The company behind Trump’s online ad campaign as well as Brexit Leave (leave.eu led by Nigel Farage) is Cambridge Analytica. It uses psychometrics to ‘measure’ tendencies among individuals and groups through their digital traces. Specifically what you like on Facebook.
Cambridge Analytica’s parent company - SCL or Strategic Communications Laboratories - uses psychometrics for psychological manipulation and behavioral change communication. The business structure conducts “political upheavals in developing countries; others had done work for NATO, developing methods for the psychological manipulation of the population in Afghanistan.”
For those who know me know that I work with analytics, algorithms and the intersection of technology and society (society in the holistic people-oriented sense, not cloistered enclaves). I’ve been talking about this for so long; how Big Data has played a massive role in emboldening the most unhinged forms of fascism in society and how Silicon Valley is one of the places to blame.
Of course, when a woman says something like this, the go-to reaction among tech folks is to label her hysterical and brush her doubts aside by telling her that she is too ‘emotional’ to discuss and analyze technology’s role in politics and governance.
Among those to mock my thoughts were upper class white men who hide their lack of empathy under the guise of ‘rationalism,’ middle class white men who buy waifu pillows on Amazon and yell at minorities online via anonymous Twitter accounts, and South/East Asian men who’ve made it big in SF and feel the need to parrot their white peers’ ways so as to avoid being called betas. It’s a pretty sad sight all in all.
But this is a truly terrifying read on how psychometrics and data-driven communications played an integral role in fascism and Trump’s victory through online marketing and micro-targeting using the O.C.E.A.N. method.
