Senator Doug Jones of Alabama on Thursday said he was “outraged” to learn of deceptive online operations used by fellow Democrats to assist his election last year, and called for a federal investigation into the matter. He was responding to a report in The New York Times on Wednesday about […] Read more »
Secret Experiment in Alabama Senate Race Imitated Russian Tactics
As Russia’s online election machinations came to light last year, a group of Democratic tech experts decided to try out similarly deceptive tactics in the fiercely contested Alabama Senate race, according to people familiar with the effort and a report on its results. The secret project, carried out on Facebook […] Read more »
Your Apps Know Where You Were Last Night, and They’re Not Keeping It Secret
… At least 75 companies receive anonymous, precise location data from apps whose users enable location services to get local news and weather or other information, The Times found. Several of those businesses claim to track up to 200 million mobile devices in the United States — about half those […] Read more »
2018 Targets in Trump’s GOP
The Trump presidency has created serious opportunities for agile progressives to target and deliver messages to a fractured and demoralized GOP. This is the conclusion of Democracy Corps’ new national online message test of 1,200 Republican registered voters, numerous Catalist voterfile matched phone surveys, and focus groups among the factions […] Read more »
How the Math Men Overthrew the Mad Men
Once, Mad Men ruled advertising. They’ve now been eclipsed by Math Men—the engineers and data scientists whose province is machines, algorithms, pureed data, and artificial intelligence. … In the advertising world, Big Data is the Holy Grail, because it enables marketers to target messages to individuals rather than general groups, […] Read more »
Long Before Cambridge Analytica, a Belief in the ‘Power of the Subliminal’
Nearly three decades ago, an ambitious young London advertising executive named Nigel Oakes fell out with his partners, two psychologists, over a central claim of his new business: That using the tools of social science, he could plant motivations in a person’s brain without their knowledge, prompting them to behave […] Read more »