A 2015 email exchange between Facebook and Cambridge Analytica provides a glimpse into how both companies responded to early indications that the firm was misusing the social media giant's data.

The emails, obtained by Business Insider, showed Facebook's policy manager, Allison Hendrix, asking Cambridge Analytica whether there were any inaccuracies in news stories about the data firm's use of Facebook as it related to Republican Ted Cruz's presidential campaign.

The articles were from Fortune, Gizmodo, and Mother Jones. They followed up on reporting from The Guardian, which wrote that Cruz was using a "firm that harvested data on millions of unwitting Facebook users."

"Here are the articles I saw yesterday in addition to The Guardian. Please let me know (1) where there are inaccuracies and (2) whether I can share your PR contact's info with our PR team (for the purpose of sharing that contact info with any media outlet who contacts us)?" she wrote.

The Guardian wrote that Cruz's campaign was "using psychological data based on research spanning tens of millions of Facebook users, harvested largely without their permission," according to documents it obtained. The publication reported that Cambridge Analytica's parent company gathered Facebook data by paying people $1 on the Amazon marketplace for "human intelligence." Anyone who sold their data ended up not only selling their own personal information, but that of their friends too.

In Mother Jones, Kevin Drum wrote that none of what was reported was unusual for a consumer research firm. But he pointed blame at Facebook for "allowing people to take advantage" of its default user settings, which he said opened people up to such data harvesting.

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