Could big data and psychometrics have helped put The Donald in the White House? The ability to algorithmically profile people based on their online behaviour was an important factor in Trump’s bid for the presidency, helping the candidate target potential voters with tailored messages, Hannes Grassegger and Mikael Krogerus write for Vice’s Motherboard.

“Trump’s 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.” Psychologist Michal Kosinski devised a method to analyze people through their Facebook activity. “In 2012, Kosinski proved that on the basis of an average of 68 Facebook ‘likes’ by a user, it was possible to predict their skin color (with 95 percent accuracy), their sexual orientation (88 percent accuracy), and their affiliation to the Democratic or Republican party (85 percent).” The method works the other way around too: finding people — like undecided Democrats, for instance.

Big data company Cambridge Analytica, which specializes in “innovative political marketing — microtargeting — by measuring people’s personality from their digital footprints” and which the UK “leave” Brexit campaign commissioned, was hired by Donald Trump for his campaign. The company might have used Kosinski’s method — its parent company had contacted Kosinski for inquiries. Alexander Nix, Cambridge Analytica’s CEO, revealed the method in a presentation at the 2016 Concordia Summit (runtime: 11:03) and it is revolutionary, almost disturbing. The method involves ad targeting, meaning that ads appearing to you correspond to your personality type, in addition to buying people’s data from sources including land registries and shopping data.

“We have profiled the personality of every adult in the United States of America—220 million people,” Nix tells his audience. “Until now, explains Nix, election campaigns have been organized based on demographic concepts. ‘A really ridiculous idea. The idea that all women should receive the same message because of their gender — or all African Americans because of their race.’ What Nix meant is that while other campaigners so far have relied on demographics, Cambridge Analytica was using psychometrics.” Big Data indicated which messages by Trump worked where; Trump’s win would then be the biggest implementation of Big Data.