Much attention has been focused on how the British firm Cambridge Analytica used various forms of dirty tricks to try and influence elections in various countries. The level of success achieved by them is hard to gauge since, unlike with advertisements aimed at selling products where there is a measurable outcome, electoral success is harder to gauge since we don’t know how individuals actually voted and also so many factors go into how people vote that drawing a straight line from cause to effect is hard. Pointing to the fact that winners in some close elections, like Donald Trump in the US and Uhuru Kenyatta in Kenya, were clients of CA as evidence of their effectiveness is interesting but we don’t know how many of their other clients lost.
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