Analytics and the Russians

Hard on the heals of the revelation that the Trump campaign used an analytics company to target ads on Facebook, Hillary Clinton suggested that the Trump campaign shared that information with the Russians.

The real question is how did the Russians know how to target their messages so precisely to undecided voters in Wisconsin or Michigan or Pennsylvania – that is really the nub of the question. 

"So if they were getting advice from say Cambridge Analytica, or someone else, about 'OK here are the 12 voters in this town in Wisconsin – that's whose Facebook pages you need to be on to send these messages' that indeed would be very disturbing.

Let's ignore the findings of the Congressional investigation that showed that the Russian ad buys that were geographically targeted were mainly bought in 2015, well before the general election. That still leaves some big questions:

1) How is it that the Russians can spend a couple million and swing the election? Between them, the two campaigns spent over two billion dollars. How could the Russian ads possibly be so much more effective than the ones the campaigns were saturating the airwaves with?

2) The Obama campaign was a pioneer in the use of social media analytics and the Trump campaign made good use of it. Are we seriously supposed to believe that the Clinton campaign didn't use these tools, too? Come on! Hillary is asking us to believe that her campaign passed on using a major new tool.

Hillary needs to accept that she lost the election after running a bad campaign. And the press needs to stop feeding her fantasies.