Analysts believed that information technology and data science have played prominent roles in the 2016 U.S. presidential race.
They said on Tuesday in Los Angeles that the presidential candidates spent millions of dollars on data analysts in order to target specific voters while social bots attempt to manipulate discussions on social media.
They added that hackers also caused further turmoil by leaking emails.
“With our lives becoming more digitised, data analysts had become an increasingly important tool in U.S. political campaigns to reach out to voters.
A report on Statistics Views noted that the Democratic Party has embraced data science early on.
It said since the 2008 presidential election, the Democratic National Committee began gathering data sets of voters, which included information about “which magazines they subscribe to, whether they like to vote early, and how likely they are to open certain emails.
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It said further that during this election, the Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton hired about 60 analysts under the guidance of the statistician Elan Kriegel, Clinton’s director of analysts.
“Kriegel was also Barack Obama’s battleground states analytics director in 2012.
The report said data analysis tools help campaigns identify how to most effectively allocate their resources and be smart about how and when to target their voters.
It said during the democratic primaries, Kriegel’s analyst team was “responsible for deciding where and when to place each of the 60 million dollars that Clinton invested on TV ads,” wrote the new report, by optimising the “cost per flappable delegate.
The report attributed Clinton’s success over Bernie Sanders to the efficient use of data analysis.
It said that by contrast, Donald Trump’s republican campaign was less open about its data operations than its rival.
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It said back in May, Trump told the media that he felt data analyst was “overrated,” and that he planned to win the election solely by his own personality.
It said that Trump did not invest in data analysis during the primaries but, did start spending millions of dollars in the summer at the insistence of his close advisors.
“Not only did the campaigns analyse massive amount of voter data, they also actively influenced people’s opinions by manipulating social media.
Emilio Ferrara, a Research Assistant Professor at the Information Science Institute of the University of Southern California, said that many recent papers have demonstrated how people’s opinions are swayed by what they read online, and bots can contribute to that effect.
A recent study by Ferrara and his colleague Alessandro Bessi found that nearly one-fifth of all 20 million election-related tweets they collected between mid-September and late October were from “social bots.
Bots is an automated computer programme that are designed to pose as real people, sometimes without disclosing their true artificial identity.
The computer scientists found that Twitter accounts identified as pro-Trump bots have mainly been tweeting positive messages, increasing the republican nominee’s popularity, while only half of pro-Clinton bots were spreading positive messages, with the other half criticising the democratic nominee.
Another set of analysts noted that hackers added, even more turmoil into this year’s already unusual election.
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They said a large number of emails from John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair, were released in batches on the WikiLeaks website, revealing embarrassing private discussions within the Clinton campaign.
They noted that analysing some of the leaked emails, some speculate that Podesta fell into the trap of a “phishing email” back in March, which posed as Google’s account services department and directed him to a fake website to give his email password.
They recalled that in October, the Obama administration officially accused Russia of attempting to interfere with the elections, by hacking the computers of political organisations including the Democratic National Committee.
“The Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security in a joint statement that U.S. Intelligence Community is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from U.S. persons and institutions, including from U.S. political organisations.
The accusation was dismissed by the Kremlin.
Julian Assange, Editor-in-Chief of WikiLeaks, also denied that the Russian government or any other “state parties” could have been the source of the Podesta emails.
Last summer, in an interview with Bloomberg, Kim Dotcom, the New Zealand-based founder of MegaUpload, said that Julian Assange would be Hillary Clinton’s “worst nightmare” in 2016.
“I know where Hillary Clinton’s deleted emails are and how to get them legally,” the German millionaire tweeted on Oct. 27, adding they “are all stored in the NSA (National Security Agency) spy cloud in Utah.”
