Update

Here is part of the conversation that led to their change in privacy policy (the rest of the exchange took place through PersonalData.IO or public tweets).

Update 2

Of course it didn’t fail: NakedCapitalism has referenced this piece saying: “This is a fancified reworking of the liberal trope that non-liberals are stupid”.

In simple terms, Fording and Schram said that there is a disproportionate support for Trump among people who either don’t use cognitive processes to make decisions, or don’t have political knowledge to start these processes. Even if you shortcut that to “stupid” (see footnote [4] why you shouldn’t do that), the parts of Fording and Schram’s paper that I rely on say “Stupid people disproportionately support Trump”, not “Trump supporters are stupid”. I myself suggested that Trump’s campaign might have intentionally targeted those voters as a consequence.

Thanks for reading! My name is Paul-Olivier Dehaye, I am a mathematician at the University of Zurich, and the co-founder of PersonalData.IO. I have also written about the geopolitical implications of data collection by Cambridge Analytica and its parent group, SCL, and contributed background research to an article about the transfer of data and techniques from Cambridge University to the Trump campaign, through Cambridge Analytica.

References

[1] Fording and Schram used data from the January 2016 American National Election Study Pilot Survey. To be clear, I am not citing here the political analysis in the Fording and Schram paper, which is indeed way too partisan for my taste. Any criticism of that part should be taken up with them. Instead, I am using their (very straightforward) analysis of the raw data. This is more objective, but not immune to criticism. They could, for instance, have selectively picked questions to construct proxy indicators and help their case. Or the data collection methodology could be flawed at the outset. I have not tried to question this, and would welcome any criticism of those aspects.

This being said, I am reusing the term “low-information voters”, which is loaded. I am using the same definition as Fording and Schram, because it is very objective, can be assessed from the data collected and matches the literal interpretation (“low on information” means either “low on relevant facts” or “low on processing of those facts”). I am fully aware that the term has been used and abused by both sides before, for political purposes (Fording and Schram detail this history, in a partisan way). I do hope the sensitivity of the term will itself attract more eyeballs.

[2] This followed the pattern of Robert Mercer, who is reported to be their part-owner and to have funnelled money to Cambridge Analytica through his SuperPAC, which also went from supporting Cruz to supportingTrump.

EDIT: I was told, but didn’t check, that Cambridge Analytica and Cruz parted ways a bit before him dropping out of the race.

[3] That strategy was also used for Brexit. Cambridge Analytica provided polling services to the Leave.EU campaign in the very early stages of the Brexit campaign: “Facts don’t work”, as the strategist Gerry Gunster put it to the man who funded the initial Brexit campaign, Aaron Banks. You can see Britany Kaiser of Cambridge Analytica sitting next to Banks and Gunster in the initial press conference of Leave.EU. Another organisation campaigning for Brexit became the reference organisation for that side of the campaign, and Cambridge Analytica was dropped from the team. The campaign kept the same strategy though. The full quote:

Banks engaged the Washington campaign strategy firm Goddard Gunster to advise Leave.EU; it swiftly identified immigration as the critical issue and told him how to exploit it. As Banks recalled in the week after the referendum victory: “What they said early on was, ‘Facts don’t work,’ and that’s it. The Remain campaign featured fact, fact, fact, fact, fact. It just doesn’t work. You have got to connect with people emotionally. It’s the Trump success.”

[4] In a context of active disinformation (for many reasons), if you are not critical of what you read and only react emotionally, this makes you very gullible. To be 100% clear, I am against disinformation, but not emotional reactions, which have a place in politics. It is also easy to see the highest reaches of the Need for Cognition Scale as purely positive and rational, but that is not the case. Humans have developed emotions and cognition for different circumstances, and both have their place. In addition, even in situation s where cognition is needed, high Need for Cognition individuals are often vulnerable to their own biases through “ad hoc hypothesis” or more simply over-rationalization.

[5] There could even be, but that is even more speculative, a feedback loop with Facebook’s algorithms, since these tend to favour content producing emotional reactions.

[6] To avoid any ambiguity, this report was filmed at the headquarters of SCL, the parent company of Cambridge Analytica. Based on a lot of additional evidence not presented here, there is little doubt in my mind that Cambridge Analytica is just SCL with a Delaware registration, and a few staff members embedded into the U.S. campaigns they were working for. A lot of the heavy technical lifting still happened in the UK at SCL headquarters.

[7] The International Journal of Educational and Psychological Assessment, December 2012, Vol. 12(1)

[8] Cambridge Analytica’s CEO and Data Protection Officer, Alex Tayler, have consistently shown a very weak understanding of EU data protection laws and how they work. In particular, Cambridge Analytica’s privacy policy has to grant a baseline right of access regardless of the nationality or country of residence of the data subject (admittedly, this is super complicated, but I have a lot of relevant evidence going in this direction).