Cambridge Analytica: reclusive billionaire and Bond-style villain forge new data weapon
How political messaging based on personality became a new weapon in Trump’s election campaign, writes Michael Wade
The dealings that have been revealed between Cambridge Analytica and Facebook have all the trappings of a Hollywood thriller: a Bond villain-style CEO, a reclusive billionaire, a naïve and conflicted whistle-blower, a hipster data-scientist-turned-politico, an academic with seemingly questionable ethics and of course a triumphant president and his influential family. Much of the discussion has been on how Cambridge Analytica was able to obtain data on more than 50-million Facebook users — and how it allegedly failed to delete this data when told to do so. But there is also the matter of what Cambridge Analytica actually did with the data. The data-crunching company’s approach represents a step change in how analytics can be used as a tool to generate insights and to exert influence. Pollsters have long used segmentation to target particular groups of voters, such as through categorising audiences by gender, age, income, education and family size. Segments can also be created around ...
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