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Link: http://people.oregonstate.edu/~vanlondp/cs391/two.php
TheGuardian’s article ‘I made Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare tool’: meet the data war
whistleblower (Links to an external site.)gives us insight on Christopher Wylie, a major player in
the Facebook scandal. When Wylie was 24 he had the revolutionary idea that resulted in the
founding of Cambridge Analytica. At the time Wylie was working for Steve Bannon, executive
chairman of Breitbart. Together Steve and Christopher worked with “hedge fund billionare”
Robert Mercer to create a company to turn big data and social media into “an established
military methodology – “information operations” – then turn it on the US electorate.” At some
point Wylie had a grand idea to to harvest Facebook profiles for private and personal info and
then turn that into “sophisticated psychological and political profiles”. He then would target these
people with political ads specifically tailored towards them. Wylie became a whistleblower when
speaking to journalists and revealing he had “the receipts, invoices, emails, legal letters –
records that showed how, between June and August 2014, the profiles of more than 50 million
Facebook users had been harvested. Most damning of all, he had a letter from Facebook’s own
lawyers admitting that Cambridge Analytica had acquired the data illegitimately.”
Christopher Wylie did not inherently realize the consequences of what he had done. At the time
Wylie was acting on the behalf of his boss Steve Bannon and is cited in the article that “[he]
assumed it was entirely legal and above board.”” Although Wylie may have inadvertently
influenced the 2016 election for the worse, his actions have taught us an invaluable lesson
regarding social media. We live in an age where we should have an active distrust of internet
sources and social media sites. If society had actively practiced being less revealing about
themselves online, this disaster may not have occurred. Instead millions of Americans actively
took quizzes on Facebook revealing far too much about themselves. As the article states,
“Suddenly, there was a way of measuring personality traits across the population and
correlating scores against Facebook “likes” across millions of people.” It goes on to say that the
data allowed them to learn so much about people, for example they found that people who were
part of the “I hate Israel” group on Facebook tended to like Nike shoes and KitKats.
According Santa Clara University’s Markkula Center’s article, A Framework for Ethical Decision
Making, (Links to an external site.)the Rights Approach suggests “that the ethical action is the
one that best protects and respects the moral rights of those affected.” This theory can be
applied to explain the actions of Christopher Wylie. One could say that Wylie disclosed his
previous actions and became a whistle blower due to a realization that what he had done was
morally wrong. To right his wrongs he came clean. The theory also details the idea of being told
the truth, making one’s own choices on how to live life, and having a degree of privacy.
Everything that Wylie had done broke these ideals. He ripped privacy from the lives of these
Facebook users, targeted them with ads to make their own political decisions for them, and lied
to many people. Christopher’s change of heart shows that everyone always has the opportunity
to do the right thing.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/data-war-whistleblower-christopher-wylie-faceook-nix-bannon-trump
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/data-war-whistleblower-christopher-wylie-faceook-nix-bannon-trump
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/data-war-whistleblower-christopher-wylie-faceook-nix-bannon-trump
https://www.scu.edu/ethics/ethics-resources/ethical-decision-making/a-framework-for-ethical-decision-making/
https://www.scu.edu/ethics/ethics-resources/ethical-decision-making/a-framework-for-ethical-decision-making/
https://www.scu.edu/ethics/ethics-resources/ethical-decision-making/a-framework-for-ethical-decision-making/