Finally forced myself to watch The Great Hack.
Verdict: my reluctance was justified, and I should have held firm.
It vastly exaggerates what CA did, takes several of their garbage, baseless claims at face value and ultimately makes a pantomime villain out of a minor character.
I've spoken to mathematicians who are adamant that "psychographics" simply doesn't work.
CA were selling snake oil. Nobody has ever been able to prove that any of it worked.
The Great Hack laps it all up.
Not to mention infuriating snippets like:
"CA would say you've gotta target this state, that state"
"How would they know that?"
"That's their secret sauce!"
Erm, any political science graduate could build a model to determine which states to target.
Ultimately I'm with @OwenGleiberman: it's understandable that people were shaken by Trump's win and sought desperately to find a bogeyman, to reassure themselves that without this one evil data firm, there's no Trump. But it's not true variety.com/2019/film/revi…
I'd also strongly suggest that anyone who still buys the vastly exaggerated version of CA's role and capabilities reads @Soccermatics's excellent book Outnumbered, which delves into the details of CA's claims and other cases of overhyped algorithms goodreads.com/book/show/3676…
Two final points:
• When Obama campaign used FB users' friend lists & behavioural nudges to persuade voters in 2012, it was written up as smart use of data docs.house.gov/meetings/IF/IF…
• Read this thread by an Obama campaign staffer explaining what they did
I'm not making value judgments on how either the Obama or Trump campaigns used FB data to try to persuade voters, but you cannot say one was smart and good, and the other was evil.
Right or wrong, they're both industry-standard ways of using personal data to attempt to persuade.
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