Cambridge Analytica Files ‘I created Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare tool’ | Hacker News Reader

Cambridge Analytica Files ‘I created Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare tool’

theguardian.com

Active discussion on different Guardian article about same topic:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16606924

What's fascinating to me about The Cambridge Analytica Files is the reaction from within Facebook. They seem to be panicking. I've never noticed Facebook reacting so defensively before, regardless of what they were accused of.

The writer even claims that Facebook threatened to sue the Guardian before publication: https://twitter.com/carolecadwalla/status/974995682124804099

Really makes me wonder if there were any other big stories that got redacted pre-publication because Facebook threatened to sue the publisher.

Maybe Mr. Mueller should open the investigation on Facebook role in the 2016 elections instead of looking into Russian trolls actions.

It seems worthwhile to keep the investigation into Russian activity open, since it has turned up a lot of interesting things already. There are many other capable prosecutors besides mr Mueller who could look into the role of Facebook during the elections. The justice system is concurrent; it can investigate more than one thing at a time :)

One does not necessarily exclude the other. Heck, you have Lukoil mentioned in this article, with Wylie claiming that they were briefed on what Cambridge Analytica was doing.

My opinion about the elections: Each piece had to fit perfectly for Trump become president, and unfortunately (for the entire world), each piece did fit perfectly.

Knowing that he won while losing the popular vote, taking away a single piece would result in him not being a president today. Cambridge Analytica definitely seems like a piece that could have made all the difference, but Russia could have also been such a crucial piece.

And, if we do go under the assumption that both CA and Russia could have made all the difference, one is a private company operated in a country that's one of the closest allies to the US, while the other piece is a country that's basically the enemy of the US for the past 50 years.

Taking all of that into consideration, I would still prioritize investigating Russia over CA if I were Mueller.

s/instead of/as well as/

Why not both.

Why do we keep getting these breathless articles about how secret geniuses used social media to "hack" elections? Do we really need a mass conspiracy to explain why large chunks of the population find populist/nationalistic leaders appealing? Motivating voters with this kind of rhetoric predates the internet, in fact it predates the United States.

As mentioned in the comments on the other hacker news post about facebook profiles being scraped by Cambridge Analytica:

1. Obama's 2008 election absolutely bragged about their use of social media to win. I vividly remember multiple long articles in the NYTimes talking about how they exploited new tech to reach voters.

2. During the 2016 election Clinton raised and spent nearly double trump. On top of that most of the money Trump got was towards the end of the election whereas Clinton had huge coffers from day one.

3. I read the guardian article linked and this is one of the few parts that seem to mention what exactly this "hacker" strategy was at Cambridge Analytica

>“And then I came across a paper about how personality traits could be a precursor to political behaviour, and it suddenly made sense. Liberalism is correlated with high openness and low conscientiousness, and when you think of Lib Dems they’re absent-minded professors and hippies. They’re the early adopters… they’re highly open to new ideas. And it just clicked all of a sudden.”

This is the insight that that apparently is being called a "psychological warfare tool?" You're telling me that Clinton's campaign didn't have sociologists and psychologists who were absolutely obsessed with exactly the same advertising criteria? This kind of psychological profiling is the kind of stuff you learn about in 101 classes at university. For the past 80 years (that I as a lay person know of, probably longer) people have spent their entire careers analyzing and applying propaganda and marketing to political campaigns. Why should anyone believe based on what's being presented in this article that not only was none of this stuff done before but that it somehow handed Trump one of the greatest election upsets in American history? The mental gymnastics people are going through to deny the fact that yes, many voters have conservative values, is getting out of hand.

Sure, the Obama and Clinton campaigns used social media and astroturfing. And they developed and targeted their stuff based on psychological profiling. However, as I understand it, their stuff was targeted only in traditional ways. Based on lists from various sources. Some of those lists were based on website signups, and even posting history and so on. But they generally weren't very granular.

Basically, Cambridge Analytica took the behaviorally targeted ad approach that's taken over the Internet, and applied it to political campaigns. So they're doing psychological profiling at the individual level. They targeted likely Clinton and Sanders voters with messages that discouraged voting. They targeted likely Trump voters with messages that bolstered support and encouraged voting. Messages in ads. In Facebook and Twitter posts by agents and bots. Telephone calls. Physical visits by canvassers, who carried phones with apps that provided real time access to individual user profiles.

That was new tech!

But of course, now everyone will be using it. If they can afford it, anyway. And what does that portend for democracy? Nothing good, I'd argue.

LOL, we do know from Podesta emails, that Clinton campaign colluded with Google, Facebook, Twitter directly. Clinton got help from inside of these companies. Don't tell us your nonsense.

Your use of the word "collusion" and list of sites appears intended to imply that the Clinton campaign was as criminal, or more criminal, than the Trump campaign which itself is accused of "collusion" with Russia. You even use italics to emphasize how much worse the implied dirty connections must be between the Clintons and these companies.

What laws, specifically, do you believe the Clinton campaign broke with their "collusion" and in what way was the Clinton campaign's social media strategy intended to deceive?

And for bonus points, why does this only, specifically, implicate Clinton, the Democrats and the left in wrongdoing, but not Trump, the Republicans or the right?

