How political data firms continue to vacuum up psychological and personal data on people in order to sway voters, even after the Cambridge Analytica scandal
In April, when the Senate Judiciary and Commerce committees summoned Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to Washington … Tweets: @profcarroll Tweets: David Carroll / @profcarroll : Mind Games: @suehalpernVT on the next wave of voter analytics after Cambridge Analytica, and how in the absence of true data rights in the US, both Rs and Ds are doubling-down on manipulation and privacy invasion, eroding the dignity of democracy. http://newrepublic.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The arc here runs from Cambridge Analytica's personality-quiz profiling of Facebook users through the revelation that harvested data from 50M profiles fed psychographic voter models, to the April Senate Judiciary and Commerce hearings where Mark Zuckerberg was summoned to Washington. By October, Sue Halpern's reporting for The New Republic — amplified by David Carroll, whose @profcarroll account drove the story's circulation — finds the underlying machinery intact.
What changed is not the practice but its distribution: with no true data rights in the US, both Republican and Democratic analytics operations are doubling down on manipulation and privacy invasion rather than retreating after the scandal.
First-order effects
- Voters remain the direct subjects: political data firms on both sides continue collecting psychological and personal data to sway them, undeterred by the scandal or the Zuckerberg hearings.
- Facebook stays exposed on the legal front — former FTC officials had already flagged that the harvesting may have violated its 2011 privacy consent decree, keeping enforcement pressure live while Congress probes.
Second-order effects
- Campaign analytics decouple from Facebook itself: as Cambridge Analytica argued, models built from 2014-era data no longer require fresh Facebook data, so platform crackdowns don't stop the profiling — it migrates to consumer-data sources instead.
- The bipartisan nature of the practice blunts partisan accountability: neither party has an incentive to push restrictions that would disarm its own targeting operation, shifting the burden to regulators and litigants like Carroll.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the US converges toward a formal data-rights framework — the 'true data rights' Carroll invokes — because self-restraint by campaigns and platforms has demonstrably failed after a scandal of this scale.
- The deeper structural risk Halpern names is civic: normalized psychographic targeting erodes the dignity of democracy itself, making voter manipulation an accepted cost of competitive elections rather than a scandal-triggering exception.
The trend: Voter analytics is consolidating into a permanent, bipartisan infrastructure of psychological profiling that persists past scandals until legal data rights, not voluntary restraint, redraw its boundaries.