A new report by CBS News poured some cold water on the media firestorm sparked by The Guardian’s exposé on the Trump-connected Cambridge Analytica firm’s efforts to gather data on Facebook users. Though the Trump campaign did work with the firm, CBS reports, it quickly “phased out” its partnership with the group for the general election and did not use any of the “psychographic” data at the center of The Guardian’s report.
On Sunday, The Guardian published a lengthy investigative piece based on the claims of whistleblower Christopher Wylie, who says he “made Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare tool” for Cambridge Analytica before he left in 2014 but now says he regrets heading up the effort. The firm, Wylie said, unethically accessed Facebook data from some 50 million users to create profiles based on personality type for targeted campaigning. The report set off a series of damning headlines, though many pointed out that efforts to use social media data to create profiles had been widely praised by the same outlets back in 2012 when the Obama campaign likewise mined social media data for campaigning purposes.
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