The Trump 2020 app is a voter surveillance tool of extraordinary power
Both presidential campaigns use apps to capture data, but Trump’s asks to scoop up your identity, your location, and control of your phone’s Bluetooth function.
by Jacob Gursky, Samuel Woolley archive page
June 21, 2020
Ahead of President Trump’s rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, his 2020 re-election campaign manager Brad Parscale tweeted about the event. “Just passed 800,000 tickets,” he wrote. “Biggest data haul and rally signup of all time by 10x. Saturday is going to be amazing!”
Parscale’s numbers for the rally—originally scheduled for Juneteenth and still set to occur just miles from the site of one of American history’s deadliest acts of racial violence—have come in for criticism after only 6,200 people actually turned up, with sign-up numbers supposedly inflated by pranking teens and K-pop fans. But even on the surface, his claim was confusing: the venue holds only 19,000 people. So what was the campaign doing signing up so many people for tickets?
The clue lies in Parscale’s use of the phrase “data haul.”
Data collection and targeted online messaging were integral to the 2016 US presidential election, and they will be again in 2020. But there has been a shift. In the same way that candidates in the last cycle used Facebook to reach and persuade voters, ongoing research from our team at the propaganda research lab at UT Austin’s Center for Media Engagement suggests that 2020 will be defined by the use of bespoke campaign apps. Purpose-built applications distributed through the App Store and Google Play Store allow the Trump and Biden teams to speak directly to likely voters.
They also allow them to collect massive amounts of user data without needing to rely on major social-media platforms or expose themselves to fact-checker oversight of particularly divisive or deceptive messaging.
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