Introduction
At the time of writing this, the 2024 US presidential election is just around the corner. With Trump facing off against Harris, it is a battle of titans for the high chair and the future of democracy in the US as we know it. In this digital age, where ‘fake news’ and ‘alternative facts’ are thrown about haphazardly by at least one side of the aisle, I think it is important to look back on the last presidential campaign that Trump won in 2016. The 2016 US election has been a major turning point in the way presidential campaigns can be run successfully in the digital age.
Cambridge Analytica and Facebook Scandal
The behind-the-scenes star player in Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign has got to be Cambridge Analytica. This British data broker and digital advertising company ran a large part of Trump’s digital campaign, primarily focusing on creating models that predict political affiliation, allowing them to specifically target certain people online. Cambridge Analytica describes itself as a “global election management agency” which if you ask me, sounds a little ominous to begin with.
The foundation of Cambridge Analytica’s “management” started with illegally requiring personal data on 87 million American voters. They did this by offering small sums of money to a couple hundred thousand people for them to fill out a 120-question personality survey. While the people taking these surveys consented to giving up that information, Cambridge Analytica took it a step further and matched that supposedly anonymous data with these peoples personal Facebook data, like their full name and current location. If you have a full psychological profile AND someone’s entire digital footprint, you can write a program that works backward to derive someone’s personality traits from their digital behavior. Not only did they illegally acquire personal data on the survey participants, they also acquired the personal data of all their Facebook friends. This is how the personal data of a hundred thousand participants turns into the personal data of 86 million American voters.
This is a simplified version of how Cambridge Analytica was able to so accurately predict the behavior of voters to sway an election. If you’d like to learn more in-depth about how exactly they managed to do this, the Guardian wrote an article with the help of Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie which you can find here.
When you have a program that can predict political affiliation and personality traits based on someone’s Facebook likes it gives you extraordinary leverage through highly personalized advertising. You can take a broad statement anyone believes in like “more jobs!” but focus on different aspects of what that statement means to appeal to different people with different priorities. For example, when targeting a working-class person with a family you can emphasize the importance of providing for a family, while if targeting a single working-class person you can focus on self-reliance and independence. The small business owner might be more susceptible to advertising focusing on how more jobs create more wealth and economic stability.
Besides using different angles to push the same message, a large part of Trump’s campaign was also built on what we now call ‘fake news’. Using blatantly false advertising and ‘alternative facts’ specifically targeted to people who showed personality traits that make them susceptible to believing these lies. Studies analyzing ‘fake news’ on Facebook show that during the 2016 election, the fake news coverage favored Trump vs Hillary 30 to 81.
In the aftermath of the election, an anonymous whistleblower came out and exposed the practices of Cambridge Analytica and Facebook. This whistleblower was later named as Christopher Wylie. The following scandal resulted in a lawsuit where Facebook was fined $5 billion by the Federal Trade Commission and Cambridge Analytica was dissolved as a company, though there are subsidiaries of the company that still exist today. The scandal also spawned a global discussion of the ethics of data harvesting and data privacy in the information age.
Conclusion
The reason I think it is important to know how Cambridge Analytica’s practices swayed the election in Trump’s favor is because it demonstrates how powerful big data brokers can be when combined with experts in targeted advertising. In a world where more and more political campaigning happens digitally, and a world where the truth is less important than getting clicks, it is important for us all to be mindful of exactly how we are being targeted online, and what kind of tools are being used to push us certain agendas.
I hope, for the sake of all, that the American people in the upcoming election decide to resist the one-sided advertising they undoubtedly will encounter. I hope that instead, they choose to look for reliable, varied sources, to form their own opinions. It is after all a responsibility of a citizen in a democracy to be well-informed, and that includes the ways in which you might commonly be misinformed.
- Allcott, Hunt, and Matthew Gentzkow. 2017. “Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election.” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 31 (2): 211–36. ↩︎
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