Under the guidance of Brad Parscale, Mr. Trump’s digital director in 2016 and now the campaign manager for his 2020 re-election effort, Cambridge performed a variety of services, former campaign officials said. That included designing target audiences for digital ads and fund-raising appeals, modeling voter turnout, buying $5 million in television ads and determining where Mr. Trump should travel to best drum up support.
They made their models using info they misappropriated from FB.
“He ultimately provided over 50 million raw profiles to the firm, Mr. Wylie said, a number confirmed by a company email and a former colleague. Of those, roughly 30 million — a number previously reported by The Intercept — contained enough information, including places of residence, that the company could match users to other records and build psychographic profiles. Only about 270,000 users — those who participated in the survey — had consented to having their data harvested.”
You guys just haven’t connected the dots yet. Guiss is certain that Trump told the firm to illegally harvest information. Amaright?
I didn’t say that. Just posting facts. Here are some more:
According to Wylie : “This data was used to create profiling algorithms that would allow us to explore mental vulnerabilities of people and then map out ways to inject information into different streams or channels of content online so that people started to see things that may or may not be true. This is a company that took fake news to the next level.”
Not only was that data used for microtargeting voters, Wiley claimed, but by tracking the response to those messages in real time on social media, the firm could advise the campaign where Trump should visit and what words would resonate most with voters in the region. In fact, Steve Bannon, former chief strategist for President Donald Trump and executive chairman of Breitbart News, told Bloomberg in late October of 2016, “I wouldn’t have come aboard, even for Trump, if I hadn’t known they were building this massive Facebook and data engine. Facebook is what propelled Breitbart to a massive audience. We know its power.”
Bannon previously served as Cambridge Analytica’s vice president before joining the Trump campaign.
Doesn’t surprise me that potential Trump voters have mental vulnerabilities...
Sounds like a well-organized campaign employing a lot of good technology to reach their target audience. This, as I remember, was described as "chaos".
This kind of thoughtful analysis and targeted spending beats the ad pushing the wheelchair off the cliff and idiots wearing vagina hats 99% of the time. If this was the way she ran her campaign, thank heaven she didn't get the opportunity to run our country!
She did manage to try a new tactic....buying Russian fake news for big bucks.
I didn’t fall for it when Obama did it. Remember I didn’t vote for him?
Another important difference:
“In Obama’s case, the original contributors at least explicitly knew they were contributing to a campaign effort, even if their millions of unwitting friends had no idea their private information was being harvested to attempt to sway their voting behavior. In Cambridge Analytica’s case, users knew only that they were contributing to an academic research project.”