Every time Donald Trump breaks a window, congressional Republicans obediently sweep up the glass. That’s become one of the most predictable patterns of his turbulent presidency—and a defining dynamic of the approaching midterm elections. Each time they overtly defend his behavior, or implicitly excuse him by failing to object, they […] Read more »
The Media’s Double Standard on Privacy and Cambridge Analytica
Listening to most of the analysis of Cambridge Analytica’s use of Facebook data, one would think that our deepest, darkest secrets were pilfered from Facebook’s servers and hand-delivered to Trump Tower and the Kremlin, which skillfully used them to exploit our fears and manipulate our emotions. One could be forgiven […] Read more »
Facebook’s Surveillance Machine
In 2014, Cambridge Analytica, a voter-profiling company that would later provide services for Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, reached out with a request on Amazon’s “Mechanical Turk” platform, an online marketplace where people around the world contract with others to perform various tasks. Cambridge Analytica was looking for people who […] Read more »
Trump is attacking Mueller as faith in the special counsel is rising
President Trump has ratcheted up his criticism of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, calling out Mueller by name for the first time and asking if anyone thinks the investigation is fair given the investigative team includes “13 hardened Democrats” and “Zero […] Read more »
Wanna know what happened in 2016? We got a ton of graphs for you.
The paper’s called Voting patterns in 2016: Exploration using multilevel regression and poststratification (MRP) on pre-election polls, it’s by Rob Trangucci, Imad Ali, Doug Rivers, and myself, and here’s the abstract: CONT. Andrew Gelman (Columbia U.), Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science Read more »
How Trump Consultants Exploited the Facebook Data of Millions
As the upstart voter-profiling company Cambridge Analytica prepared to wade into the 2014 American midterm elections, it had a problem. The firm had secured a $15 million investment from Robert Mercer, the wealthy Republican donor, and wooed his political adviser, Stephen K. Bannon, with the promise of tools that could […] Read more »