Thread by @carljackmiller

1/ I want to say a few things about how over-hyped I think Cambridge Analytica is.

1. They were working for Cruz and Trump beat him with almost no organises digital campaign.

2. By far, the best funded and most experienced digital team was Hilary’s, not Trumps’

Campaigners always claim they made the difference after a victory and people have totally drunk CA’s kool aid. We have conveniently forgotten the enormous amount of data that the Obama campaign had to, Yes, score every voter for likelihood to vote and vote Obama

The Obama campaign re-wrote the rule book for digital campaigns and a lot of them went on to work for Hilary and spent years laying the groundwork. CA for trump had months at best.

I cannot see anything that CA did that the Hilary campaign could not do or know.

To me, this story is an excuse to not confront the hard realities about why Trump was elected and instead fixate, like the Russia scandal, on how people could have been duped, tricked into voting for him. It’s a massively unhelpful red herring.

Continuing...

There is a genuine question around privacy, personal data and the industry that has grown up around the use, sale, re-sale and conglomeration of data. But the focus on CA implies that it was alone. It really wasn’t.

I don’t think CA are, like, good people but I dont think they are preternatural evil geniuses. if we focus on CA as an outlier, we’re missing scrutiny of the entire industry and political use of big data - which includes people from all sides of politics.

I should also add that before the FB data, there was CA’s use of psychographics and that in my opinion was sales-driven hokum.

Massively beneficial for CA for everyone to believe they really are the masterminds. But journalists need to stop swallowing it wholesale.