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How Cambridge Analytica Used Intimate Data to Exploit Gun Owners’ Private Lives
(projects.propublica.org)
this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2025
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You can just watch The Great Hack or The Social Dilemma, these are the same people and techniques as what got Brexit passed and Trump elected
But it says "never before made public"
Yeah, the gun lobby work details are new.
But the techniques that they use are not specific to the gun lobby. They obtain a lot of personal data, profile the data into silos based on the kinds of messaging that works for them (primarily things that trigger fear, outrage, anger, conspiratorial thoughts, etc) and use those profiles to craft memes.
They then make a lot of fake accounts on social media and attempt to insinuate themselves into the social graphs of their target populations and then spend weeks/months pouring these poisoned memes into the conversation on social media.
In Trump's campaign and Brexit they used a bunch of 'Which Marvel character are you'-style quizzes to ask a bunch of questions to generate the psychological profiles. They also had access to voter role data from the primary campaigns.
The execution of the plan, once they had the targeting data, was the same in all of their campaigns. It's not much different than what advertisers do, but they're not bound by any FCC regulations and have no qualms about lying or being deceptive in their messaging.