Digital campaign consultants can support online communications such as Brad Parscale who developed Donald Trump's social media campaigns in 2016 and 2020. Data brokers can provide political parties with voter data, such as Experian, a company that sold data to political parties in the UK and Brazil. The companies can be involved in more nefarious methods such as uRepresentation who created inauthentic Facebook pages to support political campaigns in various African countries.
We wanted to research a much larger industry. We started our research by examining a few news articles that profiled data brokers and data analytics companies. From there, we began a series of in-depth investigations into the context of these companies – the work they do, their outreach and how they fit into a landscape of other organisations and actors. We reviewed the websites and promotional materials they produced, we conducted open-ended interviews with some of their staff members, and we attended industry events. Our findings helped us map a digital campaigning industry whose breadth and depth far surpassed our expectations.
We discovered that the lack of consistent and regular reporting belied a richer and more complex web of organisations, which was easily found as soon as we started looking. From each entity, several threads would lead to others. For example, as shown below, the software platform NationBuilder’s website lists 16 other data companies they work with who either provide them with data, analytics or identity resolution practices. Within only a few weeks, we had a list of 60 agencies, companies or organisations who either sold data or relied on it for data-driven campaigning techniques, which they offered to political campaigns. At this point it was clear that within the larger data industry, there existed a distinct political data industry.
Our overview of organisations working with political data can also help map where their work fits within a broader industry, to understand which parts of their work were relatively normalised in modern political campaigning and which parts of their work were highly unusual and not representative of the broader personal data and political campaigning industry.
