[cross-post from Medium]
Cambridge Analytica basically used customer segmentation and targeting: standard advertising stuff (and some cynicism about that: iirc one of the other campaigns ditched them) that will probably become standard for campaigns if it hasn’t already (full disclosure: am helping out on a campaign). Cool (if unethical) use of surveys as probes though. Get the feeling they didn’t do as much as they could have done, but that was enough. Not sure how I feel about gaming elections right now: part of me says bad, another part that it’s politics as normal, just scaled and personalised.
Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, big data seems to be a problem. We need to fix this. So repeat after me “big data is not data science”. Get the data, study the data, but understand that exploring data is just part of the arc between questions and storytelling, that humans are complex and working with them is about both listening and persuading.
Let’s try data-supported hearts-and-minds.