By B Kivai
Now now now….
There is talk and fear around town that Cambridge Analytica will help Jubilee win elections, come 8/8, because, apparently, the company helped the Brexit Leave vote and Trump’s rise to presidency.
Cambridge Analytica purports to use big data (it doesn’t) to sway undecided voters. It’s a traditional firm that uses fake news, hate mongering and ethnic profiling to create alternative truths. With regard to ‘big data’ and recently, ‘little data’, the firm does not offer any advantage to candidates.
Also, Cambridge Analytica has a string of failures (most memorably their failure to package Ted Cruz as a lethal presidential candidate). That also indicates that they did not help Trump’s election, because they were beaten by Trump’s traditional team in Republican primaries, as Analytica was working for Cruz.
Also, Hilary Clinton ran the most ‘big data’ based campaign in the history of America, targeting people to such accuracy as to know the person who should knock on the door of an undecided voter to convince them to vote for her. It is a strategy that was first employed by Abraham Lincoln in 1860 and 1861, as he used highly targeted political campaigns to beat the big men he ran against (as clearly captured in the biography, A Team of Rivals by Dorothy Kearns).
Cambridge Analytica has failed in Lativia, St Lucia and helped Umaru Yar’Adua run the worst campaign election in Nigeria. Actually, the firm has succeeded nowhere with its data models, because the Brexit vote and Trump win were largely multi-dimensional elections which even the company (Analytica) shies away from claiming credit.
It’s an abuse to data enthusiasts, big data profs and fans of competitive intelligence to hint that Uhuru will have a scientific campaign just because he has hired the UK firm. These are the kicks of a dying donkey, as the old days of PR and fake news are hitting dead ends.
What we should expect, is a very polarized campaign framed in the realms of ‘us’ and ‘them’. But the good boy Emmanuel Macron of El Mache fame has showed us that we can defeat stupidity.
On we go.
