By: Kathryn Montgomery and Jeff Chester | Jan 16 2020
In March 2018, The New York Times and The Guardian/Observer broke an explosive story that Cambridge Analytica, a British data firm, had harvested more than 50 million Facebook profiles and used them to engage in psychometric targeting during the 2016 US presidential election (Rosenberg, Confessore, & Cadwalladr, 2018). The scandal erupted amid ongoing concerns over Russian use of social media to interfere in the electoral process.