In some very real way, has Cambridge Analytica changed my life? Casey is the only person in America who benefited from the Cambridge Analytica scandal. He's like, 'This was great for me.'
Welcome to Snafu, the podcast about history's greatest screw-ups. I'm your host, Ed Helms, and each episode, as you know, I cover an enormous screw-up from history to see what we can learn from humanity's biggest mistakes. My guests today are truly two of like, just the most awesome people. Truly, I'm so excited. We have Kevin Roose, who is an award-winning tech columnist for the New York Times, frequently covering Silicon Valley, social media, and tech developments. He's also the author of several books, including The AGI Chronicles, The Inside Story of the Race to Create an Artificial Superintelligence, releasing later this year. Welcome, Kevin Roose.
And we also have not just Kevin, we also have Casey Newton, who is the founder and editor of Platformer, a publication about the intersection of democracy and tech, and was previously a senior editor at The Verge. Together, these two come together in a podcasting Voltron as the podcast Hard Fork, which is brilliant. It's hugely popular. It is incredibly successful. It is a New York Times podcast, and it is about the rapidly changing tech world, and somehow it's incredibly grounded and informative, even when these things feel dark and scary, and it's also insanely funny and entertaining. Welcome, Casey and Kevin.
Thank you, Ed. It's great to be here. Thank you for those kind words, and I'm sorry Kevin's bio is so long. We're trying to cut that down a little.
I just keep adding fake things to it. Olympic gold medalist, Nobel Prize winner.
That's all good. I think anyone can claim a Nobel at this point. Um, what is the... I'm just so curious as a fan of Hard Fork, and I'm sure you get asked this a lot, but were you guys friends before Hard Fork, or did you sort of come together, or was this sort of like more of a business venture? And then because you do have the dynamic of people who seem to just have known each other a long time. It's a very easy vibe.
I think the answer is that we were friends who have become much closer friends since we started doing the show. Like Kevin and I knew each other from San Francisco tech reporting circles. We would see each other all over town as we were, you know, covering this Google event, that Apple event. Um, but both of us really wanted to start a podcast, and when we looked around, and the truth is both of us tried very hard to find someone else to do the show with, and we just kept coming back to each other. We just kept coming back like, I think this is honestly the only person I could imagine doing this with. And like almost five years later since we started having that conversation, like I feel exactly the same way. He's the only one for me.
It's a charade. We actually hate each other. This is just a sort of kabuki theater bit we do.
This is the first time we've talked outside of a Hard Fork taping in several years. Oh, well, you're putting on a good show. I'm definitely buying it. I think one of the reasons Hard Fork works for me just as a fan is that I just trust you guys. I feel like you're incredibly well informed, but you also have this uncanny ability to stay calm and steady when things feel so terrifying. And I'm just wondering, as a non-super-tech person, I just feel so confused so much, and you guys are such a steady calming force. How do you do that? Like, how do you... You're in the middle of it. It would seem like you would just be running around with your hair on fire all the time.
I mean, I think both of us are optimists by nature. Um, we're both people who have observed that, like, for the most part, technology has been good for people. Like, we're not people who wish that we could go back to an agrarian economy and sort of do subsistence farming. Like, I like having an iPad, you know? And so we want to believe that as uncertain and scary as the world often is, we are going to muddle through somehow. And so, you know, while we pay a lot of attention to the many, many things that are going wrong, the snafus if you will, um, we also think there's like some pretty cool stuff happening in the world, and we like pointing that out whenever we can.
I think we try to be skeptical without being cynical, um, would be the way I would put it, you know? I think we try to be reporters and question authority and the official narratives, but we're also, um, not sort of knee-jerk reflexively, uh, cynical about the fact that some of this technology is quite good and improving in ways that should make us both excited and fearful. So, that's the balance we try to strike. We try to just be really honest. Some weeks we're really terrified, and you can hear that in the show. Some weeks we're more excited, and hopefully you can hear that, too.
