As I wrote earlier today, the story of Cambridge Analytica that the
press, public and elected officials seem to have fixated on is that of a
rogue company run amok with breached data that manipulated unwitting
Americans into electing the candidate of the company’s choice (the
company denies all of the allegations). A key thread of the narrative
over the last three days has centered on the alleged impact of the
company’s data analysis on the 2016 presidential election with the
undertone that if true, the company’s actions somehow represent
something new and unsettling in using data to advance a political
campaign. To add a bit of perspective to this debate, it is worth
looking back at two key ways in which the Obama campaign pioneered the
modern data-driven campaign that is at the center of the Cambridge
Analytica debate.
U.S. President Barack Obama and Mark Zuckerberg. (David Paul Morris/Bloomberg)
