If you think they just started harvested data in that one instance or for the Obama campaign, then you haven’t been paying attention.
Via Daily Caller:
All hell has broken loose about the link between Cambridge Analytica, a British marketing firm that the Donald Trump campaign hired to drum up votes, and Facebook, which might have improperly supplied Cambridge Analytica with valuable information about 50 million American voters in 2014.
A whistleblower, Christopher Wylie, who left Cambridge Analytica that same year, is now spilling his guts about the role he played in the data transfer. As a result, Facebook’s stock has shed nearly $50 billion in value, Facebook investors are suing the company, and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has opened an investigation.
Should we care about any of this? Not really.
I conduct scientific research on online manipulation, and, at this point, I probably know more about it than anyone else in the world. Online manipulation of our thinking, opinions, purchases and votes is real, powerful and scary; the numbers are mindboggling, in fact. But Cambridge Analytica is not the problem, mainly because the methods it uses to manipulate are not very powerful. Compared with the real threats out there, they are, in fact, trivial.