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ASSIGNMENT 3

According to a recent study conducted by the Gaudian, people spent an average of 60% of their day on
social networks, and the number keep rising over the years. Social networks have made communication
easier than ever in the past, enable each of us to quickly chat with friends, update news, and many
more. With its rapid development, the convenient of social networks has hidden a fact, a very important
fact that each person should notice about: We, or our tons of daily activities online, has contributed to
the rise of an enormous industry: Data. With the help of Big Data and Data Analysis industries, our data
is collected daily, then being sold, being cooked, and finally, being used to make profit. The incident of
Cambridge Analytica (CA) and 2016 America Election is just an alarm, telling us how we have become a
man-machine that produce money and benefits to corporations.

So, how is our data of daily activities being used to make profit? Lets us bring an example from a study
by Michael Kosinski: a certain number of "likes" on Facebook can help understand people, rather than
what their relatives or friends or even themselves can understand, thereby relating to their choices,
such as in elections. Talking at our view, the social network user, when we encounter an “good” post
from friends (or whoever in the internet), it is instinct that we hit “Likes” button. Hitting that button is
just the way you express your support, your encouragement to others, just the same as the act of yelling
“Awesome” or “I like it!” to a friend in real world, which is so natural that even you may not realize or
remember what you’ve just done. In the view of a data analyzer, things appear to be a lot different.
Hitting “Like” on something prove that the user has an interest on that thing, or in a bigger scale, that
sort of information. Although a single “Like” seem to be useless as it cannot prove anything, a number of
“Like” is a valuable data on building our model of personality. With the “Like” data, in composition with
other source of data collection from you and others people around, data analyzer can not only category
users into group, but also predicting user’s future choice and action. For example, if they monitored that
you frequently hit “Like” on Donald Trump’s speech and hit “Angry” or ignore articles from Joe Biden,
you will most likely vote for Trump in his next election.

The story of CA and Trump in 2016 just follow the same principle, but in a much more complicated scale,
when our data is not only used to category and predict votes, but also used to apply suitable actions to
each group of users to change their decision. To understand how CA can affect our choice, one must
understand how behavioral science, data analytics, and innovative ad tech all tie together. Behavioral
science refers to fields of study relating to human or animal, behavior and actions. Cambridge
Analytica’s end goal was to persuade users to vote in favor of their client, which involved displaying
messages that would most likely result in a change of behavior. The following example, taken from
Alexander Nix’s presentation at the Concordia summit illustrates the importance of keeping behavioral
science in mind when conveying messages. Imagine you are walking on a beach and see one two signs
below:
 Source: Cambridge Analytica

Which one do you find more efficient? The sign on the left may prompt you to turn away, but if you saw
the sign on the right, you would have a far stronger urge to do so. The motivation of both signs is to
ensure that you leave the area, but the sign on the right resonates stronger, probably for all people,
because of the fear of an attack by a shark. In this example, everyone would probably have the strongest
urge to undertake the action of leaving the beach after seeing the message on the right. In the field of
political, depending on pre-existing beliefs and values, different people would be better persuaded with
varying messages in support of the same candidate or issue. CA first collect user activities data from
different sources, then built a model of user personalities, which enable them to create an
advertisement that would be most convincing to them. Therefore, they would be able to convince many
different people with different personalities, to have the same opinion on a particular issue or candidate
by using personalized, targeted advertisements.

The method used by CA is very effective at convincing people, resulted in Trump’s success in 2016. In
facts, even each of us can use this method to affect other’s opinion. For example, in the May of 2019,
when walking around the accent city of Hanoi, I had dropped in a restaurant have Pho. But then I
realized that the attitude of employees was very bad, they serve food slowly and rude to whom try to
urge them. The price of Pho was very high but the quality was very bad. After having such awful
experience, I decided to write a post explaining how bad the restaurant was, then posted it to a
Facebook food reviewing group. Many people commented and reacted to this post. After that, the
restaurant had suffered a huge amount of objection, the sale was down because less people drop in.
That an example of how we can affect other’s opinion with news and information.

The affect of sharing or publishing information on the internet may become very impactive. That why
before sharing something to the social network, we have to comply with the following 5 steps of making
decision:

1. First, we have to ask: “Should I share this information? This is ethically right or wrong?”, or in
another words, we have to identify the ethical issue, the ethical issue
2. Second, we need to verify the integrity of the information. Web have to ensure that its have
enough evident and facts. In addition, authenticity is also a problem
3. Next, you have to decide how we will publish the information. Based on your need, each
approach will bring advantages and disadvantages
4. The fourth step: Do it! Now you take the action: Post the information
5. Finally, after the information has been published, you have to watch it or impacts, and conduct
lesson learned from your action