To me, the takeaway from the Cambridge Analytica episode is not that Cambridge Analytica had some special sauce of psychographic manipulation; it's that they were basically using the same tools of microtargeting that Facebook makes available to everybody. They overstated that dramatically in their marketing materials, but I think microtargeting to find audiences that are responsive to particular messages is effective. Facebook makes $40 billion a year in revenue for a reason. I don't think you have to imagine a splashy new way of doing that called Cambridge Analytica to make that meaningful. I think data-driven targeting is the name of the game in advertising today, and we ought to be regulating at the root, rather than in fancy branches.
On September 25th, 2018. See this statement in context.