Have We Allowed Big Data To Become Too Powerful?
There has been a significant amount of hand-wringing over the use of big data for certain activities, from its monetization through to using it to direct specific messages at specific people. It has been blamed for the huge political polarization we see in Western society today and it has also been credited with some huge breakthroughs in terms of elections, but not always in a positive way.
We have seen several media outlets call it in to question, The Guardian ran an editorial called ‘The Guardian view on big data: the danger is less democracy’ and even Scientific American had a piece called ‘Will Democracy Survive Big Data and Artificial Intelligence?’. It is clear that big data is becoming more powerful, something we knew would happen, and will continue to happen, as more data is collected and the means in which it is analyzed becomes more powerful.
When discussing the use of targeted messaging The Guardian went as far as saying:
Scientific American perhaps went even further, saying:
Both essentially have the same message – big data is becoming too powerful.
It is difficult to argue with this, given what we have publicly seen in elections since 2008, that the use of data has had a profound impact on their results. Cambridge Analytica, a formerly unknown company for many outside of the big data sphere, has now become synonymous with the misuse of data for manipulation, both for the EU referendum in the UK and Donald Trump’s victory in the US. The company have been very vocal in their work too, with their CEO Alexander Nix telling Sky News that there are ‘close to 4 or 5 thousand data points on every individual’ showing the depth of knowledge that they have exploited in their work. We also saw Obama targeting specific voters through data, utilizing complex algorithms to create targeted messages for specific voters and donors to help his campaign to two relatively comfortable victories.
However, as The Guardian rightly points out, there is a big difference between campaigning now and even 8 years ago. Where all campaigning was previously conducted relatively publicly, now it is done behind closed doors thanks to data. One of the most controversial uses in the most recent election was the Trump campaign’s attempts to suppress black voters who were overwhelming anti-Trump.
