Cambridge Analytica and the Dark Arts of Voter Manipulation
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The New Yorker
4.3 • 3.9K Ratings
🗓️ 23 March 2018
⏱️ 20 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week, new stories emerged about how the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica used data from tens of millions of Facebook profiles to shape Trump's culture war. Cambridge Analytica is almost wholly owned by the family of Robert Mercer, a billionaire donor with a far-right vision of America. Jane Mayer joins Dorothy Wickenden to discuss how dark money and data mining are being used to influence elections and undermine democracy.
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| 1:12.2 | This is the political scene, a weekly conversation with New Yorker writers and editors about politics. |
| 1:18.4 | It's Friday, March 23rd. I'm Dorothy Wickenden, executive editor of The New Yorker. |
| 1:24.1 | Over the past week, new stories have emerged about how a formerly obscure political consulting firm, Cambridge Analytica, helped to shape the message of the Trump campaign. |
| 1:36.3 | Christopher Wiley, a co-founder of the company, spoke to the Guardian about the weapon, as he described it, that he and the CEO, Alexander Nix, created |
| 1:46.2 | to influence elections through social media. |
| 1:49.2 | We would know what kinds of messaging you would be susceptible to, including the framing |
| 1:54.2 | of it, the topics, the contents, the tone, whether it's scary or not, that kind of thing. So what you would be susceptible to, |
| 2:02.7 | and where you're going to consume that. And then how many times do we need to touch you with that |
| 2:07.9 | in order to change how you think about something? He goes on to explain how the firm plan to wage |
| 2:15.1 | a culture war in America. If you want to fundamentally change society, you first have to break it. |
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