A new report by CBS News poured some cold water on the media firestorm sparked by The Guardian’s exposé on the Trump-connected Cambridge Analytica firm’s efforts to gather data on Facebook users. Though the Trump campaign did work with the firm, CBS reports, it quickly “phased out” its partnership with the group for the general election and did not use any of the “psychographic” data at the center of The Guardian’s report:
The Trump campaign never used the psychographic data at the heart of a whistleblower who once worked to help acquire the data’s reporting — principally because it was relatively new and of suspect quality and value. The profiling approach utilized by Cambridge Analytica allowed it to predict the voting likelihoods of individual people based on personality, the firm claimed.
The Trump campaign paid the firm $5.9 million for data collection services and used some of its data through the end of the primaries, but then phased it out, instead using the RNC’s data, which it determined to be “vastly more accurate,” for most of the general election campaigning. The campaign had only contracted with CA as “a hedge against the RNC, in case it wouldn’t share its data,” CBS reports.
The crucial decision was made in late September or early October when Mr. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Brad Parscale, Mr. Trump’s digital guru on the 2016 campaign, decided to utilize just the RNC data for the general election and used nothing from that point from Cambridge Analytica or any other data vendor. The Trump campaign had tested the RNC data, and it proved to be vastly more accurate than Cambridge Analytica’s, and when it was clear the RNC would be a willing partner, Mr. Trump’s campaign was able to rely solely on the RNC. – READ MORE
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