Well, that is very well said, and I love the distinction between skepticism and cynicism, and I feel like that's not a distinction that is made often enough in sometimes in our own guts. Like, I know I cross over. I like to think I'm just a sort of healthy skeptic, but sometimes that cynicism creeps in. And boy, does it get dark. Oh, boy. But that's why you're here. That's why Hard Fork is there to uplift all of us. And it's why I am so thrilled to have you both on today. I picked a doozy of a snafu to discuss, and it's one that you both know inside and out, uh, which is kind of interesting because that's a little bit of a flip of our typical format. Usually I'm telling the guest a snafu that they may or may not know anything about, and either way it's a surprise whatever the story is, and in that way I'm sort of the professor, they're the student. But in this case, this is a story that you both deeply reported on at the time it was happening, and you are deeply well informed about. So, I am very much the student. I'm excited to... I'll still be the narrative anchor. I'm going to kind of walk us through the story, but I'm so eager to learn from you guys and hear from you the sort of details and color that we just ordinarily wouldn't get in an episode like this. So, thank you for being here, and we are about to dive into the story of Cambridge Analytica. Right off the bat, guys, what does that conjure in you? Tension, excitement, humor? What is that?
It makes me honestly a little bit nostalgic. Cambridge Analytica was honestly really important in my life. I had started writing a newsletter just a few months before that scandal, and I was mostly at the time writing about the backlash to Facebook that had begun after the 2016 US presidential election. And my newsletter was getting, you know, a little traction here, a little traction there. And then Cambridge Analytica happened, and all of a sudden it felt like to some people the biggest story in the world. And so my newsletter grew. It wound up enabling me to like quit my job, start a podcast. Yeah, so like in some very real ways, Cambridge Analytica changed my life.
Casey is the only person in America who benefited from the Cambridge Analytica scandal. He's like, 'This was great for me.'
Ah, I love it. I have distant memories. I mean, I have the memory of a goldfish, so I forget things that I reported about last week. Um, but when you say the words, I am filled with a kind of, yeah, mid-2010s nostalgia. I started thinking about the Harlem Shake, you know, and the ice bucket challenge and sort of other phenomena from that era.
Well, just to give the audience a little bit of grounding, the Cambridge Analytica data harvesting scandal of 2018 is considered one of the most massive and possibly worst data misuse cases in history. This was eight years ago or more. No, like what was 2014, which is 12 years ago? What year are we in?
Well, so this actually gets to a really interesting and important thing. Yes, like where do you start it? Yeah, so one of the reasons why Cambridge Analytica wound up being a really weird scandal was that most of the details were known years before it turned into this conflagration, and it was only in the aftermath of Trump's election that a lot of Americans said, 'Wait, what exactly was going on?' And then it blew up.
Oh boy. All right, let's dive in. To kick off our snafu, we're going to travel back in time, like we were saying, to the mid-2010s. So just to help reset your culture clocks, Obama was in his second term, Russia has annexed Crimea, everyone's freaking out about Ebola, in the tech world Apple watches and other kinds of wearables are on the rise. And yes, as Kevin mentioned, the ice bucket challenge, we were all pouring ice water on our heads, and Instagram was primarily just photos of eggs Benedict and sunsets. The good old days. Um, AI still felt like sci-fi back then. ChatGPT wasn't even a blip. We were young, optimistic, and really maybe a little too casual about clicking 'I agree' on terms and conditions that no one read. How naive we were. It was a better time. Now, while we were happily posting memes and baby photos, we didn't even think to worry about what was happening to all the data that we were putting out into social media or what someone could possibly do with it. But I'm kind of getting ahead of myself. Let's start with something innocent: Facebook quiz apps. You remember these? The harmless time wasters like, 'What is your ice cream IQ?' or 'What carb are you emotionally?' or 'Which Harry Potter house are you in?' Which Harry Potter house? Um, did you take any of these quizzes? Do you remember any results?
I remember that I was all of the carbs, actually. It turned out that I identified equally with all of them.
Do we know any... Was anyone a Gryffindor? I feel like Kevin is definitely a Slytherin.
That's such a Hufflepuff thing to say.
No. Kevin loves to scheme. I took one, and it turns out I was... it was like, 'Which bagel are you?' and I'm an everything bagel, which I think was supposed to be flattering, but I don't like everything bagels. I think they're kind of gross.
