Some quotes from there:
- Unfortunately, the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook scandal also has renewed a very old and disabling fable embraced by many well-meaning people on the left, which is that Americans (and others overseas) keep voting for right-wing authoritarians because they are being manipulated by the media.
- The implication, never blatantly stated but simply conveyed by all the tricks of modern documentary-making—striking digital graphics meant to illustrate how our data leaks into the hands of others, ominous music, and alluring close-ups of [Brittany] Kaiser as she watches the scandal unfold on television—is that Trump won because Cambridge Analytica gave him a secret edge. All of this is garbage.
- The closer one looks at Kaiser’s claims, the more they dissolve into a young staffer believing the hype that her company’s higher-ups asked her to sell.
- It’s not for nothing that political scientist Dave Karpf, who has written two books on the use of data in modern campaigns, calls Cambridge Analytica “the Theranos of political data.”
- The Great Hack wants to make its viewers care about data rights and the dangers of modern misinformation campaigns but unfortunately is itself a slick piece of misinformation that plays artfully on the prejudices and misunderstandings rife in its targeted audience.
There is a Hacker News discussion prompted by this article, with some technical details.
