But he didn’t just explain it. He took some steps to do something about it.
In researching this story, we realized that there is any number of perfectly legal bits of f—kery that we could engage in. We could, for example, use data brokers to go phishing for members of congress, by creating a demographic group consisting of men, age 45 and up, in a 5-mile radius of the U.S. Capitol, who had previously visited sites regarding or searched for terms including divorce, massage, hair loss and mid-life crisis.
The result is a collection of real data from their experiment that Oliver threatens to reveal if Congress doesn’t act. The ads they ran were Marriage shouldn’t be a prison, Can you vote twice?, and Ted Cruz erotic fan fiction. I’m not sure it will actually light a fire under so moribund an institution as Congress, but it’s worth a shot!