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Find Out How The Obama and Romney Campaigns Are Using Your Data

This article is more than 10 years old.

In an attempt to get a look into targeting methods used by political campaigns this election season, investigative journalism non-profit ProPublica launched a new project yesterday seeking to collect campaign emails and draw conclusions from their variations. The project is called Message Machine and aims to eventually collect enough data to publish an interactive feature that ProPublica says “will show you exactly how the campaigns are using your personal information to deliver each message.”

Message Machine comes on the heels of an earlier project with the same name. The earlier version looked at just one email from the Obama campaign and found six different variations in a sample of under 200 recipients. The variations, according to ProPublica, included “some interesting demographic targeting”

The current project is far more robust than the original and will look at all campaign emails, even those coming from Super PACs. "We've never actually done anything like this before," ProPublica’s Jeff Larson said in an interview yesterday. "In terms of scope, I don't think we've ever done a project that impacts quite so many people." The hope is to find more interesting trends.

The concept of using large amounts of data to target voters is a fairly new one, but not something major campaigns have shied away from. The Obama campaign has a job posting on KDNuggets.com which does not beat around the bush. The ad tells prospective candidates that their team will examine terabytes of data to help “determine which voters to target for turnout and persuasion efforts, where to buy advertising and how to best approach digital media.”

To Larson, it’s important that the public be made aware of the methods campaigns are using to reach them. “That political campaigns are using the techniques of advertising to optimize their message is something that the public should certainly be aware of,” said Larson.

You can follow the project’s progress, or join it yourself, here.