I remember when the Obama campaign hired data scientists and used targeted social networking tools to pursuade voters who were on the fence and it was heralded as brilliant and the future of politics.
I worked for a company crawling Facebook data by creating viral apps the year the original API came out. By now I am sure this is done by many companies.
Why is any of this news? My understanding is that companies harvesting social networking data via viral apps and then reselling it to perform targeted voter advertising is literally a 10 year old concept. Were any laws broken here? Were there any techniques used here that were novel or done by one political party and not the other? Why are we talking about this one firm and not the many others that surely exist that are trying to do the same thing for <insert political candidate of choice>
I worked for a company crawling Facebook data by creating viral apps the year the original API came out. By now I am sure this is done by many companies.
Why is any of this news? My understanding is that companies harvesting social networking data via viral apps and then reselling it to perform targeted voter advertising is literally a 10 year old concept. Were any laws broken here? Were there any techniques used here that were novel or done by one political party and not the other? Why are we talking about this one firm and not the many others that surely exist that are trying to do the same thing for <insert political candidate of choice>