Wikipedia: ***Carole Cadwalladr, features writer for The Observer (sister of The Guardian) and formerly worked at The Daily Telegraph; was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting, ***alongside The New York Times reporters, for her coverage of the ***Cambridge Analytica scandal...
Before Cambridge Analytica closed operations in 2018, the company took legal action against The Observer for the claims made in Cadwalladr’s articles.
In April 2019 Cadwalladr gave a fifteen-minute long TED talk about the links between Facebook and Brexit, titled “Facebook’s role in Brexit — and the threat to democracy”. According to Cadwalladr she delivered the talk directly to the people she described as “’the Gods of Silicon Valley: Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Jack Dorsey’, the founders of Facebook and Google – who were sponsoring the conference – and the co-founder of Twitter – who was speaking at it.”...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carole_Cadwalladr
thousands of hours/words from FakeNewsMSM over Cambridge Analytica/Trump ended up with -
18 Oct: IT Wire: Cambridge Analytica yarn turns out to be as much a hoax as Russiagate
By Sam Varghese
Much in the same way that the myth that Russia colluded with the Trump campaign in the 2016 US presidential election was shown to be just that after a probe by former FBI chief Robert Mueller, the great Cambridge Analytica scandal appears to have also lost all its air like a deflated balloon.
A report by Elizabeth Denham, Britain’s Information Commissioner found that the company had used “in the main, well-recognised processes using commonly available technology” to create what it sold to the Trump campaign...
***Denham’s report, which took three years to complete, did not gain half as much publicity as the sensational reporting of journalist Carole Cadawalladr who wrote about it in an article in 2017 titled The great British Brexit robbery.
Cadawalladr, who along with Britain’s ***Channel 4 was behind the story, described it as follows in a report that drips with hype...
Cadawalladr’s reporter colleagues at the Guardian, who worked on the story, were sceptical about it as well and privately said it was being pushed on them by senior editorial staff.
On Brexit, Denham said there was “no further evidence to change my earlier view that SCL/CA (Cambridge Analytica) were not involved in the EU referendum campaign in the UK”...
As to the old bogey of Russian involvement, she said the only things found were some Russian IP addresses in data from Kogan’s server. There was no “additional evidence of Russian involvement”...
Cadawalladr has made no statement about the ICO report which came out in the first week of October. She won a number of awards for her so-called exclusives. Whether she will return them now and acknowledge that her reporting was mostly hype remains to be seen.
But I wouldn’t hold my breath on that score.
https://www.itwire.com/open-sauce/cambridge-analytica-yarn-turns-out-to-be-as-much-a-hoax-as-russiagate.html
kudos to The New Statesman, founded by members of the Fabian Society, and described by its editor as “of the left, for the left”, for covering the unravelling of the Cambridge Analytica hoax and, in the process, debunking another anti-Trump ***Channel 4 hit piece (Channel 4 & Cadwalladr combined in pushing the Cadwalladr/Cambridge hoax, as per the IT Wire article):
15 Oct: New Statesman: How the Cambridge Analytica scandal unravelled
The notion that the contentious British firm played a pivotal role in the Trump and Brexit votes has become ever harder to maintain.
By Laurie Clarke
The story had a seismic effect on political discourse. Two of the most unpredictable events in the recent political past – Donald Trump winning the US presidency and Brexit – were pinned on the company...
Three years since the scandal began to emerge, such ideas endure. CA is still thought by many to have played a key role in influencing both the Trump and Brexit votes...
On 2 October a three-year investigation into Cambridge Analytica by the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) concluded with findings that were underwhelming to many, and devastating to some. After trawling through information including more than 700 terabytes of data seized at Cambridge Analytica’s London offices, the data regulator found no evidence that Cambridge Analytica had misused data to influence Brexit or aid Russian intervention in elections...
More damning was the finding that Cambridge Analytica wasn’t doing anything particularly unique. The information commissioner, Elizabeth Denham, told parliament that “on examination, the methods that SCL (a company that is corporately interlinked with Cambridge Analytica) was using were, in the main, well-recognised processes using commonly available technology”. This assessment jarred with reporting at the time that had imbued CA with Derren Brown-like abilities to tinker with perceptions and sway credulous masses...
Many were sceptical of the true power of Cambridge Analytica at the time, but in parts of the press and political establishment, the company’s supposed democracy-destabilising powers were amplified...
While perhaps shocking to some, the ICO’s findings were in line with what many experts in political science had suspected. “Many social scientists, at least in my sphere, have been saying for a long time that Cambridge Analytica was snake oil,” says assistant professor of political science and social data analytics at Pennsylvania State University, Kevin Munger...
***A recent investigation by Channel 4 claims evidence that the Trump campaign tried to “suppress” some voters, who were disproportionately likely to be black, through Facebook micro-targeting. This suppression technique was purportedly delivered through negative advertising that attacked Clinton...
“That it actually worked (and on such a scale as suggested by C4) is highly doubtful and – based on everything we know about (targeted) advertising and attempts at persuasion – most likely pales in comparison to very real voter suppression efforts, which include removing polling stations, gerrymandering, or restrictive voting laws,” says Simon. An application of Occam’s Razor elevates explanations such as Clinton’s unpopularity compared to Barack Obama, and genuine voter suppression tactics above the persuasive power of targeted Facebook ads.
Theories about Cambridge Analytica’s role in the outcome of the 2016 US election or the Brexit vote quickly rose to prominence as a means of explaining two events that seemed shocking to many. “Both challenged the old hegemony which had seemed so stable,” says Simon. “Unfortunately, we are all somewhat prone to mono-causal explanations (‘the big data magic did it’) – it’s simply a bit easier to blame new technologies than to go for the longue durée approach where you accurately weigh the importance of other, long-term, structural factors in these events.”...
https://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/social-media/2020/10/how-cambridge-analytica-scandal-unravelled
Cadwalladr is, of course, perfectly suited lead the Real Facebook Oversight Board!