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 »
Cambridge Analytica boasts of dirty tricks to swing elections
The company at the centre of the Facebook data breach boasted of using honey traps, fake news campaigns and operations with ex-spies to swing election campaigns around the world, a new investigation reveals. Executives from Cambridge Analytica spoke to undercover reporters from Channel 4 News about the dark arts used […] 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 »
Facebook bans Trump campaign’s data analytics firm for taking user data
Facebook is suspending the Trump-affiliated data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica, after learning that it failed to delete data that it had taken inappropriately from users of the social network, Facebook said late Friday. … Cambridge Analytica, a firm that specializes in using online data to create voter personality profiles in […] Read more »
Politics & Polls podcast: Social Research in the Digital Age
From smart phones to social media, digital technology has changed the way we live — allowing for new explorations of human behavior. Big data now enables scientists to process data about human behavior on a scale never before imaginable. In this episode, Professors Julian Zelizer and Sam Wang interview Matt […] Read more »
How Do You Vote? 50 Million Google Images Give a Clue
What vehicle is most strongly associated with Republican voting districts? Extended-cab pickup trucks. For Democratic districts? Sedans. Those conclusions may not be particularly surprising. After all, market researchers and political analysts have studied such things for decades. But what is surprising is how researchers working on an ambitious project based […] Read more »