Hacker News Reader

CA sound like a bunch of scumbags and I'm glad people are shining light on these kinds of activities. However, I'm not convinced what they did was really all that new or interesting. This is our modern world and it's terrifying. Call it marketing, propaganda, fake news or disinformation, we're being manipulated constantly by numerous unattributable actors.

The more interesting question to me is why is CA being called out for it? I'm sure there are numerous groups doing this now both privately and funded directly by states. That doesn't make it right, but it changes the question to; What's special about CA?

I've been reading a biography of Allen Dulles called the Devil's Chessboard. Dulles founded the CIA and setup the agency as a prime purveyor of disinformation campaigns. These kinds of Machiavellian tactics likely go back further than The Prince himself. The only thing new here is the level of amplification modern data technology provides, but this is not limited to CA.

> The more interesting question to me is why is CA being called out for it?

I mentioned this in another thread and got immediately downvoted, which I predicted would happen. I will add more context here to perhaps avoid that. What I said was:

"What changed is that an attack vector has been found to take out Cambridge Analytica. The Democrats are in full political warfare with the Trump regime, and this is just another salvo."

To be clear, I am not a Trump supporter, and identify as a far-left progressive, so I'm only stating what I see to be happening, and not attacking the Democrats. Secondly, I used to work at a gaming company that was the largest 3rd party integration with Facebook, and saw that this type of data leakage has been the norm and not the exception for at least 8 years.

Trump has been under a (mostly deserved) multi-pronged attack by various left-wing media, political, corporate, and voter organizations since he got into office. What is happening is that many, if not most, upwellings of public sentiment against his presidency are actually engineered through the very same sorts of PR firms as Cambridge Analytical, even though most people think the that it's organic. There is obviously organic disgust for Trump, but it's being fed and amplified and warped and guided using the same social media techniques that Cambridge Analytica uses, which is ironic.

I believe that many organizations are actively working in opposition to Trump using these kinds of psychographic tools, but I'm not really convinced that the upswellings of public sentiment are mostly, or even largely, the result of their efforts. Just reporting factual information about what his administration is doing works fairly well to alienate large parts of the nation which aren't part of his political base, and their opposition seems like a natural consequence of his administration's decision to govern from the far right. I think you should give people some credit for having good-faith opinions of their own.

The hysteria and misinformation in the Russia campaign is a counter example to your claim.

There's just a ton more money on the right - the Koch network and GOP billionaire donors dwarf the spending by progressives.

So it's a lot easier for right-wing purchased media and social media and purchased think tanks (Cato/Koch) and foundations (Bradley, DeVos) and right-wing news outlets to spread propaganda. Because they have more money to spend.

So I think rightfully, people feel that the bigger threat is from the right. It's not a coincidence that CA was heavily funded by a GOP billionaire who wants to damage gov't services to cut his own taxes (Mercer is in an $8B dispute with the IRS).

I think the real problem is what Zeynep Tufeksi has been writing about: informed consent. Even if some tiny print says it's ok in a click-contract where they have a majority of the negotiating power, Facebook is releasing data on its uses without their informed consent. That's what we as a society need to re-evaluate.

> There's just a ton more money on the right - the Koch network and GOP billionaire donors dwarf the spending by progressives.

Clinton heavily outspent Trump in the last election.

"Clinton's unsuccessful campaign ($768 million in spending) outspent Trump's successful one ($398 million) by nearly 2 to 1. The Democratic National Committee and left-leaning outside groups also outspent their Republican counterparts by considerable margins."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/04/14/someb...

Comparing the campaign spending does not capture the (vast) amounts of money spent by PACs. Indeed, one would expect Democrats to have more small-money, campaign donors, as opposed to large-dollar PAC donors.

I'm not satisfied with the off-hand dismissal of outside spending from the linked article. Since 2010, this has (arguably) been the more interesting area to scrutinize, and deserves more than a sentence.

I also recall the heavy domination of social media like Reddit by Clinton supporters. CNN was solidly in the Clinton advocacy camp, too. Despite all that, she still had to manipulate the DNC party rules to get the nomination. Trump was nominated despite the rather intense opposition from the GOP establishment.

The polls all predicted an easy coast to victory for Clinton. Even Trump on election night appeared shocked that he won, and seemed to have made no plans in case he won.

How do you reconcile that with the claim that the Trump supporters vastly outspent the Clinton supporters? Do you have any figures?

