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Cathy O’Neil
Barack Obama is an American politician who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009–2017. Barack Obama’s political legacy, O’Neil shows, is deeply entwined with the era of Big Data. For instance, his campaign team used analytics experts to create micro-targeting campaigns in the run-up to his 2012 reelection. And, in his second term, Obama passed legislation aimed at creating a new system of college rankings. In these ways, his presidency overlapped with the rise of computer algorithms dictating how people navigate the world.
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Barack Obama Character Timeline in Weapons of Math Destruction
The timeline below shows where the character Barack Obama appears in Weapons of Math Destruction. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 3: Arms Race
During President Barack Obama’s second term, he suggested a new college rankings model that was tied to affordability, diversity,...
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Chapter 7: Sweating Bullets
...colleagues were getting were meaningless—but the “bogus WMD” creating them was still gaining traction. The Obama administration sought to reform legislation that judged school districts based on test scores alone, creating...
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Chapter 10: The Targeted Citizen
...of citizens for votes and donations through carefully honed messages. In July of 2011, the Obama campaign started hiring analytics experts who would help create and target groups of like-minded voters....
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Four years later, Hillary Clinton’s campaign would build on the Obama research team’s methodology to create a data system that would let them manage millions of...
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...dangerous—certain political groups can create targeted advertisements full of false information that spread rapidly. The anti-Obama “birther” campaign got off the ground this way, as has a lot of misinformation about...
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