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voters’ needs and desires. Cambridge Analytica, for example, with the help
of academic researchers, developed a way to pro le social-media users using
OCEAN, a system for classifying personality type by measuring for openness,
conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism (Grassegger,
Hannes, and Krogerus 2017). e researchers claimed that on the basis of an
average of 68 Facebook ‘likes’, it was possible to predict a user’s skin colour
(with 95 per cent accuracy), sexual orientation (88 per cent accuracy), and
a liation to the Democratic or Republican party (85 per cent) (Grassegger and
Krogerus 2017). Cambridge Analytica became engrossed in an international
scandal because of the way they gathered Facebook data and because of the
responses their employees gave in a UK Channel 4 television undercover
investigation: they claimed to use nefarious tactics to win elections. But the
broader tactics of big data companies’ gathering online data for political parties
better to understand voters are now widespread.
Can big data companies decide elections? To date, no academic research
has provided a comprehensive answer. Big data campaigning is so new that
researchers are still grappling with scienti c methods to understand its impact
(Belfry Munroe 2018). Given that this is the rst academic analysis on big data
campaigning in Malaysia, for this chapter I am more interested in whether
political parties and groups thought big data companies were pointless, useful,
or crucial (which gives us an indication of whether they will use them again) and
to identify the professional practices of big data companies and campaigners in
Malaysia. Further research could examine whether big data companies actually
had an impact upon GE14’s outcome.

Malaysian Opposition Parties and Big Data Campaigning

is section focuses on how opposition parties utilised big data campaigning
in GE14. I argue that opposition politicians see big data companies as
facilitating ‘innovative’ and ‘cutting edge’ campaigning that can win elections.
In this regard, it is important to understand the context in which Malaysian
opposition parties arrived at big data companies. ese parties see big data
campaigning as an extension of other ‘liberation technologies’ (Diamond 2010)
used to undermine an electoral-authoritarian regime. Opposition coalition
Pakatan Harapan was far more concerned with the question of whether big
data companies could assist them in an unlikely election victory in an unfair
campaign environment than with the ethical questions that employing a big
data company might raise.

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