General Discussion

kpete

(71,961 posts) Wed Mar 21, 2018, 05:24 PM Mar 2018

Good Rebuttal to the new conservative meme on Cambridge Analytica that the Obama campaign did it too

No, Obama Didn’t Employ the Same Strategies as Cambridge Analytica
by Nancy LeTourneau March 21, 2018

Following reports that Cambridge Analytica harvested the data of millions of people on Facebook, the company signaled to right-wing media what their response should be. They took to Twitter with a lie that mirrors much of what we’ve heard from Trump over the last couple of years: “Obama did it too.”

Obama’s 2008 campaign was famously data-driven, pioneered microtargeting in 2012, talking to people specifically based on the issues they care about.

That is a fairly accurate description of data-driven microtargeting, which doesn’t have a lot to do with the kind of psychological profiling done by Cambridge Analytica. But the issue is not just how the data was used, it’s also how CA managed to compile 3,000-5,000 data points on approximately 230 million people. What we now know is that they used free personality quizzes, where people were told that their information was only going to be used for research purposes, and gathered not only all of their Facebook data in the process, but swept up all of the data from their Facebook friends as well.

Here’s the response from someone who knows a thing or two about what the Obama campaign actually did:

Michael Simon
‏
👋 I ran the Obama 2008 data-driven microtargeting team. How dare you! We didn’t steal private Facebook profile data from voters under false pretenses. OFA voluntarily solicited opinions of hundreds of thousands of voters. We didn’t commit theft to do our groundbreaking work.