This goes from a tangential attack on the “Cambridge Analytica” story to an attempt to undermine the social media explanation of Trump’s election. The “poor news reporting” issue is a red herring. Kavanaugh seems to believe that all reporters misrepresented the data CA used as internal Facebook data. As a reader of the reporting, I understood it wasn’t internal. Of course, other than stuff users delete, user data is user data. But that’s beside the point.

Kavanaugh’s real intent is to undermine the argument that this data, processed by CA, could have pushed Trump over the top. There his logic takes a detour. Clinton was not particularly popular (but no less than Mondale or Dukakis). Misogyny was a factor. Kavanaugh assumes that CA’s algos were just social science drivel, thus they couldn’t have made much of an impact.

Kavanaugh misses the key point. CA is linked to Russia. The data they purchased wasn’t just used for their algo, it was used by Russia. And if Kavanaugh thinks Russia doesn’t know how to pump propaganda into the heads of ignorant innocents, he’s unaware of 20th century history. Further, we know that fake news stories were preferentially spread by the type of people so targeted. In other words, it worked.