Nr. 92 - BRITTANY KAISER 2020, MAT

100 x 100 cm: paper, ink

Brittany Kaiser worked for Cambridge Analytica. In 2015, that company acquired personal data of tens of millions of FACEBOOK users, without their consent. FACEBOOK continuously collects information about its user's personalities and choices, just by tracing what people talk about and share. Cambridge Analytica, in collaboration with the masterminds behind election campaigns, used the data to find the soft spots of voters and target them with specific adverisements. In this way they steered the voting behaviour in the UK Brexit Referendum (2016)(Brexit) and the USA Presidential elections (2016)

Brittany Kaiser was one of the whistle blowers telling  that something was going on that was undermining democracy. She continued to advocate  that platforms like FACEBOOK should be legally forbidden to post political advertisements

In a 2019 interview FACEBOOK CEO Mark Zuckerberg answered that: "in a democracy,  I don’t think that a private company should be censoring politicians or news, and that people should be able to see for themselves what politicians are saying". Thereby, he did not want to make the distinction between "free speech" and "paid speech" and claims that people should not be sensible to publicity ...