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The Whistleblower Research Paper
The Whistleblower Research Paper
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Order Number |
34534545554 |
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Type of Project |
ESSAY |
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Writer Level |
PHD VERIFIED |
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Format |
APA |
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Academic Sources |
10 |
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Page Count |
3-12 PAGES |
Instructions/Descriptions
The Whistleblower Research Paper
The Guardian’s article ‘I made Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare tool’: meet the data war whistleblower (Links to an external site.)gives us insight on Christopher Wylie, a major player in the Facebook scandal. When Wylie was 24 he had the revolutionary idea that resulted in the founding of Cambridge Analytica.
At the time Wylie was working for Steve Bannon, executive chairman of Breitbart. Together Steve and Christopher worked with “hedge fund billionare” Robert Mercer to create a company to turn big data and social media into “an established military methodology – “information operations” – then turn it on the US electorate.”
At some point Wylie had a grand idea to to harvest Facebook profiles for private and personal info and then turn that into “sophisticated psychological and political profiles”. He then would target these people with political ads specifically tailored towards them.
Wylie became a whistleblower when speaking to journalists and revealing he had “the receipts, invoices, emails, legal letters – records that showed how, between June and August 2014, the profiles of more than 50 million Facebook users had been harvested. Most damning of all, he had a letter from Facebook’s own lawyers admitting that Cambridge Analytica had acquired the data illegitimately.”
Christopher Wylie did not inherently realize the consequences of what he had done. At the time Wylie was acting on the behalf of his boss Steve Bannon and is cited in the article that “[he] assumed it was entirely legal and above board.”” Although Wylie may have inadvertently influenced the 2016 election for the worse, his actions have taught us an invaluable lesson regarding social media.
We live in an age where we should have an active distrust of internet sources and social media sites. If society had actively practiced being less revealing about themselves online, this disaster may not have occurred. Instead millions of Americans actively took quizzes on Facebook revealing far too much about themselves.
As the article states, “Suddenly, there was a way of measuring personality traits across the population and correlating scores against Facebook “likes” across millions of people.” It goes on to say that the data allowed them to learn so much about people, for example they found that people who were part of the “I hate Israel” group on Facebook tended to like Nike shoes and KitKats.
According Santa Clara University’s Markkula Center’s article, A Framework for Ethical Decision Making, (Links to an external site.)the Rights Approach suggests “that the ethical action is the one that best protects and respects the moral rights of those affected.” This theory can be applied to explain the actions of Christopher Wylie.
One could say that Wylie disclosed his previous actions and became a whistle blower due to a realization that what he had done was morally wrong. To right his wrongs he came clean. The theory also details the idea of being told the truth, making one’s own choices on how to live life, and having a degree of privacy.
Everything that Wylie had done broke these ideals. He ripped privacy from the lives of these Facebook users, targeted them with ads to make their own political decisions for them, and lied to many people. Christopher’s change of heart shows that everyone always has the opportunity to do the right thing.
The Whistleblower Research Paper
