by Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., Childrens Health Defense:
A voter analytics firm harvested data from millions of Americans’ cellphones during the 2020 COVID-19 lockdowns and used the data to assign phone users a “COVID-19 decree violation” score and a “COVID-19 concern” score, according to a whitepaper released by PredictWise, the firm that harvested the data.
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A voter analytics firm harvested data from millions of Americans’ cellphones during the 2020 COVID-19 lockdowns and used the data to assign phone users a “COVID-19 decree violation” score and a “COVID-19 concern” score, according to a whitepaper released by PredictWise, the firm that harvested the data.
The data, derived from “nearly 2 billion GPS pings” stemming from “ground truth, real-time, ultra-granular location patterns,” according to PredictWise, was then used to target election-related messages to voters during the 2020 election season.
According to PredictWise, the firm “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.”
The data was collected with political purposes in mind, PredictWise said:
“It doesn’t take a data scientist to know that COVID-19 was going to play a major role in the 2020 election.
“This once in a lifetime pandemic took control of the political debate, our airways, and ultimately our lives.”
Republican voters were specifically targeted based on the data that was collected:
“PredictWise targeted Republicans who scored high on our measure of COVID-19 decree violation (folks who were on the go more often than their neighbors) and Republicans who scored low on our measure of COVID-19 decree violation (folks who mostly or always stayed at home) in the swing state, Ohio, and asked survey questions.”
PredictWise also developed “COVID concern” scores:
“PredictWise found that Republican non-movers’ (compliers) concern around COVID-19 and persuadability was almost as high as Democrats overall and Republican non-movers over the age of 65 were more concerned about COVID-19 than Democrats.”
While PredictWise did not specify the precise period during which it harvested the data, ReclaimTheNet noted that state-level lockdowns began in the U.S. on March 15, 2020, while election day was on Nov. 4 of that year.
This is noteworthy because of the political purposes for which the data collected by PredictWise was utilized. According to the firm, this data was used in at least one U.S. Senate campaign:
“The result — the Arizona Dems Coordinated Campaign in support of now U.S. Senator Mark Kelly was able to deploy this real-time location model to open up just over 40,000 persuasion targets that normally would have fallen off, allowing them to give the right message to the right voter at the right time.”
The Arizona Democratic Party is just one of the entities listed on the “2020 PredictWise Client List” accompanying the whitepaper.
The national Democratic Party as well as state-level Democratic parties in Florida, North Dakota, Ohio and South Carolina, the Ohio Senate Democrats, and organizations such as Fair Fight Action, Future Majority, TargetSmart and the Voter Participation Center, were also on the list.
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