How Cambridge Analytica profiled voters and what it means for India

Voter psychological profiles were built to determine political enthusiasm, political orientation, frequency in voting and consistency in voting for the same political party

Technology news: A recent Federal Trade Commission (FTC) order holding US based Cambridge Analytica guilty of “deceptive practices to harvest personal information from tens of millions of Facebook users for voter profiling and targeting” has shed new light on the business of psychological profiling aimed at predicting voter behaviour. The Commission’s order spells in great detail the technicalities, business and potential impact of voter profiling on election results.

How did the Cambridge Analytica model work?

The now bankrupt firm’s chief Alexander Nix primarily relied on new research that was done in University of Cambridge that used Facebook profile information to predict an individual’s personality according to the OCEAN scale. The OCEAN scale also known as the five big personality traits measures an individual’s personality on five counts – openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Researchers had developed an algorithm that used an individual’s Facebook likes to predict their personality traits – the more the likes a…read more