A data harvesting company boasted of helping Democrat candidates gain a decisive advantage in winning their 2020 elections by providing custom-tailored advertising through targeting swing voters based on their user profiles, GPS, and other data.
The data harvester PredictWise has “built a unique solution that allows for novel ways of looking at voters. Customers will be able to make decisions in innovative ways and be more effective in their political and issue outreach,” Tom Bonier, CEO of TargetSmart, a PredictWise client, said in the PredictWise White Paper.
In its 2020 PredictWise client inventory, almost only Democratic organizations and affiliations are listed.
In the paper, PredictWise claims that Democrats were able to “deploy this real-time location model to open up just over 40,000 persuasion targets that normally would have fallen off.”
In this case, it said, those voters were successfully saved for now-Senator Mark Kelly, who campaigned in Arizona at the time.
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“Last election cycle, congressional, senate, and presidential committees used PredictWise through the DNC,” the document bragged. “Super PACs pushed same-day registration in key swing states of Wisconsin and Michigan and produced the only statewide red-to-blue flip in a Trump-won state in Ohio (Brunner, Ohio Supreme Court).”
Rating citizens’ COVID compliancy
From the White Paper, we also learn that the company has been in operation for only five years. It made its greatest push forward in 2020 when it collected, analyzed, and combined location and other data from several million U.S. cellphone users during the beginning months of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) lockdown.
The text also proudly stated the company had rated individuals’ for their willingness to comply with government edicts or, worse still, assigned a “COVID-19 decree violation score,” which can in no other way be interpreted than as a social compliance or social credit score, for which they especially targeted Republican voters.
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PredictWise further stated, “PredictWise understood that there were potential pockets of voters to target with Covid-19 messaging and turned high-dimensional data covering over 100 million Americans into measures of adherence to Covid-19 restrictions during deep lockdown,” it said.
The Covid-19 decree violation scores were collected using nearly two billion global positioning system (GPS) pings resulting in what the company called “real-time, ultra-granular locations patterns.”
It went on to state that users who were “on the go more often than their neighbors” during the lockdown were rated a high Covid-19 decree violation score while those who complied and stayed at home were assigned a low social credit score.
Netizens’ outrage
Many internet users responded with biting sarcasm after the news broke that some 100 million fellow citizens were monitored for COVID compliance and targeted by media agencies to influence their electoral behavior. Some went as far as calling it a “PsyOp.”
“The [Covid] response PsyOp was a trial-run,” Todd Herman, CEO of start-up HydroFlask, stated on Twitter. “The WEF and its cohorts are studying the data and creating psych-profiles of dissenters. When they launch their next assault, they will have evolved.”
“I agree. They did dry runs, then a trial run, now they’ve begun to examine the data, and next time they’ll be prepared. Those farmers and truckers will be met with bearcats and major blockades; that’s assuming people aren’t arrested right off the bat,” replied another user.
