Payments attracted the 270,000 quiz takers whose data seeded the dataset

Evidence

So why did Kogan create this Facebook quiz? Well, he wasn’t just interested in getting personality data from people via a survey. He wanted to match people’s responses to their online activity. Before they participated, the app would ask users to consent to having public information scraped from their Facebook page, including their profile, page likes, birthday, city of residence, and sometimes even their newsfeed, posts and messages. To be fair to Kogan, this was common practice among app developers at the time; it was a standard Facebook feature that did not violate their terms of service. Facebook likes were considered public data, up for grabs for anyone interested. To help ensure that people would take part and answer all questions, Kogan paid about 270,000 people to participate in this quiz. — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof, 494

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Friend scraping expanded 270,000 paid participants into data on 87 million people — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects…, 496