Arvadans Interviewed By British TV In Facebook Data Scheme

ARVADA, CO -- British newscasters form Channel 4 came to Arvada last week as part of a journalistic exploration of the 2014 Colorado campaign work of British company Cambridge Analytica and their use of Facebook data.

Cambridge Analytica and partner company SCL Elections were hired as a campaign advisers by Colorado Republicans in 2014 elections, and allegedly meshed 136,000 Facebook personality profiles with registered voters in a system they called "behavioral microtargeting."

That data was leaked to the UK's Channel 4 News.

“If we [Channel 4 News] can get a copy of it, users would be naïve to assume that someone else can’t as well,” the presenter said.

According to reporting by the Denver Post, two Colorado Republican political PACs paid $460,500 to Cambridge Analytica and SCL Elections to help turn the State Senate Republican and help Sen. Cory Gardner defeat Democrat Mark Udall. The Democrats' ten-year rule of the State Senate was broken by Republican Beth Martinez Humenik, of Senate District 24 which overlaps parts of Arvada in Adams County.

Arvada resident Janice, a nurse whose data was analyzed for behavioral clues, told Channel 4: “It’s a manipulation of our society by people who don’t really care about our society. They care about their business. They care about their bottom line and they aren’t here for all of us, other than they want to manipulate all of us because we’re either a voter or a consumer. And that’s how they look at me, they don’t look at how safe I am, or how good my schools are.”

Arvada resident Debra told Channel 4, "It’s unnerving to think that someone has and is keeping track of that information. I’m questioning if I scroll down something and click on it, to look at it more what’s involved in the post, then that’s them gathering data as well. It makes me really hesitant to even want to engage to that degree.”

Barbara, who described herself as a lifelong Republican, said she was not surprised that information was extracted from her online profile. “It doesn’t worry me … I just figured they were,” she said.

Read the Channel 4 article here.

See Denver Post's coverage here.

Image via YouTube.