To a large extent I agree with you. However, I remember that even with the Obama campaign I felt the same kind of unease that I feel now, a suspicion that we've maybe become a tad too effective at manipulating people, or rather large numbers of them through means that simply weren't available before the internet, marketing research, social media, and other 'modern day' things.

I suppose one could argue that this has been happening for a long time. I'm sure mass media and TV changed things, as did newspapers before that, etc. And while that does make the current 'narrative' a bit hysteric, I still think this general development through time is worth worrying about (and discussing).

You don't need to. There is research that this type of targeting is absolutely ineffective.

Do please link to this research.

I agree with your argument and have thought about that 'explainatism' as well. In my oppinion it is used by those that are incapable of accepting substantially different worldviews to their own. Trump was prepping up his followea for the loser narrative too with the 'the elections are rigged' argument. Attributing it to some sort of cheating narrative allows the follwers to continue belive that they are doing the right thing and that the other side is just a bunch of manipulated fools that need enlightenment.

> 1. Obama's 2008 election absolutely bragged about their use of social media to win. I vividly remember multiple long articles in the NYTimes talking about how they exploited new tech to reach voters.

Talking to people using their social media profiles, while identifying yourself as from a political campaign, is worlds away from what Cambridge Analytica are doing: which is not remotely open or honest.

The Obama campaign's chief strategist is a master of "Astroturfing" and has a second firm that shapes public opinion for corporations

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2008-03-14/the-secre...

>One way the campaign sought to identify the ripest targets was through a series of what the Analyst Institute called “experiment-informed programs,” or EIPs, designed to measure how effective different types of messages were at moving public opinion.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/508836/how-obama-used-big...

>Among the insights that were shared are the fact the people like conform to social norms, both in their community and their own past behavior. So telling voters that their neighbors have already voted or reminding them about their previous support of a candidate, makes those voters more likely to take action.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/11/meet-ps...

>The real drivers of an effective social media campaign, however, are based on the psychology of social behaviors not the current technology.

http://mprcenter.org/blog/2013/01/how-obama-won-the-social-m...

I was wondering how Breitbart and Trump did so well. It makes sense now that it was not luck, but they had access to new "tech" in away. Fake news for them is kinda like how Obama was the first to used Twitter and other SM platforms to get connect with voters and get elected.

Reminds me of the quote ~ "it's artificial intelligence until you understand how it works. Then it's just algorithms"

You think the DNC didn't have something similar given how close Facebook and Google's leadership were with the Clinton campaign?

I may be wrong but I'm not sure I get why they put so much emphasis on the getting of the data from Facebook, as I feel that that's really easy.

Can't you just 1. crawl public profiles 2. create convincing fake profiles by mixing around the info in real profiles, and then add people, and progressively crawl private profiles that way? 3. pay app owners to require more permissions and sell you the info, or create your own apps

I guess it's such a big deal because they managed to do it in a way that was legal, on first glance

"may be wrong but I'm not sure I get why they put so much emphasis on the getting of the data from Facebook, as I feel that that's really easy."

That's exactly the point.

This kind of work combining propaganda and disinformation with AI models and feedback into them to get a progressive change of belief is fascinating. I think of this as the first of many wars democracy will fight against AI and we are currently loosing.

This is the thing that the AI doomsayers are missing, IMO. If we *do lose a fight with a malevolent AI it will be because some extremely wealthy humans decided to build it to enlarge their power.

The implications are hard to grasp. I think if they were more widely known then Cambridge Analytica would get the same kind of treatment that Huntingdon Life Sciences did (extremely personal terrorism from "animal rights" protestors)

Populists have been doing similar things for ages and most of the population goes with it

We just have to figure out a democracy without letting the peasants decide things on their own.

That's the great irony of it

Or you can let them vote to ban Dihydrogen monoxide and see them shoot themselves in the foot

Christopher Wylie is being utterly courageous. But even so, I'm reminded of Robert Oppenheimer. We still have nukes. And we'll still have targeted PSYOP. So it goes.

He is just being Canadian. It would be very impolite not to apologise, having just screwed up your neighbour's entire political landscape.

What I don’t understand about this company is how it supposedly uses facebook data that facebook itself doesn’t use for its ad platform. They seem to want to point out that they are smarter than facebook, and therefore are a better choice to do targeted ad publishing through. Why are they so relatively unknown and underused then? Any company could use this data to do better business, and it would be trivial for facebook to compile it. That it would have caused the election to swing seems a little far fetched. If anything, it would have provided the campaign with more than ever information about what the American people really want, and how much they want it. That there is lots of talk and no action is the fault of the campaigning party, not of the system used to figure out what their fellow citizens really care about. Republican president follows a Democratic double term, news at 11?

I think Facebook would be missing the correlations of likes to the Big Five personality traits. But they could rebuild it if they wanted to, by promoting a free personality test on their site. (I assume that correlations between personality traits and political learnings has been researched before and there’s various bits of data available?) Then you can go from targeting ads at likes to targeting ads at political views.

If this really works and you can't do this legally it will be done by governments covertly.

I find it difficult to believe it had a real impact though. I think they are just enjoying notoriety.

I think RAND have been doing this for quite a while.

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