{"id":23828,"date":"2017-01-29T11:21:26","date_gmt":"2017-01-29T16:21:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/?p=23828"},"modified":"2017-01-29T11:21:26","modified_gmt":"2017-01-29T16:21:26","slug":"the-data-that-turned-the-world-upside-down","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/2017\/01\/29\/the-data-that-turned-the-world-upside-down\/","title":{"rendered":"The Data That Turned the World Upside Down"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Motherboard<\/em> a <em>Vice<\/em> channel has the article <a href=\"http:\/\/motherboard.vice.com\/read\/big-data-cambridge-analytica-brexit-trump\" target=\"_blank\">The Data That Turned the World Upside Down<\/a>.  This may be the most startling article you will read in a long time.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nTrump\u2019s striking inconsistencies, his much-criticized fickleness, and the resulting array of contradictory messages, suddenly turned out to be his great asset: a different message for every voter. The notion that Trump acted like a perfectly opportunistic algorithm following audience reactions is something the mathematician Cathy O\u2019Neil observed in August 2016.<\/p>\n<p>.<br \/>\n.<br \/>\n.<br \/>\n\u201cPretty much every message that Trump put out was data-driven,\u201d Alexander Nix remembers. On the day of the third presidential debate between Trump and Clinton, Trump\u2019s team tested 175,000 different ad variations for his arguments, in order to find the right versions above all via Facebook. The messages differed for the most part only in microscopic details, in order to target the recipients in the optimal psychological way: different headings, colors, captions, with a photo or video. This fine-tuning reaches all the way down to the smallest groups, Nix explained in an interview with us. \u201cWe can address villages or apartment blocks in a targeted way. Even individuals.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In the Miami district of Little Haiti, for instance, Trump\u2019s campaign provided inhabitants with news about the failure of the Clinton Foundation following the earthquake in Haiti, in order to keep them from voting for Hillary Clinton. This was one of the goals: to keep potential Clinton voters (which include wavering left-wingers, African-Americans, and young women) away from the ballot box, to \u201csuppress\u201d their vote, as one senior campaign official told Bloomberg in the weeks before the election. These \u201cdark posts\u201d\u2014sponsored news-feed-style ads in Facebook timelines that can only be seen by users with specific profiles\u2014included videos aimed at African-Americans in which Hillary Clinton refers to black men as predators, for example.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Motherboard a Vice channel has the article The Data That Turned the World Upside Down. This may be the most startling article you will read in a long time. Trump\u2019s striking inconsistencies, his much-criticized fickleness, and the resulting array of contradictory messages, suddenly turned out to be his great asset: a different message for every [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[166],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23828","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-stevegsposts","czr-hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23828","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23828"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23828\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23829,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23828\/revisions\/23829"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23828"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23828"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23828"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}