May 21 – The data mining and data harvesting techniques used on Facebook to ultimately form opinion in the US election that saw the election of Donald Trump, were also used in the UK to target football fans and influence them to vote for Brexit in the 2016 referendum.
There is no suspicion that the data was used illegally but there is concern that the two pro-Brexit campaigns that used the data sets were colluding to do so in order to get around campaign spending restrictions. Campaign are forbidden from working together unless they declare their spending jointly. Ad limits per campaign were set at £7 million.
The data was gathered via a Facebook competition that gave fans the chance to win £50 million if they named the winner of every game in Euro 2016.
Targeted at the usually hard-to-reach working class young males who ignore politics, the campaign ads show two men in a pub drinking beer – the prize is £50 million, one of them says, because “that’s how much Britain gives the EU every day”.
The Vote Leave and BeLeave campaigns have denied to the Guardian newspaper that there was any sharing of data or co-ordination.
The select committee for digital, culture, media and sport released a letter Facebook sent to the Electoral Commission in which it said that two campaigns, Vote Leave and BeLeave, used three sets of data to target audiences that covered “the exact same audiences”.
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