Who’s afraid of Cambridge Analytica?

Photo by Shane Guymon on Unsplash

I’ve noticed many people being scared of digital manipulation, Cambridge Analytica style, where companies track your digital footprints to show you microtargeted content that penetrates your brain and manipulates your mind. If such a thing works, it seems possible for powerful people to hire such firms to direct public opinion and election results through the use of political campaigns ads targeted specifically to our psychological profiles.

That’s does sound a bit scary.

But whether we should actually worry about it depends, it seems to me, on two factors: the accuracy of what Cambridge Analytica called “psychografic profiling” (predictive power) and the efficacy of the consequential microtargeting (persuasive power).

Let’s dive in.

Predictive power

There’s a famous paper — cited over 2500 times — by Michal Kosinski, David Stillwell and Thore Graepel. It seeks to predict traits — such as sexual orientation, ethnic origin, political views, religion, personality, intelligence, — and attributes like age, gender, and relationship status from Faceook likes. So they asked 58.000 folks to provide access to their Facebook likes and also to fill out some questionnaires, which gave the researchers their “true score” on these demographic and psychometric variables. This allowed…