This event has been cancelled. David Stillwell is unable to attend the festival.
In the last couple of years interest has grown in communication techniques based on psychometric mechanisms, focusing not only on the socio-demographic characteristics of the recipients but also on their personality traits. Many observers have attributed to these techniques a non-marginal role of Donald Trump's 2016 electoral success; thousands of hyper-personalized messages on social media (in particular Facebook) were able to convince very few (but decisive) voters in key swing states, leading the Republicans to victory. Is this the future of political communication? We will discuss this with the co-author of the academic study on which the model that Cambridge Analytica adopted for the Trump campaign is based.