Hamish Marshall, Conservative leader Andrew Scheer’s campaign manager for the 2019 election, says he’s a “huge fan” of building detailed psychological profiles of Canadian voters and targeting them with personalized political messages.
Big data and politics took an unsurprisingly dystopian turn this week after a series of bombshell revelations about Cambridge Analytica – a data analytics firm once run by Steve Bannon and bankrolled by reclusive billionaire Robert Mercer that claims it used “psychographic data” to engineer Brexit and the election of Donald Trump.
According to The Guardian, Cambridge Analytica scraped Facebook data from over 200 million people to create “sophisticated psychological and political profiles and then target them with political ads designed to work on their particular psychological makeup.”
The whistleblower at the centre of the Cambridge Analytica revelations calls it “Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare mindf–k tool.”
Many ordinary Canadians are likely unaware that similar techniques are already being used to wage “psychological warfare” in Canadian politics too.
Last year, at the Manning Centre’s Alberta Networking Conference in Red Deer, Hamish Marshall – a backroom conservative strategist who founded the alt-right Rebel Media website and ran Andrew Scheer’s Conservative leadership campaign – told conservative activists they need to focus on the “emotions” of individual voters if they ever hope to win again.
“We all think a lot about technology, but a lot of what we have to deal with, frankly, is human psychology,” Marshall explained during a panel on “Modern Campaigning.”
Moderator Jeromy Farkas, a Calgary city councillor, later asked Marshall to share his thoughts on “data-driven psychometrics in designing the message and the medium.”
“I’m a huge fan of it,” Marshall said. (more...)
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