![]() During the 2004 presidential campaign, for example, the Bush team surveyed a large sample of these voters to assess their attitudes and behaviors, and sorted them into thirty groups, each with similar interests, lifestyles, ideologies, and affinities. ![]() For a few election cycles starting at the turn of the century, the Republicans had the advantage, developing a database called Voter Vault that allowed party operatives to understand voters in an increasingly nuanced way. The mathematician Cathy O’Neil, in a commentary for Bloomberg, called Cambridge Analytica’s secret sauce “just more ketchup.” Using psychological traits to craft appeals to voters, she wrote, wasn’t anything new-every candidate was doing it.įor decades, in fact, campaigns have been using and refining “microtargeting” techniques, looking at religious affiliations, buying habits, demographic traits, voting histories, educational attainment, magazine subscriptions, and the like, parsing the electorate in order to understand which values and issues are driving which voters. (It should be noted that internal Facebook documents leaked in early May show that Facebook itself has been mining users’ emotional states and sharing that information with advertisers.)Īfter the initial alarm that an obscure data firm might have wormed its way into the American psyche deeply enough to deliver the election to Trump, critics began to question what Alexander Nix, the head of Cambridge Analytica, called the firm’s “secret sauce,” the algorithms it used to predict a voter’s psychological profile, what is known as “psychographics.” Confessore and Hakim’s article about the firm, which appeared on the front page of the Times, quoted numerous consultants, working for both parties, who were dismissive of the firm’s claims. Though there is little doubt that Cambridge Analytica exploited members of the social network, Facebook’s real influence came from the campaign’s strategic and perfectly legal use of Facebook’s suite of marketing tools. Again, none of these 30 million people knew their data were being harvested and analyzed for the benefit of an American political campaign.įacebook did turn out to be essential to Trump’s victory, but not in the way Grassegger, Krogerus, and Schwartz suggest. These profiles included their Facebook “likes” and their own contact lists.Īccording to the investigative reporter Mattathias Schwartz, writing in The Intercept, a further 185,000 people were recruited from an unnamed data company, to gain access to another 30 million Facebook profiles. But in order to receive payment, those people were also required to download an app that gave Cambridge Analytica access to the profiles of their unwitting Facebook friends. Using an Amazon site called Mechanical Turk, the company paid one hundred thousand people in the United States a dollar or two to fill out an online survey. As the New York Times reporters Nicholas Confessore and Danny Hakim described it:Ī voter deemed neurotic might be shown a gun-rights commercial featuring burglars breaking into a home, rather than a defense of the Second Amendment political ads warning of the dangers posed by the Islamic State could be targeted directly at voters prone to anxiety….Įven more troubling was the underhanded way in which Cambridge Analytica appeared to have obtained its information. The company then developed political messages tailored to appeal to the emotions of each one. While pundits were dissecting the collapse of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, the journalists for Das Magazin, Hannes Grassegger and Mikael Krogerus, pointed to an entirely different explanation-the work of Cambridge Analytica, a data science firm created by a British company with deep ties to the British and American defense industries.Īccording to Grassegger and Krogerus, Cambridge Analytica had used psychological data culled from Facebook, paired with vast amounts of consumer information purchased from data-mining companies, to develop algorithms that were supposedly able to identify the psychological makeup of every voter in the American electorate. Not long after Donald Trump’s surprising presidential victory, an article published in the Swiss weekly Das Magazin, and reprinted online in English by Vice, began churning through the Internet.
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