From <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;us-news&#x2F;2015&#x2F;dec&#x2F;11&#x2F;senator-ted-cruz-president-campaign-facebook-user-data" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;us-news&#x2F;2015&#x2F;dec&#x2F;11&#x2F;senator-ted-c...</a><p><i>&quot;... used Amazon’s crowdsourcing marketplace Mechanical Turk (MTurk) to access a large pool of Facebook profiles, hoovering up tens of thousands of individuals’ demographic data – names, locations, birthdays, genders – as well as their Facebook “likes”, which offer a range of personal insights ... For every individual recruited on MTurk, he harvested information about their friends , meaning the dataset ballooned significantly in size ... users had an average of around 340 friends ... the Facebook data was then used to generate sophisticated models of each of their personalities using the so-called “big five” personality traits and characteristics – openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism.&quot;</i><p>From <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;politics&#x2F;features&#x2F;2015-11-12&#x2F;is-the-republican-party-s-killer-data-app-for-real-" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;politics&#x2F;features&#x2F;2015-11-12&#x2F;is-the...</a><p><i>&quot;... “This is really trying to use psychology to understand why hostile audiences do what they do, and to use this methodology to deconstruct that behavior and then use communication to try and change attitudes and ultimately behavior,” Nix says. “Persuading somebody to vote in a certain way,” he goes on, “is really very similar to persuading 14- to 25-year-old boys in Indonesia to not join Al Qaeda.”</i>