Mass voter profiling was framed as a modern form of military psychological operations

Evidence

A key character in our story is whistleblower Christopher Wylie, an eccentric late-twenties Canadian data consultant and ex-Cambridge Analytica employee, who ended up creating what he called ‘Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare mindfuck tool’. In his book Mindf*ck, Wylie says that he came up with the plan to harvest data on millions of Facebook users and to leverage their online data to build psychological profiles that could then be used to target people with political ads that matched those profiles. Wylie refers to this as a modern adaptation of military ‘Psyops’ (psychological operations). — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof, 500

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s knowledge base on influence operations, propaganda, and Cambridge Analytica coverage. — connects to: Medico-statistical language adopted from armies enabled political control of crowds — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 326; Digital footprints removed the survey barrier to identifying persuadable voters — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects…, 573; Politics inherited the military model as a means of preventing civil disorder — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 252

Broader Connections

• Politics inherited the military model as a means of preventing civil disorder #corroborates (0.85) — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 252
• Medico-statistical language adopted from armies enabled political control of crowds #corroborates (0.82) — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 326
• Digital footprints removed the survey barrier to identifying persuadable voters #corroborates (0.78) — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof, 573