DID YOU KNOW?
The Trump
Campaign
Used
to Craft His
Message
When Richard Nixon first ran for Congress in 1946,
he and his supporters used a wide range of dirty tricks
aimed at smearing his opponent as pro-Communist,
including a boiler-room operation generating phone calls to regis-
tered Democrats, which simply said, “This is a friend of yours, but I
can’t tell you who I am. Did you know that Jerry Voorhis is a Com-
munist?” Then the caller would hang up.
In 2016, the same basic strategy was employed but with decades
of refi nement, technological advances, and massively more money
behind it. A key player in this was right-wing computer scientist
and hedge-fund billionaire Robert Mercer, who contributed
$13.5 million to Trump’s campaign and also funded Cambridge
Analytica, a data analytics company that specializes in “election
management strategies” and using “psychographic” microtarget-
ing—based on thousands of pieces of data for some 220 million
American voters—as Carole Cadwalladr reported for The Guardian
in February 2017.
After Trump’s victory, Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander
Nix said, “We are thrilled that our revolutionary approach to
data-driven communication has played such an integral part in
President-elect Trump’s extraordinary win.”
Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, Strategic Communica-
tion Laboratories, was more old-school until recently in elections
across Europe, Africa and the Caribbean. In Trinidad, it paid for
the painting of graffiti slogans purporting to be from grassroots
youth. In Nigeria, it advised its client party to suppress the vote
of the opposition “by organizing anti-poll rallies on the day of the
election.”
But now the company can micro-target its deceptive, disrup-
tive messaging. “Pretty much every message that Trump put out
was data-driven” after Cambridge Analytica joined the campaign,
Nix said in September 2016. On the day of the third presidential
debate, Trump’s team “tested 175,000 different ad variations for
his arguments” via Facebook.
This messaging had everything to do with how those targeted
would respond, not with Trump’s or Mercer’s views. With the real
patterns of influence, ideology, money, power and belief hidden
from view, the very concept of democratic self-governance is now
fundamentally at risk.
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Willamette Week OCTOBER 11, 2017 wweek.com