The results of the 2016 election surprised everybody. But there was one group of people who should not have been surprised: the leadership and data scientists of Facebook, Amazon and Google.
The whole premise of Facebook, Amazon and Google is that everyone uses their products, and so they have access to everyone’s data. They know whom you’re talking to, what you’re saying, how that person reacts to your face and what they then proceed to do. They also have the best data scientists and machine learning experts money can buy. Thus, the idea goes, they can...
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These place are tone deaf echo chambers full of women and diversity hires.
No better than all the polls that said Hillary was 98% ahead, or whatever.
Very interesting—and I would buy numbers 3,4, and 5. But I think there's something else there that is outside Mr. Kogan's frame of reference. First, I would bet that there are still a lot of people who don't eat, breathe, and sleep social media. They have limited, if any, exposure to that intel-gathering vacuum trap. I would speculate that this demographic would be largely over-50 and blue-collar—in other words, Deplorables, aka Trump voters.
Second, I would guess that Mr. Kogan, being an intellectual, has fallen into the trap of believing that everyone else is as rational as he. Many, many people do not go through the scientific method of selecting and discussing a candidate that he describes. For such folk, voting is a spur-of-the-moment choice, often based on a host of subjective criteria such as height, hair style, and "would I like to have a beer with this guy?". With Hillary being perhaps the most unlikeable biped on the planet, I can readily believe that her cackle, her facial expressions, and other factors triggered people's instinctive aversion and made their decision for them.
Finally, I think that many Deplorables, particularly in purple states, kept their preference for Trump under wraps to avoid complications at school and in the workplace. These voters would have been "undercover" and thus would not have shown up on any Faceberg data mining analysis.
But what the hell do I know? I don't write for medium.com.