Fake-Out

News Bulletin: 50 million Facebook users’ personal data “harvested” by Trump-linked dirty tricks elections company.

“The company at the centre of the Facebook data breach boasted of using honey traps, fake news campaigns and operations with ex-spies to swing election campaigns around the world, a new investigation reveals.

“Executives from Cambridge Analytica spoke to undercover reporters from Channel 4 News about the dark arts used by the company to help clients, which included entrapping rival candidates in fake bribery stings and hiring prostitutes to seduce them.

“In one exchange, the company chief executive, Alexander Nix, is recorded telling reporters: ‘It sounds a dreadful thing to say, but these are things that don’t necessarily need to be true as long as they’re believed.’”

—Emma Graham-Harrison, Carole Cadwalladr and Hillary Osborne, reporters, “Cambridge Analytical boasts of dirty tricks to swing elections,” The Guardian, March 19, 2018.

 

• Editorial Comment: It’s Tuesday. Do you know where your Facebook data has been?



• Related: “How Facebook likes could profile voters for manipulation,” WaPost.

peezpix by Ted Pease

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