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.
