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Showing posts from March, 2018

Did Cambridge Analytica’s Facebook Harvesting Decide the US Elections?

Have the Russians and Cambridge Analytica been abusing Facebook to influence the US and British elections by spreading fake news to receptive users? Absolutely Yes! Has this abuse had an impact on the US elections and Brexit? Most likely not! It becomes increasingly clear that people like Donald Trump (through his former confidant Steve Bannon) and Vladimir Putin have been (illegally) harvesting user profiles on Facebook and setting up Twitter bots to spread fakenews on Facebook and Twitter . Facebook by its own account admitted that fake news produced by the Russians and US Alt-right proponents might have been seen by millions of users. What has not been shown, however, is what effect this has had on the actual voting behavior. I argue that this effect has been minimal, most likely smaller than the voting margin for Trump in the US elections, and for Brexit in the UK. While a group of researchers has done an t horough analysis of the dynamics of the spread of