How a new use of Big Data let Trump win.

[glatt]

My sister in law just posted this article on FB. The website is admittedly sketchy (antidotezine.com) but it is, from what I can see, a direct translation of the original German language article from Das Magazin in Switzerland, and the citations all check out.

The article is a very long and interesting read and I encourage you to read it. I haven't seen this reported in the US.

The old way of doing a campaign is to get demographic data about voters and try to target them with messages that resonate with them. But it's crazy to think all women will think the same way, or all blacks, or any group. What's much more effective it to target personality types. There is a way of categorizing people using the OCEAN method where you see how they fall on the spectrum of Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. Once you identify how a person falls in each of those areas, you can predict better than they will themselves how they will respond to a particular message.

A company called Cambridge Analytica, headed by Alexander Nix, has mined data from Facebook and from all the free apps you have on your phone. They paid for that data, and with it, they have built an extremely detailed profile of every adult in America. And with that profile, they can target specific ads to individual people. And specific message too to come out of Trump's mouth. Cambridge Analytica was behind Brexit and also behind Trump.

From the article:

“We have profiled the personality of every adult in the United States of America—220 million people,” - Nix

Mathematician Cathy O’Neil had already observed in August that “Trump is like a machine learning algorithm” that adjusts to public reactions. “Pretty much every message that Trump put out was data-driven,” Alexander Nix explained to Das Magazin. On the day of the third presidential debate between Trump and Clinton, Trump’s team blasted out 175,000 distinct test variations on his arguments, mostly via Facebook. The messages varied mostly in their microscopic details, in order to communicate optimally with their recipients: different titles, colors, subtitles, with different images or videos. The granularity of this message tailoring digs all the way down to tiny target groups, Nix told Das Magazin. “We can target specific towns or apartment buildings. Even individual people.”

and

In the Miami neighborhood of Little Haiti, Trump’s campaign regaled residents with messages about the failures of the Clinton Foundation after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, in order to dissuade them from turning out for Clinton. This was one of the goals: to get potential but wavering Clinton voters—skeptical leftists, African-Americans, young women—to stay home. To “suppress” their votes, as one Trump campaign staffer bluntly put it. In these so-called dark posts (paid Facebook ads which appear in the timelines only of users with a particular suitable personality profile), African-Americans, for example, were shown the nineties-era video of Hillary Clinton referring to black youth as “super predators.”

And check out this Youtube video of Nix talking at a convention about how he was behind the big surge Cruz had early in the primary and how it works.


Trump and Brexit used this tool. Hillary did not. But if the Democrats are paying attention, this was the first shot fired in an arms race, and campaigns will never be the same again where we each get individual messages sent to us.