The great Cambridge Analytica conspiracy theory

This Cambridge Analytica thing is starting to sound like a chattering-class conspiracy theory. We’re meant to believe that Donald Trump won the presidential election and Brexit was victorious in the EU referendum because sinister rich and right-wing people trawled social media, harvested our inner-most lives, and then planted messages that ‘mind-fucked’ us into voting for things we shouldn’t have voted for? This is straight out of the David Icke school of political thought (I say thought…) where it is always assumed that faceless malevolent actors are puppeteering public life and secretly controlling people’s minds and behaviour. This might be the moment when the paranoid style of thinking went mainstream.

It’s hard to think of any other recent journalist expose that has been as overcooked and overblown as the Observer’s feverish claims about Cambridge Analytica. Yes, there are questions for CA to answer. If it is true that it excavated people’s personal information on Facebook in a way that breached Facebook’s terms of agreement, as the Observer claims but CA denies, then some explanation will be needed.