‘I made Bannon’s psychological warfare tool’ meet the data war whistleblower | Hacker News Reader

‘I made Bannon’s psychological warfare tool’ meet the data war whistleblower

theguardian.com

109 pointswgx73 comments

The video interview (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXdYSQ6nu-M) was really fun to watch. It's not every day you hear someone talking directly and honestly to camera about how their company's image was a fabrication, that they ran a propaganda machine, how they were bankrolled by an American billionaire, how they directly interacted with Steve Bannon, Facebook's broken app privacy model, etc.

Very interesting.

I love where he says it wasn't a public campaign where one message was sent out and everyone could judge it, but rather it was designed to whisper the right message privately to each individual, the message most effective at converting their opinion given their psychological and demographic profile, even if the messages themselves were contradictory across different individuals.

Hard to figure out what the future holds because we generally never get less sophisticated, but more sophisticated.

"it was designed to whisper the right message privately to each individual, the message most effective at converting their opinion given their psychological and demographic profile, even if the messages themselves were contradictory across different individuals."

When Netflix can't even recommend movies to me that are more than 50% likely to be enjoyable for me, I really have to wonder how effective messages designed to change people's political opinions based on demographic and psychological profiles really were.

I understand the sentiment but propaganda and prediction are vastly different fields. Some of the things they were doing were: spreading misinformation, undermining trust in real information and spreading negative affect. Those all seem more concretely achievable than predicting whether you will like a film that has dozens to thousands of variables around tone, content and aesthetic.

They don't really have to change people's political opinions. But they can know what makes people angry and give them more of it. They can know the lie they want to tell and make it more ubiquitous so it's harder to discern from truth. These tasks aren't anywhere near as abstract as predicting your taste in film. It seems like they knew angry people were showing up to vote for Trump, so just give people more of what makes them angry. And give people thinking about voting for Hillary more reasons to be skeptical about her weaknesses as a candidate.

Netflix has a limited catalogue and you probably wouldn't enjoy 95-99% of what's there.

Most voters in america are split on binary issues like gay rights, abortion, gun rights, etc. It's much easier to find what you're passionate about in this case, especially since location and party affiliation can give you a great prior.

Then there's A/B testing. A lot of people claim that it would be hard to sway an election on a million dollar budget but Facebook has made it incredibly easy to test what messages resonate with voters. For a few hundred bucks you can test your hypothesis and promote it to the few people who will help propagate the winning message.

From what I've come to understand personality characteristics strongly determine political leanings. The media targeting mentioned in the video can serve to create cultural associates with any given voters personality "characteristics" and move people to action. So it's not just about "changing" minds, it's about cultivating a social mileu based on prexisting peronality characteristics with votes being the end result.

Modern elections tend to be close. It doesn't have to be more than 5-10% effective to be devastating.

We are entering a new era of propaganda where the human mind is going to be hacked with the same sophistication and black hat mentality as any other system.

Refresh your lists of logical fallacies a.k.a. vulnerability lists and make every effort to patch.

I wonder if a large part of this social media psyops/fake news "crisis" is because the "bad guys" won. The bad guys here being Trump, Bannon, and the alt-right, who are disliked by both traditional democrats and republicans. Why did we not question Obama's original campaign and their use of social media? It is widely understood that Obama leveraged social media in novel and cutting edge ways to directly target voters predisposed to his message and to rally huge amounts of voters into action. Isn't this essentially what happened leading up to the election of Trump? Obviously there are some other factors at work like the involvement of a foreign entity and very questionably ethics in the gathering and compiling of these massive data sets. But do we really think that this is the first time Russia has meddled with US elections? And since when are we surprised when a politician (or their hired guns) exhibits unethical behavior?

I'm not trying to excuse Facebook or the other platforms here. I would think they would be the first ones trying to combat this behavior and expose people leveraging their ecosystem without permission for some personal agenda - if, for no other reason, than the sheer pride of not being taken advantage of. And now these companies certainly need to take action to avoid huge social and political backlash (or try to stem the backlash that has already occurred). But I do wonder how large this backlash would be had Hillary won the Whitehouse in 2016.

Edit: I hadn't seen ryanx435's comment and the corresponding replies before posting. While it's easy to dismiss his comment as purposely obtuse, I also think it's very easy to do so too quickly, thus avoiding actually thinking about this issue and perhaps falling into the same echo-chamber/bubble mentality that many accuse Trump supporters of.

"Obviously there are some other factors at work like the involvement of a foreign entity and very questionably ethics in the gathering and compiling of these massive data sets."

I think you answered your own question. Those other factors are the crucial factors that make this situation different. Crimes were allegedly committed. This isn't about using social media, it's about the alleged crimes. I don't even see how you can draw a parallel to Obama's campaign. What crimes did Obama's team allegedly commit?

But what specific crimes were committed? Is it illegal for Russians to buy Facebook ads? Was it illegal for these researchers to harvest Facebook data and was there explicit laws preventing them from using that data in other ways? Certainly there is massive ethical issues but technically illegal?

A merely "massively unethical" secret targeted psyops and propaganda campaign involving a foreign power should still be a cause for concern. Especially if it turns out it worked.

Would we see these activities as unethical if the message was one of hope rather than hate?

For instance, how upset would we be if Sweden purchased a bunch of pro Bernie Sanders Facebook ads and Bernie Sanders ended up getting voted in as president?

