Cambridge Analytica’s use of Facebook is straight from Obama’s playbook

Every few weeks, it seems, Carole Cadwalladr drops a long piece for the Guardian or the Observer about how the Trump and Brexit campaigns mind-hacked democracy. On both sides of the Atlantic, people who don’t like Trump or Brexit share these pieces and shriek.

The latest article, which lit up the political internet at the weekend, has the added spice of a whistleblower – a pink-haired ‘data science nerd’ straight out of science-nerd central casting. He’s called Christopher Wylie and Cadwalladr reveals that he has been the source for her much-vaunted scoops on Cambridge Analytica, the data firm who worked with the Trump and Brexit campaigns. Now he’s ready to go on the record about his work at Cambridge Analytica – or how, as he puts it, he became “Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare mindfuck tool”

It’s sexy stuff; the characters feel like a movie. You have bad guys – Trump, Bannon, the sinister billionaire IT-man Robert Mercer.