A World Without Wizards: On Facebook and Cambridge Analytica
If we want to confront these unreasonable times, we must stay clear-eyed about the state of the world and stop imagining omnicompetent villains behind the scenes.
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How the NYC Commission on Human Rights Uses Open Data Against Discriminatory Landlords
The New York City Commission on Human Rights has partnered with the city’s data analytics office for help using open data to go after bad landlords. One of the lesser-known protections of the New York City Human Rights Law prohibits housing providers from discriminating against potential tenants based on their...
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What the Left Can Learn from Trump’s Analytics Team
Yes, the Clinton campaign struggled with messaging; that doesn’t mean we should throw away everything we’ve learned about how data can make campaigns more effective.
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Will the Real Psychometric Targeters Please Stand Up?
A skeptic’s take on Trump’s purported big data juggernaut, Cambridge Analytica
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An Inclusive Vision for Democratic Technology
While we try to understand the lessons of 2016, it is time to deal with a key missing element in the conversation on the future of Democratic technology: the voices of people who are not straight, white men.
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Retrospective Wishcasting
Please don’t fool yourselves into believing that the secret to Trump’s success lay in some grand, secret data innovation.
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Preparing for the Campaign Tech Bullshit Season
Campaign tech bullshit is found at the intersection of two forces: (1) the incentive to freak your opponents out by sounding more sophisticated than you are, (2) the incentive to build a reputation for the next campaign cycle.
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What Civis Media Optimizer Is Not
Reminder: some of these new products represent a big change. But it often isn’t the change we were expecting or fearing.
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Parsing Upworthy’s Big Pivot
Equating Upworthy with clickbait has always obscured the real secret to their success: the company is among the web’s most deft practitioners of sophisticated analytics.
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Ethan Roeder on the Future of Political Analytics
"Journalists should be pushing campaigns to answer ethical questions about the work they're doing."