On today's episode, we break down the story of how social media and big data became integral parts of elections in the United States and how candidates that successfully took advantage of these new tools were able to make strategic gains over their opponents in battleground states. The Obama campaign in 2012 set the standard for how candidates should focus on engaging with voters via social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Data analytics also played a major role in the 2012 Obama campaign's strategy for winning votes, using new databases and techniques to learn about voter preferences that could not be accessed by traditional means. In this episode, we learn that AI tools will likely be used to enhance these techniques, and the risks that are involved require effective government guardrails and regulations that need to be implemented ASAP.

News Article Links:

New York Times

The Hill

CNN

Fortune

SkyNews

Reuters

Research Papers:

Dalton-Hoffman (2012)

Hong and Nadler (2012)

Pew Research Center (2021)

Nickerson and Rogers (2014)

Zhang Yan et al (2018) (Research Article)