The single largest donor to any super-pacs or other outside groups so far in this political season is Robert Mercer, owner of the Big Data firm Cambridge Analytica. Besides donating cash, Mercer has donated analysis work. He paid mechanical turk workers for access to their facebook accounts and by association access to data about anyone who had unwittingly friended those mturk workers.
The goal seems to be the gathering of detailed psychological profiles to enable "micro-targeting" of campaign advertisements. In a reversal from typical claims about targeted advertising, political micro-targeting is not about showing you candidates you might like to vote for but instead figuring out how to social-engineer you into liking the candidate that paid for the advertising. They are looking to press people's buttons and hope to figure out which buttons each of us are most sensitive to and then tell each voter exactly what they want to hear and only what they want to hear, leaving out anything that might inconveniently cause them to be skeptical.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Thexalon on Sunday December 13 2015, @11:41PM
The candidate who is known to be taking advantage of this, at least according to TFA, is Ted Cruz. I would think that's worth a mention, especially since it might cause people to become skeptical of Ted Cruz.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 14 2015, @12:28AM
If they aren't all doing it, they will soon. There is just too much money at stake for any serious candidate to rule out anything that might give them an edge.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 14 2015, @01:36AM
Hmm, Ted. Facebook. Harvard. . . .Yard. Mark. . . Zuckerbot. . . I sense a deep, very deep, disturbance in the Force. And you know what? God feels it too. Cruz is going to drop out of the presidential race in a fortnight. God told me. Oh, and is Dad is not really a Christian! Catholics told me so!