https://twitter.com/mbsimon/status/975231597183229953
"I ran the Obama 2008 data-driven microtargeting team. How dare you! We didn’t steal private Facebook profile data from voters under false pretenses. OFA voluntarily solicited opinions of hundreds of thousands of voters. We didn’t commit theft to do our groundbreaking work."
I've seen no hard data showing that any of this did Trump any good. Apparently not a single study has been done as to whether people either failed to vote or changed their vote based upon fake news or the use of this data.
I do follow fringes of online anarchism and anomie, and I was surprised to see so much support for Trump, when the polls were showing him so far down. And much of that support was so odd that I thought it ironic. But whatever.
I'd like to see such a study, for sure. But I'm not optimistic. Arguably, many who voted for Trump would be no more forthcoming to researchers than they were to those doing the election polling. There's just too much polarization, I suspect.
What distinguishes CA and the Trump campaign is how well the data was used. CA staff apparently just did a better job at using the data to manipulate people. Their canvassing app. Using bots on Facebook and Twitter. Plus entrepreneurs from Eastern Europe or whatever. And maybe they went further, discouraging potential Clinton and Sanders supporters fron voting.
But anyway, the key point isn't whether CA or Obama/Clinton got more data from Facebook, or whether Facebook willingly helped Obama/Clinton. The key point is how well voters can now be manipulated. It's another level in the problem that money buys political power. And it's arguably how AI could do the same.