In case you missed it …
U.K. worshippers were left “in tears” after a Cambridge dean and research student claimed Jesus may have been transgender.
New (and old) Disney CEO Bob Iger promised to double down on LGBTQ “storytelling” during a town hall with employees. As a reminder, the latest Disney movie, which featured a gay main character, was a big flop.
Elon Musk scorched the media for being ‘against free speech’ after a reporter all but asked the White House to monitor Twitter. Biden press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre assured the Reuters reporter they were keeping an eye on Twitter.
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They recently discovered a “white paper” from voter analytics firm PredictWise that shows the company used Covid-related data to target political ads to help Dems win votes.
What They Did
PredictWise got access to the location data of tens of millions of U.S. cell phones. They wanted to know who was moving around a lot in relation to others during lockdown. They then assigned “Covid-19 decree violation” scores. If you were someone who was “on the go more often than their neighbors,” you got a high violation score. If you stayed home, your score was low.
The firm followed up with surveys that also impacted each person’s “Covid concern” score. They used this information to help Democrats in several swing states to target “Covid concerned” Republicans with special messaging to get them to vote blue. They bragged about Sen. Mark Kelly’s race as one they were able to target and assist.
PredictWise understood that there were potential pockets of voters to target with Covid-19 messaging and turned high-dimensional data covering over 100 million Americans into measures of adherence to Covid-19 restrictions during deep lockdown.
PredictWise brags that its data “tracks the opinions, attitudes, and behaviors” of over 260 million Americans, or – 78% of the entire US population of 333 million.
Was It Wrong?
The collection of this data isn’t illegal. In fact, I’m not sure it’s much different than the data collection that happens when many of us click on a website, order something from Amazon, or watch something on a streaming service (yeah, all that information can be tracked and sold).
It’s not against the law. And it’s not unusual for both political parties to pay for information on voters and work to persuade those voters using that information.
But seeing it used in such a specific, targeted way here sure is creepy.
— Ken