Can you steal an election with targeted ads? You don’t need to! – Another angry woman:

Segmentation is a great buzzword for sorting people into categories, and its importance is wildly overstated in order to sell tools for audience analysis. Nevertheless, it is helpful, when stealing an election, to segment your audience into three groups. You don’t even need to do much analysis on these groups: two out of the three will reveal themselves pretty quickly.

The three segments required for stealing an election are: people who are voting for your guy anyway; people who will never in a million years vote for your guy; and people who are on the fence.

You don’t need to microtarget these audiences in any way; in fact, you need to target all of them. You need a message which resonates with the people who will vote for your guy; make the people who will never in a million years vote for your guy object to the point of insufferability; and that the thing which is most noticed by swing voters is the insufferability of the second category.

Big social media platforms are terrible for lots of reasons, but “micro targeting” scams like the one Cambridge Analytica was running are a red herring.

This kind of stuff is the “Diebold machines were rigged for Bush!” of the current era… a handy conspiracy theory that can be blamed for Democrats' failure to do the long, hard work of organizing.