Long Before Cambridge Analytica And Facebook, Simulmatics Linked Data And Politics
One Man's Obsessive Fight to Reclaim His Cambridge Analytica Data
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<aside> 💡 I was already familiar with Data Feminism and the "Techlash Trilogy", so the specific readings from this week's materials that further impacted my understanding of data ethics were Lepore's If Then and Auerbach's "Confirmation Bias: Did big data sink the Clinton campaign?". What hooked me into these two particular readings was not only that they were lesser-known histories of predictive analytics in the political sphere but that both exposed the dark side of the Democratic party's data ethics previously unknown to me. It is interesting that Simulmatics was born after the Democratic party had devastatingly lost to the Republican party in the 1952 election, as if Ed Greenfield saw an opportunity to "level the playing field". Fast forward to the 2016 election, it was understood that both parties had a (now standard) data analytics system at the core of their campaign strategy: Clinton with "Ada" and Trump with Cambridge Analytica. I used to believe that the 2016 election was solely a result of Cambridge Analytica's interference, but now I can see that it was also a result of the Clinton campaign's hyper-dependence on data and an unquestionable belief that data is objective.
Additionally, through Lepore's NPR interview, another similarity that I found fascinating (and maybe horrifying) is the analogy that Simulmatics is to Kennedy what Cambridge Analytica is to Trump. This specific part of the interview felt eerily similar to how Cambridge Analytica's executives had boasted about winning elections around the world in Channel 4's undercover investigative video:
INSKEEP: "Simulmatics founders worked for presidential candidate John F. Kennedy in 1960, when their work was controversial enough that Kennedy denied it."
LEPORE: "...they did provide his campaign with an awful lot of advice..And then they were doing this kind of big publicity blitz taking credit for Kennedy's victory."
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