I tried not to discuss my political views in my comment - I'm sorry if you feel that I lent support to one candidate or the other.

> Despite all that, she still had to manipulate the DNC party rules to get the nomination

I don't think this is true. Irrespective of whether there was impropriety at any particular election, there was no way Clinton would have lost the nomination by the time that Sanders was in his stride. The superdelegates all but assured this.

Incidentally, the Sanders campaign went from decrying the presence of superdelegates to courting them - they may be an unreasonable mechanism for elections, but both groups tried to use them to their advantage.

> claim that the Trump supporters vastly outspent the Clinton supporters

I made no such claim. I suspect that it's true, but my point is that looking at campaign donations (and Reddit activity) highlights the activity of low-dollar donors.

Finally, to put into perspective the numbers from the article you cited, it seems that PACs spent 4 billion USD (across all races) in 2016[1] - around four times the spending of the two presidential campaigns.

It seems complicated to total super-PAC spending. Many websites state that there was more money supporting Clinton/Democrats, but this may ignore Republican PACs that do not declare a party preference[2].

[1] https://www.fec.gov/updates/statistical-summary-24-month-cam...

[2] https://www.opensecrets.org/outsidespending/summ.php?cycle=2...

> I don't think this is true.

Donna Brazile (Chairman of the DNC) wrote a book about it.

https://www.amazon.com/Hacks-Inside-Break-ins-Breakdowns-Don...

>Despite all that, she still had to manipulate the DNC party rules to get the nomination.

Are you being serious? She was the overwhelming choice in the primaries... Bernie lost by like 4 million votes. What are you talking about???

> Are you being serious?

Yes. Check out the DNC chairman's book on it.

You mean Donna Brazile's book? Can you be specific about what claims she made in this regard?

And not just PACs - there is 'deep spending', on propaganda media: Breitbart, IJR, NY Post, WSJ, and on foundations: Jud Watch (has spent $500M in last decade to attack Bill and Hillary), ALEC, SPN, Cit U (that Supreme Court decision was planned by billionaires).

There is a huge incentive for billionaires to spend money on propaganda, because they need votes for their pro-wealthy policies, which almost no voter would support without propaganda.

Or the billions in freely given media coverage.

Ironically, that was CNN, etc., giving Trump airtime in the mistaken belief that he'd hang himself on his own words. It wasn't due to media billionaires trying to get Trump elected.

That is the money spent in normal campaigning. If Trump spent money on CA, or if he received help from Putin's troll farms, do you really think those contributions would be accounted for in the official contributions/spending reports?

By the way, the same thing would be valid if H. Clinton used them. But for now we only have proof he did.

It's not just about money, but the appropriate application of money. Sure the Dems may have bought some likes and upvotes, while CA applied information warfare technique normally reserved for military activity.

From the Guardian:

>He had recently been exposed to a new discipline: “information operations”, which ranks alongside land, sea, air and space in the US military’s doctrine of the “five-dimensional battle space”.

This is a fatal vulnerability to the ideal of democracy. The only way to beat this game is to play it, and whoever can play it faster, smarter, and harder wins.

The only limitation is when these actions cross the line and cost you support by alienating your base, but I don't think that line exists for Trump.

Did the gaming company you work for represent themselves in inaccurate ways? This seems to be what CA did - fraudulent identities, putting out news that they knew was not truthful, and not identifying their ads and output as part of a political campaign.

That's one of the problems for me in all of this; a group that is lying, or perhaps breaking campaign disclosure laws, is acting wildly different than a gaming company.

They aren't just scumbags they are snake oil salesmen. No one in the political world thinks of them as anything but snake oil salesmen. Their company is about tricking people into buying their service and never delivering any results. Look at their track record. A lot of people will point to them and say "see, this is how Trump won the election" but that's just not even remotely close to the truth, and honestly just melds their marketing of snake oil with their shadiness. Many political people have paid them and subsequently dropped them because they didn't deliver. This was no different.

The abuse of Facebook's API/Graph is much less of a story about a secret genius agency (far from the truth) and more about how Facebook policies are lax on privacy of users. Facebook knew about this for a while, and sat on it. Facebook also acknowledge it was not a "breach" it was just exploiting things Facebook had already allowed through their shifting privacy policies and permissions.

