Cambridge Analytica explored the potential of psychographics: the idea that your social media preferences and language predict your personality. Consider if you were running a campaign to support the right to bear arms. If the campaign manager knew someone was an anxious person, then they could target them with messages which argued they needed guns to keep them safe. This is the potential nightmare of the new media: the idea that our data might know more about us than we do, and that this is then being used to influence us without our knowledge.
