According to a report in The Guardian, Cambridge Analytica, the data analytics firm that worked on Donald Trump’s election team and the winning Brexit campaign, harvested millions of Facebook profiles, in a major data breach, and used them to build a powerful software program to predict and influence choices at the ballot box.
This company was used by Nitish Kumar and Sushil Modi during the 2010 Bihar assembly elections which were swept by the BJP-JDU combine.
As per a successful case study mentioned on the company’s website, “CA (Cambridge Analytica) was contracted to undertake an in-depth electorate analysis for the Bihar Assembly Election in 2010. The core challenge was to identify the floating/swing voters for each of the parties and to measure their levels electoral apathy, a result of the poor and unchanging condition of the state after 15 years of incumbent rule.”
It then goes on to add that “In addition to the research phase, CA were tasked to organise the party base at the village level by creating a communication hierarchy to increase supporter motivation. Our client achieved a landslide victory, with over 90% of total seats targeted by CA being won”.
In the 243 seat Bihar assembly, JDU had won 115 seats while its ally BJP had won 91 seats in the 2010 polls. The opposition party RJD, led by Laloo Yadav, won a meagre 22 seats while its ally, Congress party had won only 4 seats. Although JDU and RJD combined together in 2015 to win the Bihar assembly polls, JDU’s Nitish Kumar switched sides last year to go with Narendra Modi’s BJP.
Cambridge Analytica, a company created by Robert Mercer, a billionaire patron of right-wing outlets like Breitbart News in the US, has been swallowing up all the data they can get. It has collected data from Facebook – illegally as we now know — and Twitter and has purchased a lot of other data — about television preferences, travel, shopping, public events attended, movies watched, books bought and so on — from third-party organisations and so-called data brokers.
It then combines this social psychology with data analytics, and uses it for something the company calls “behavioral microtargeting” — basically individualized advertising targeting every single voter by using psychometrics. Rather than assuming all people in the same age group or of the same gender will respond to the same message, they target individual voters with emotionally charged content — in other words, advertisements and messages designed to tug on emotional biases.
The strategy has clearly been a success globally but few know that the company was employed by the BJP and JDU in Bihar in 2010 itself. It is not clear if the company has since been employed on any other election campaigns in India, or is currently contracted to any political party for electoral work.