The 2008 Obama campaign profiled over 250 million Americans with behavioral data

Evidence

Research by media scholars Daniel Kreiss and Philip Howard indicates that the 2008 Obama campaign compiled significant data on more than 250 million Americans, including “a vast array of online behavioral and relational data collected from use of the campaign’s web site and third-party social media sites such as Facebook.…” Journalist Sasha Issenberg, who documented these developments in his book The Victory Lab, quotes one of Obama’s 2008 political consultants who likened predictive modeling to the tools of a fortune-teller: “We knew who… people were going to vote for before they decided.” — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 392

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how far did 2008-era relational data from Facebook go, and how do its methods directly prefigure Cambridge Analytica’s later work?
• CANDY: The ‘we knew who people were going to vote for before they decided’ consultant quote is a perfect dinner-party fact.
• XREF: connects to: The 2012 Obama campaign applied behavioral surplus prediction directly to voter targeting — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 395

Broader Connections

• The 2012 Obama campaign applied behavioral surplus prediction directly to voter targeting #expands (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 395