But Cambridge Analytica played only a small role in Trump’s campaign. Anyone who values healthy democracy should find this concerning. Indeed, that was part of Trump’s digital strategy in 2016. Particularly troubling is the prospect of campaigns using these tactics to suppress turnout among supporters of other candidates. Since they potentially allow campaigns to slice and dice the electorate, dividing voters into small groups, and are usually transient and fleeting, micro-targeted adverts can also be difficult to scrutinise. There are legal and ethical concerns about how micro-targeting is used across the political spectrum. In fact, what Cambridge Analytica did in the US has been part of political campaigning across parties and around the world for years. This requires magical thinking about new technologies’ capabilities, and too many bought Cambridge Analytica’s snake oil, as if one shady company could bend the electorate to its will with its spooky tech tools. We saw a kind of inversion of this after 2016: problems with complex socioeconomic origins were claimed to have simple technological causes. The scholar Evgeny Morozov writes about “ technological solutionism”, where problems with complex socioeconomic origins are claimed to have simple technological solutions. Despite the temptation to see the hidden hand of nefarious actors, there is, so far, little evidence to suggest any Russian connection. It did, the ICO found, have shoddy data practices, but there were seemingly no significant breaches of the law. Its involvement in the UK’s EU referendum, the ICO concludes, extended to limited work with Leave.EU analysing Ukip membership data. In the 2016 US elections, Cambridge Analytica used commonplace data science techniques to predict voters’ political views and target them with adverts on Facebook. We need to confront their surveillance business models, their increasingly central position in digital society, and the power they now hold as a result. But there are still real reasons to be concerned about the impact of tech companies – notably Facebook – on our democracy. Despite concerns about its data practices, the short-lived political consultancy ended up functioning as a distraction. As had been expected by many, this found no smoking gun. T he information commissioner (ICO), the UK’s data protection regulator, has concluded its long-running investigation into Cambridge Analytica.

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