The Cruz campaign is deriving its strategy with the aid of exhaustively mined social media data aggregated, partially by stealth, by Cambridge Analytica, a UK outfit run by Aleksandr Kogan, a lecturer in psychology at Cambridge University who seems to specialize in researching love and feelings of well-being.
As part of an aggressive new voter-targeting operation, Cambridge Analytica – financially supported by reclusive hedge fund magnate and leading Republican donor Robert Mercer – is now using so-called “psychographic profiles” of US citizens in order to help win Cruz votes, despite earlier concerns and red flags from potential survey-takers.
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Kogan assured the MTurk users their Facebook data would “only be used for research purposes” and remain “anonymous and safe”.
However, the Facebook data was then used to generate sophisticated models of each of their personalities using the so-called “big five” personality traits and characteristics – openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism (known as the OCEAN scale).
By summer 2014, Kogan’s company had created an expansive and powerful dataset. His business partner boasted on LinkedIn that their private outfit, Global Science Research (GSR), “owns a massive data pool of 40+ million individuals across the United States – for each of whom we have generated detailed characteristic and trait profiles”.
The stealth aspect involved a survey done thru Mechanical Turk, which paid Facebook users $1 for access to their information.
Crucially, Kogan also captured the same data for each person’s unwitting friends. For every individual recruited on MTurk, he harvested information about their friends, meaning the dataset ballooned significantly in size. Research shows that in 2014, Facebook users had an average of around 340 friends.
This is just one reason why people are going to regret living their lives thru social media. It also reflects an intrusive and manipulative approach to campaigning that this self-righteous and hypocritical candidate may have some trouble explaining, if the USMSM media will ever ask about it. But don’t hold your breath, and above all don’t expect other candidates on either side, except possible Sanders, to criticize this stuff— in this money-in-politics era, it’s the wave of the future.
From a 40-graf article at:
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/11/senator-ted-cruz-president-campaign-facebook-user-data