There's more being alleged here than another country merely "buying ads" for a candidate. That in and of itself is neither illegal nor unethical. I'm probably more laissez-faire about that then many people ... I wouldn't care if the 50 cent army posted here so long as they were up front about their affiliations. I don't object to the attempt to sway people to one or another point of view, I object to doing so through duplicitous means.

You may be correct in implying that one side is using partisanship to fuel interest in what is, objectively (I believe,) a legitimate concern. But why is the other side is so adamant to dismiss those concerns, regardless of their legitimacy?

It shouldn't matter either way, either there's fire or there isn't.

For what it's worth, I agree with you. One general exception I have is that the backlash is disproportionately targeting big tech/silicon valley, when the backlash should be more societal in nature. Yes, tech should look at making improvements and implementing checks and balances but at what point do we accept responsibility for our actions and stop trying to pawn off our own insecurities, biases, and dark impulses to some far off tech company?

Mercer's and Koch's are the oligarchs of the US thanks to Citizen United et al. Combined with 24/7 propaganda brainwashing by Fox News, defunding of public schools, the raising inequality and gerrymandering and voter supression, democracy is just a hollow shell and you end up with a guy like Trump as president.

A year ago, it was widely reported that Cambridge Analytica had very little to do with the Trump campaign's digital strategy[1][2][3]. This was corroborated by GOP consultants, campaign staffers, and current and former Cambridge employees. What changed?

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/06/us/politics/cambridge-ana...

[2]: https://www.buzzfeed.com/kendalltaggart/the-truth-about-the-...

[3]: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-12-08/no-big-da...

Members of the Trump team and GOP members lying about things, especially involving foreign countries/entities getting involved in the election? Who would have thought it.

1. The whistleblower coming forward with a story, and

2. Facebook's leaky API and how Kogan was allowed to continue by lying and saying the harvesting was for academic purposes

Both could be true. Trump himself may not have known much, but CA could have pushed for his election as part of a more global push for nationalism and identity politics.

Oh dear. 2 hours in and all the comments appear to me to be the kinds of politically trolling that we typically try to avoid on hacker news. The story is about technology and statistics and what the future of data mining might mean for democracy, folks.. can we keep the name calling to a minimum please?

There was already a massive topic about this story yesterday. I don't see what a new one accomplishes except exhausting HN's moderation team.

In fairness, everything is political, including notions of “technology” and especially statistics. See Lombroso and gerrymandering respectively.

From last years DEF CON 25, pre-dating what we are now learning about Cambridge Analytica (CA):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5Hx86H3-mc

Ultimately this isn't a political issue, it's an ethics in engineering issue and despite claims by CA that it didn't impact the outcome of the election, independent research into this area by multiple independent researchers has been painting a picture, much like Chris Sumner covers in his DEF CON 25 talk that these techniques are effective enough as just a one percent swing is sufficient.

We can't pretend that this is a political post. The ethical implications of this extend to the very structure of the modern Internet, which has become so entwined with targeted marketing. Democracy was not devised to withstand this.

And now his Facebook account has been suspended:

https://mobile.twitter.com/chrisinsilico/status/975335430043...

To be fair, Facebook announced they would, 2 days ago:

> We are suspending SCL/Cambridge Analytica, Wylie and Kogan from Facebook, pending further information.

https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/03/suspending-cambridge-an...

in other news: media outlet manages to publish 'shocking expose' about how news media is easily manipulated by external actors, all the while painting it as something 'novel', 'else' and 'external' to the venue of publication itself..

"...and Darpa, the US government’s secretive Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is cited in at least two academic papers supporting Kosinski’s work." <-- DARPA is secretive? That sounds to me like sensationalism.

Interesting how when Obama used big data and targeted marketing to win, he was applauded and given accolades [1], but when Trump used big data and targeted marketing to win, he is painted as sinister and manipulative and evil.

Almost like there is an anti trump propaganda narrative being pushed. Almost.

[1] https://www.infoworld.com/article/2613587/big-data/the-real-...

> I ran the Obama 2008 data-driven microtargeting team. How dare you! We didn’t steal private Facebook profile data from voters under false pretenses. OFA voluntarily solicited opinions of hundreds of thousands of voters. We didn’t commit theft to do our groundbreaking work.

https://twitter.com/mbsimon/status/975231597183229953

Interesting how nuance is important: Obama's big data was public or obtained legally to supplement his campaign's ground game or TV buying. While Trump's big data was based on stolen data and used to discourage Democrats from voting.

“stolen data”

Didn't read any news this weekend?

Yes, and I’d still go with “stolen” over stolen. This data was handed out, not stolen.

And its almost as though you're being as disingenuous as possible while trying to mock others for being dishonest. Why not just debate in reality versus saying "well, if I'm intentionally obtuse, I can find a way to make others look like hypocrites"? Who are you hoping will be convinced by BS like that?

it's almost as though the post was being deliberately obtuse in order to be a bit sarcastic and tongue in cheek about it and has an expectation people would understand that.. almost

So you're saying they weren't actually doing that? Glad we agree.

From the article, CA got 270,000 people to install an app. They then used those people to find and download the data for 50,000,000 from those 270,000 users without asking the permission of those 50,000,000.

You're pushing a pro-Trump propaganda narrative by making a false equivalence between Obama's ethical legal use of data, and Trump's unethical theft of it.

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