There has been a piece circulating around about the effects of big data on the 2016 election. (You can check it out here.) It tells the tale of the work of Michal Kosinski and the extensions of Psychometrics into the realm of behavior on social media. Kosinski found that, by monitoring people’s “likes” on Facebook, he could accurately predict their psychological profiles. Along came a man named Aleksandr Kogan, who appeared to swipe Kosinski’s ideas and formed a company called “Cambridge Analytica” which used Kosinski’s core ideas to gather data on people and predict their response to given marketing tactics. Donald Trump hired Cambridge Analytica, and by careful tweaking of news items and video clips, was able to hyper-target to specific segments of the population that could be swayed given their Facebook likes derived psychological profiles. I recall when I … Continue reading
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