In my opinion, surgically precise targeting was not the problem with Cambridge Analytica. The problems were:
1. Disregard for privacy, by scraping data from people who had not agreed to their terms. And, honestly, from most of the people who "agreed" to their terms.
2. Doubling down on the idea "a candidate should get votes", instead of "a voter should choose the best candidate." It's the classic problem of a measure (vote count) becoming less useful. This has always been the case in politics, but we should discourage it. Not sell it as a service.
I also remember hearing one of their goals was suppressing turnout among voters who likely supported the opponent, but I'm having trouble finding a good source. Even if Cambridge Analytica didn't focus on this, it's another case of the measure ruining its own intent. Voter suppression by official acts is often illegal, but it's not much better when done through legal messaging.
As powerful as Facebook is in the world of American communication, it can't solve those problems. Reducing political ads can help, but we're far from being able to wipe our hands and think we've accomplished much.
Surgical ads allow you to greatly reduce ad spend. If you know people who like A, B, C and are easily convinced of your worldview via data scrapping, and X, Y, Z are not, you can rile up a relatively small group of voters to shape the election outcome in battleground states.
1. Disregard for privacy, by scraping data from people who had not agreed to their terms. And, honestly, from most of the people who "agreed" to their terms.
2. Doubling down on the idea "a candidate should get votes", instead of "a voter should choose the best candidate." It's the classic problem of a measure (vote count) becoming less useful. This has always been the case in politics, but we should discourage it. Not sell it as a service.
I also remember hearing one of their goals was suppressing turnout among voters who likely supported the opponent, but I'm having trouble finding a good source. Even if Cambridge Analytica didn't focus on this, it's another case of the measure ruining its own intent. Voter suppression by official acts is often illegal, but it's not much better when done through legal messaging.
As powerful as Facebook is in the world of American communication, it can't solve those problems. Reducing political ads can help, but we're far from being able to wipe our hands and think we've accomplished much.