Like, it was just that simple. Doesn’t take much to feed racists the messaging they want to hear and suck money out of them.
That hose is powered by data.
Have you seen those spammy emails that Trump supporters get, asking for money? Yeah, they’re carefully tuned to get cash out of them.
Your regular ad campaign that’s pitching, say, workout leggings uses a huge amount of data and A/B testing to determine what is effective. It’s advertising by statistics.
You think having personalized search results is creepy and invasive until you’re like me, a web dev looking for obscure code errors...
The worst fucking thing about data analysis is when your data is corrupted or inaccurate, and you have no way of filtering it out. It means insights derived from the dataset are 100% junk.
So the troll operation in this case, by all accounts, used fake emails and temp Google Voice numbers.
I will bet a month’s salary that some poor database admin is now staring at a dataset of over a million ticket reservations that they were going to use to shill for donations and feeling sick.
Let’s say they were going to use it to ID moderates to advertise to them.
Or cross-reference signals on location, and determine how to direct their campaign spending based on that.
That dataset is probably complete junk. Any registration that doesn’t correlate somehow to known good information is now suspect.
Junk.
By automated means, is what I’m saying. Obviously if the email is “Trump.sucks.putins.balls@gmail.com” that’s a pretty safe bet for being fake.
At worst, it means they toss it.
And trust me on this: Trump may stiff contractors, but he ain’t stiffing them.
So imagine if you spent a ton of money setting up a rally and getting the devops in place to collect marketing data (least you think those systems are cheap, they are not) and then...
I can’t think of any better example of the power of the people in the modern world than this.
Allow me to enlighten you to how much time and money you have to spend on good, large scale email campaigns in order to get results.
And you live an die on the accuracy of your mailing list. Fake emails are the bane of your life.
And Trumpikins desperately needs to get to those voters.
Anyway I might be going viral and I don’t have a soundcloud, so get out and vote, Nazis fuck off, support #BlackLivesMatter, and give all the money and power to women of color and trans people
CLAIRE OUT