Did Cambridge Analytica really perform ‘a great hack’? A talk with Dave Karpf - People Who Read People: A Psychology Podcast

On this episode of the People Who Read People podcast, I talk with Dave Karpf, (twitter: @davekarpf), a political scientist and associate Professor of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University.

There’s a good chance you’ve heard about how Cambridge Analytica used access to the Facebook data of millions of U.S. citizens and advanced digital advertising wizardry to essentially “hack” Americans’ minds and deliver a surprise presidential victory to Donald Trump. This depiction of Cambridge Analytica as nefarious data geniuses has been portrayed in many news stories, and probably most prominently in the popular documentary The Great Hack (Netflix link).

But what if this perception is largely untrue? What if Cambridge Analytica was exaggerating their behavior-influencing abilities, as many companies do? And what if our perceptions of CA as geniuses of digital influence is based on people accepting their exaggerated claims uncritically?

That is the stance of political scientist Dr. Dave Karpf, and in this episode he explains why. Links to this episode:

Topics discussed include:

What the documentary ‘The Great Hack’ got wrong
Why public perception of the power of highly focused “micro-targeting” of digital advertising is largely overblown
Why political ads don’t have much effect on election results
The cost of being distracted by the wrong problems
The myth of the “attentive public” and how many of our political problems stem from politicians coming to realize that not many people are actually paying attention
Newt Gingrich’s role in “Trump”-style politics
The role of social media and the internet in politics
An incident where Dr. Karpf compared NY Times columnist Bret Stephens to a bedbug on Twitter, and how Stephens over-reacted and was mocked by both liberals and conservatives and eventually deleted his Twitter account