Um, so all these quizzes, they seemed kind of innocent and fun, but at least one in particular, we now know, was quite nefarious. And this was an app called This Is Your Digital Life. Seems harmless enough, and it claimed to be for academic research. This Is Your Digital Life was a personality quiz produced by a data scientist named Alexander Kogan and his company Global Science Research, which right away I just don't trust. Global Science Research. There's too much going on there.
I think that's the same company from the alien movies.
Exactly. You know. Yeah. Paul Reiser is an executive, and he's just a little smarmy. Weird vibes. So, this was in 2014, um, and here's where it starts getting icky. It wasn't just collecting your answers. It was also quietly scooping up data on your Facebook friends who definitely did not sign up for that. So, thanks to a handy Facebook API loophole, the app could access information on jobs, education, location, relationship status, and liked pages. So, while you were figuring out which pasta shape matched your vibe, this app was building a surprisingly detailed dossier on you, your psychology, and that of your entire digital entourage. Question: do you think that the average American at that time had any sense of how this kind of personal information that everyone was sharing just exhaustively could be turned against them? Or were we just high on digital narcissism?
No, I mean, Americans are very interesting in that they will say that privacy is very important to them, but they will give up their privacy for almost anything, right? It's like they will tell you, you know, that they don't want to put the name of their children online, but if it got them 10% off at Ross Dress for Less, they will absolutely give you all that and more. So, companies are always sort of doing this weird dance where they're trying to get you to reveal as much as they possibly can without it accidentally blowing up in their face.
Well, and this was also an era that was called sort of the Open Graph era of Facebook. Basically, they were trying to turn Facebook from an app where you would go and, you know, stalk your crushes from college or whatever to a platform where other apps could build things. There were apps like FarmVille that you could play inside Facebook. You could use Facebook to log into Spotify or any other number of services. And that was part of this quiz push, was like you could build things on top of Facebook, and then Facebook would actually send some of that data to the developers of the quizzes. This was the same protocol, the same process that they used to connect people with FarmVille games and Spotify.
The best case use of that data would just be for that app to reach more users, or at this point, what's the reason for being just so give and take with this data?
So, Facebook used to have this very permissive, what they call an API, an application programming interface. It's essentially just a piece of software that lets other pieces of software talk to each other. And there was a time when Facebook invested really heavily in that because they wanted essentially every other software to connect whatever they were building to Facebook. Facebook thought this is the way that we are going to grow and take over the world, is essentially everything runs through this. And the way that Facebook was able to attract so many of those people to its platforms was by saying, 'We will give you data that you can't get anywhere else,' right? There aren't a lot of other places where you can go if you're a legitimate researcher, a shady researcher, somebody who's making a mobile game, and immediately get not just my name and my email address and my phone number, but also at the time the names of all of my friends and their phone numbers and their email addresses. So, for people like the ones who wound up building the app that led to Cambridge Analytica, this was a goldmine. It was an absolute bonanza, and it really benefited Facebook until it did.
And do you think we've gotten... just back to that initial question about how, you know, we share information online, have we gotten any better at this? Or I mean, Casey, I love your analogy, like if we get a discount on something, we're just like, 'Yeah, take whatever you want. Here's my mother's maiden name.' But are we just that lazy? Like our brains are just wired for heuristics. Like we just want the shortcuts everywhere.
I think there have been some major changes. And you can see it when you log on to social media, right? You used to log on to Facebook and Instagram and you'd see your friends and family. Now you see a clip from a podcast you've never heard of, right? And that has several causes behind it, but one of the big ones is that Americans are sharing less. The whole bargain that they struck with Facebook of, 'Hey, I'll give you all my information in exchange for you keeping me up on the divorces of my high school classmates,' that bargain doesn't feel like it's as good anymore. And so all the real sharing is happening in these private group chats, and all the public stuff is kind of more, you know, creator content and, you know, celebrities and all of that. So in that respect, I really do think things have changed. Now, at the same time, can I get you to give up information if I give you something of relatively low value? Yes, I think that is still broadly the case across many different dimensions.
