Foreign Affairs

Building Public Trust Through Policy

Through seemingly innocuous psychological tests on Facebook, the skill with which Cambridge Analytica—the now-bankrupted political consulting firm based in the UK—combined and analyzed diverse data sets of over 80 million user accounts prove that unethical data mining, brokerage, and analysis have unwittingly become social media companies’ biggest existential threats. This was not a hard-to-predict black-swan event; in contrast, many have sounded the clarion call for action. However, the nature and fervor of these successful start-ups, while admirable, make them especially vulnerable.