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 Anonymous Coward on Monday December 14 2015, @01:24AM
WTF?
"He paid mechanical turk workers for access to their facebook accounts"
Is that not a direct violation of Facebook terms-of-service?
(Score: 4, Informative) by undefinedvalue on Monday December 14 2015, @01:53AM
It's also against Mechanical Turk's policies:
https://www.mturk.com/mturk/help?helpPage=policies [mturk.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 14 2015, @02:07AM
LOL! There are 11 prohibited things and this hits about 8 of them.