The Trump ‘secret sauce’ turned out to be just ketchup
The alleged edge of US President Donald Trump’s campaign is actually something that has been around for ages, writes Cathy O’Neil
Did the magic of psychological analytics — the big data version of "secret sauce" — launch Donald Trump into the presidency? Don’t believe the hype. Trump’s successful digital campaign has lately garnered a lot of breathless attention, notably in a German magazine article that credits a small British company called Cambridge Analytica with giving him an edge in the cut-throat world of political messaging. The idea is that the company employed newly developed methods to derive peoples’ personality traits from their activity on Facebook and elsewhere. There are a couple of problems with this narrative. First, that particular sauce wasn’t very secret. Second, everyone was doing it, including — or especially — Hillary Clinton. Don’t get me wrong. Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix seems amply capable of hatching diabolical schemes, judging from a video in which he brags about helping Ted Cruz with a "cutting edge" model that defines people according to five personality traits. But ev...
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