Yes, you've put your finger on the core of it - the way Facebook compromises privacy. It's about informed consent on sharing data - we need companies to get informed consent.

How would you know this?

Given that Trump won on the slimmest of margins, if CA’s work resulted in a net increase in Trump’s margin, the “ROI” is huge.

Trump didn't win by a slim margin at all, he lost the popular vote, but only largely because of California. He had early calls in several states that Hillary was supposed to win. Hillary lost states she never stepped foot in, she was just not a strong candidate, she didn't campaign, she had little ground game and conceded states simply because they were a "firewall." Trump should have never been within spitting distance of any Democratic candidate, especially after Obama who was fairly popular among moderates.

Trump may have won on a slim margin, but he was supposed to lose on a huge one, by most predictions. If CA merely granted a net positive, then it likely paled in comparison to whatever else substantially affected results.

>>However, I'm not convinced what they did was really all that new or interesting.

You say that as someone who frequents HN. Collectively we are probably the top 0.2% of the population in terms of technology awareness and know-how, to the point where we probably easily recognize this type of propaganda (then again, maybe not!) and understand how it works.

The same cannot be said for the overwhelming majority of the population though. In fact, I'd go so far as to claim that the majority of Facebook users don't even understand how Facebook makes money (even though the answer is so obvious to us).

I get that feeling a lot.

I was around on the internet back in the 90's and the stuff that came out in the Snowden revelations wasn't that suprising (Echelon was widely known back then but unconfirmed), We (meaning techies) have had the suspicion that they where doing this shit under the "just because they could, they would" approach.

Where Snowden was incredibly useful was that it confirmed it in a way that was hard to deny since it was straight from the horses mouth.

We might suspect that CA was doing shady shit but stuff like the C4 investigation confirms it and the confirmation is a valuable thing.

"We're smart enough to not fall for it but the proles stand no chance" doesn't pass the smell test as anecdotal evidence.

What they are doing is what marketing people have done for years, only we know from years of data and experience that these "profile and target" ad campaigns are barely above baseline for RoI.

The classic one is people who move house are more likely to go on to buy a new car in 12-24 months so they buy house sale data and target you with car info.

Supermarkets do tons of profiling based on your CC and purchase history.

None of this is to say that trying isn't scummy, but we shouldn't lose sight of the possibility that CA could be peddling snake oil.

Of course. But there's also the possibility that in this case the snake oil actually delivered an election result.

RoI is actually irrelevant. The two bigger issues are that this shouldn't be being attempted, and - more importantly in a genuine democracy - it shouldn't even be possible.

>more importantly in a genuine democracy - it shouldn't even be possible.

My point exactly. "Democracy" on paper doesn't really matter if the elites are successfully and massively deceiving the voters.

>>"We're smart enough to not fall for it but the proles stand no chance" doesn't pass the smell test as anecdotal evidence.

That's why I said "then again, maybe not".

>>What they are doing is what marketing people have done for years, only we know from years of data and experience that these "profile and target" ad campaigns are barely above baseline for RoI.

This is completely irrelevant in the current context, because for people with deep pockets, the ROI of a single project doesn't matter if it leads to huge gains further down the line.

Case in point: CA is owned by the Mercers, who just got a huge tax cut thanks to Trump.

Not only was it not new or interesting, it was previously reported on last year and no one cared then. That, is what I find interesting.

> Call it marketing, propaganda, fake news or disinformation, we're being manipulated constantly by numerous unattributable actors.

“The democratic method is that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote.”

Joseph Schumpeter —Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1947)

I'm not sure whether the statement "Facebook engages in surveillance capitalism" is intended as a defense of Facebook in this context or something else.

The rest of your post makes it sound like the former, so I'll assume that's what you meant. In that case, I think you're giving Facebook far too much credit. What you describe in your post re: CA is accurate and scandalous, but I think it's naïve to think Facebook was not only aware and complicit, but rather that they actively encouraged and have essentially based their business on this exact system. Their decision to suspend CA is topical PR spin, an opportunity for them to be momentarily seen as enforcers amongst so many other negative headlines related to Facebook, data and voter manipulation.

Apps and services not being forthright about what they do with your data is (unfortunately) the status quo. Facebook is the broker for this data in this case, and you'd be a fool to allot them any trust with it given their history. The Cambridge Analytica "scandal" is the system working as intended, but now with unpopular consequences.

