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: 2, Offtopic) by Runaway1956 on Monday December 14 2015, @01:10AM
https://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/Hillary-Clinton-women-voters-Priorities-USA/2015/08/17/id/670434/ [newsmax.com]
Hillary can't understand why over-the-hill women support her, and young women don't have the time of day for her. Her campaign is doing much the same thing, targeting very specifc advertising to very select groups of young women. As her past modus operandi would suggest, in a Latin neighborhood, Hillary wants to be a Latina, and in an old steel town, she wants to be either a coal miner's daughter, or Rosy the riveter. The better the candidate's campaign gets to know you, the better flavored bullshit they can serve up for you.
I think that's why Hillary is self-destructing. Even gulliblie, naive young people have figured out that everythign she says is a lie.