Back in 2012, a national survey questioned 3,000 young people, ages 15-25 on how they use the Internet, social media and engage in politics. Unlike any prior study on the topic, the YPP (Youth and Participatory Politics) survey included large numbers of black, Latino, and Asian American respondents, allowing for unique statistical comparisons across race. The data present one of the complete pictures to date of how young people are using new media in new ways to engage politically, providing relevant insights on both the long-term political picture in America.

The study report, "Participatory Politics: New Media and Youth Political Action," shows that contrary to the traditional notion of a technological digital divide, substantial numbers of young people are engaging in "participatory politics" -- acts such as starting a political group online, circulating a blog about a political issue, or forwarding political videos to friends. Like traditional political acts, these acts address issues of public concern. The difference is that participatory acts are interactive, peer-based, and do not defer to elites or formal institutions. They are also tied to digital or new media platforms that facilitate and amplify young people's actions.

Now, similar to such politicization of social media, in the recent news that came up last week we saw the real face of Facebook!

Cambridge Analytica, an analytics and marketing firm which has earlier worked for presidential campaigns back in 2016. Ironically, it is this very data that has brought the UK-based firm to the center of controversy. The company allegedly used data harvested from about 50 million Facebook users to target US voters ahead of the presidential campaign. Details of Cambridge’s acquisition and use of Facebook data have been reported in several detailed accounts by the media, setting off a furious debate about the ethical implications of the firm’s so-called psychographic modelling techniques.

Specifically, Cambridge Analytica is accused of buying profile data of millions of Americans’ from researcher Aleksandr Kogan. Kogan, a psychology professor at the University of Cambridge collected user data from Facebook by telling them that he was collecting it strictly for academic purposes. Kogan thus gained access to data from not only Facebook users who agreed to give their information to Kogan’s app, but according to the Guardian, also got permission to harvest data on all their Facebook friends.

What is more worrying is that the company tends to describe its capabilities in grandiose language, touting its expertise at “psychological warfare” and “influence operations.” It has long claimed that its sophisticated understanding of human psychology helps it target and persuade people of its clients’ preferred message.

Currently, Cambridge Analytica in the UK is facing investigations by Parliament and government regulators into allegations that it performed illegal work on the “Brexit” campaign.

So, the bottom line is, thanks to social media, the internet has apparently decentralized power. In the old days, information was passed down from the mountaintop – by a government, say, or a news organization – to the crowd below. Now the crowd can speak to each other and to the world. At least one aspect of the techno-utopians’ early hopes seems to have materialized now.

And it’s that hope that Cambridge Analytica has shattered. For what we now understand is that those at the top, the political parties or governments that could afford it, have been engaged in a radical act of recentralizing power. They saw the way social media was working, empowering individuals and networks of individuals, and they decided to grab those same weapons for themselves.