Who could have imagined that a suite of tools used to manipulate and target users through commercial advertising and spam could also be used for political means.

Being the status quo doesn't make it any less scandalous.

Okay so one thing I'm interested in is why is CA so evil, and is the role they played any different to what Obama used in his midterms campaign?

> The Obama 2012 campaign used data analytics and the experimental method to assemble a winning coalition vote by vote. In doing so, it overturned the long dominance of TV advertising in U.S. politics and created something new in the world: a national campaign run like a local ward election, where the interests of individual voters were known and addressed.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/509026/how-obamas-team-us...

Obama's campaign was famously one that was 'won by data', but there was no outrage back then, in fact the opposite. What's different here?

Cambridge Analytica got their data through a paid quiz that didn't fully disclose to the user what their friends and own data were going to be used for.

It almost certainly broke EU data laws, and CA referred to their data operations as 'propaganda' when speaking to clients. https://www.engadget.com/2018/03/19/cambridge-analytica-chan...

Why is CA so evil? There's just been an expose:

https://www.channel4.com/news/cambridge-analytica-revealed-t...

I asked my question after I read these articles and watched both the 16+ minute reports.

Some examples: they admit in interviews to lying to obtain votes. They propose entrapping their client's opponents by bringing girls to them, or by giving them an offer 'too good to be true'. They give the impression there isn't much they won't do.

> What's different

Disclosure and funding.

> Facebook engages in surveillance capitalism.

They're well beyond that. Once upon a time, there was no "news feed." Then they made one, and people were not happy, but at least it was strictly chronological. Then they made it subject to an opaque and ever-changing "news feed algorithm," which makes it possible to control what you see. Those creepy studies a few years ago about emotional manipulation weren't an accident. Facebook is in the Skinner Box business now.

>but it's now blatantly clear to me that he deliberately used authoritarian tactics to win the election.

How on earth is such a baseless comment voted to the top of this thread? The truth is that this is a scandal, only because it involves Trump.

Pretty much all of what you've described is run-of-the-mill marketing, that has been used by all political parties for years. You also described some astroturfing, which is also widely used by all political parties (though perhaps some more than others).

How is any of that authoritarianism?

>favouring or enforcing strict obedience to authority at the expense of personal freedom.

"Facebook engages in surveillance capitalism."

I agree. It seems like the 360-degree camera work they've done in addition to all their work in VR seems more surveillance-related than people are willing to admit but whatever.

It will be really interesting (and pleasant) to see all these companies go out of business when GDPR kicks in.

Maybe these businesses will leave markets with GDPR. But they're not going out of business and they're influence is not going to significantly wane.

“practices of deliberate and targeted mass manipulation, actively deceiving users from the outset about it's intentions, and using lies as a means to an end”

Isn’t this the modern definition of politics?

Which needs fixing. We need to restore truth to public debate, and to politics. Cynicism is destroying Western liberal democracy.

Restore?

Just because it's new technology doesn't make it bad. Hitler used PA speakers and radio advertisements to win the election. Politicians since then have all done the same. Then there was TV advertising, then Obama's targeted intelligent internet advertising, now this. Are you opposed to all political advertising? In that case, this is not the moment that it became bad. It started, well, with the beginning of human politics.

Of course, technology doesn't kill people. I never said it did. Right now I'm pointing fingers at people for what they're doing, not the underlying technology.

A wise man once said, "Drain the swamp." It's my civic duty to point out swampiness unabashedly and impartially.

Since CAs behavior, and by extension CAs customers, is inexcusable, swampy human behavior, I will stand against it. In the same way the DNCs actions against Bernie Sanders was inexcusable, the way the DNCs actions against Bernie Sanders was inexcusable, union corruption is inexcusable, corporate negligence is inexcusable, product misrepresentation is inexcusable, bullshit ICOs are inexcusable, authoritarian communism is inexcusable, the same way that history has been full of lying and deceitful politicians, priests, businessmen, lawyers, activists, messiahs I will stand against it.

Yes. "Everyone does it and always has" is a very weak excuse.

Is there any evidence that Cambridge Analytica's targeted manipulation techniques were effective?

The Trump election and the Brexit campaign are often named as the two most high profile successes of CA-backed campaigns. Since they both won by such small margins, one could wonder if it wasn't thst that gave them the final edge...

Trump and Brexit?

Cambridge Analytica didn't conduct marketing campaigns for Brexit.