In a series of stories in recent months, ProPublica revealed the inner workings of the National Shooting Sports Foundation’s project, using a trove of gun industry documents and insider interviews.
We also showed how the NSSF teamed up with the controversial political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica to turbocharge its outreach to gun owners and others in the 2016 election.
- Some of the data, excerpted here, was basic information you might find on a census, like marital status or ethnic group.
- But the data also contained much more specific information about a person’s aesthetic preferences, purchasing habits and hobbies.
- Other data highlighted consumers’ personal opinions, histories and even vices.
- Next, analysts used an algorithm to profile and score each person’s behavioral traits based on the data and a psychological assessment tool called OCEAN that measures a human being’s openness to new and different experiences, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.
- From those scores, Cambridge organized people into five groups it called risk-takers, carers, go-getters, individualists and supporters. Members of each group received Facebook ads tailored to their group’s psychological profiles.
Ignoring the topic of firearms, this is an interesting glimpse in to the ability of digital marketing in today’s world. These kind of tactics are not limited to Facebook or to potential gun owners.
IMO no user should be targeted with this level of granularity. But sadly, I think it’s only going to get worse.
This was for the 2016 election and the beginning of what we’re seeing everywhere now. They were the first for trump’s first term to use detailed propaganda and it worked. It worked again because they got better at it this last time. Like I said, they legally cheated for 2024; gerrymandering, voter suppression, misinformation, online-targeted-harassment, etc.