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112 Ross Tapsell

is research exposes some of the work done by big data companies in
GE14—one of the rst scholarly eldwork-based analyses to do so in Malaysia,
or indeed globally. Big data companies have serious potential to undermine
democracy; my ndings here resonate with debates around big data companies’
potential to encourage ‘echo chambers’, target unwilling or unaware voters
through intrusive algorithms, and generally to promote disinformation
campaigns (Gromping 2014; Lim 2017). While arguments elsewhere around
big data remain relevant, this chapter focuses on the local context of Malaysian
politics and society.

What is a ‘Big Data’ Company?
At its core, a big data company collates and combines various forms of
information, analyses the information, and produces conclusions for its
client. Increasingly, social-media platforms are central to the way big data
companies gather data, because social media allow for more personalised
forms of information to be collated in order to ‘target’ clients the company
or party wants to reach. In short, big data companies’ argument is that the
more information an advertising company knows about you, the more likely
they are to sell you a product. is can occur by targeting the right product
to you, or by sending the right message about a particular product in order to
convince you to buy it. e term ‘big data’ has become popularised as more
and more information is collated online and on digital platforms, and is thus
synonymous with the information-technology revolution that began in the
late 1990s.
As more of us turn to social media for our daily news intake, political parties
and interest groups have attempted to in uence people via these platforms.
While ‘big data’ campaigning has been prevalent at least since Obama’s 2008
campaign (Vaccari 2010), it became prominent after making global headlines
in the wake of Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory in the US. One particular
company, Cambridge Analytica, claimed credit for ‘running’ Trump’s digital
campaign and for correctly predicting the outcome of the election. In early
2018, Cambridge Analytica employees were the subject of a British journalism
investigation, in which they claimed to have won campaigns for clients in
numerous countries around the world, including Malaysia (see e Guardian
2018).
e logic for big data in politics is similar to its logic in advertising: the
more information big data companies collect about voters from information
they put online, the better candidates’ messages can be tailored to appeal to

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