Why do we keep getting these breathless articles about how secret geniuses used social media to "hack" elections? Do we really need a mass conspiracy to explain why large chunks of the population find populist/nationalistic leaders appealing? Motivating voters with this kind of rhetoric predates the internet, in fact it predates the United States.<p>As mentioned in the comments on the other hacker news post about facebook profiles being scraped by Cambridge Analytica:<p>1. Obama's 2008 election absolutely bragged about their use of social media to win. I vividly remember multiple long articles in the NYTimes talking about how they exploited new tech to reach voters.<p>2. During the 2016 election Clinton raised and spent nearly double trump. On top of that most of the money Trump got was towards the end of the election whereas Clinton had huge coffers from day one.<p>3. I read the guardian article linked and this is one of the few parts that seem to mention what exactly this "hacker" strategy was at Cambridge Analytica<p>>“And then I came across a paper about how personality traits could be a precursor to political behaviour, and it suddenly made sense. Liberalism is correlated with high openness and low conscientiousness, and when you think of Lib Dems they’re absent-minded professors and hippies. They’re the early adopters… they’re highly open to new ideas. And it just clicked all of a sudden.”<p>This is the insight that that apparently is being called a "psychological warfare tool?" You're telling me that Clinton's campaign didn't have sociologists and psychologists who were absolutely obsessed with exactly the same advertising criteria? This kind of psychological profiling is the kind of stuff you learn about in 101 classes at university. For the past 80 years (that I as a lay person know of, probably longer) people have spent their entire careers analyzing and applying propaganda and marketing to political campaigns. Why should anyone believe based on what's being presented in this article that not only was none of this stuff done before but that it somehow handed Trump one of the greatest election upsets in American history? The mental gymnastics people are going through to deny the fact that yes, many voters have conservative values, is getting out of hand.