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Comment by nooron | Hacker News Reader

Hey, this prediction is interesting, but not resonant with my experience as someone who works in this. Cambridge Analytica's impact on 2016 is significantly overstated. In fact, I would feel confident saying their impact was zero. The really interesting story about Trump and his digital operation is not CA, but the organizational innovations that Brad Parscale brought to the campaign.

Historically, political campaigns haven't designed their paid digital strategies around the iterative, test-driven tactics seen in other industries. The answer why is complicated but Parscale, as far as I can tell, was able to avoid all this organizational cruft because the campaign was so haphazardly put together. Happy to share more if this interesting to you, my startup is in this space.

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>Cambridge Analytica's impact on 2016 is significantly overstated.

What about the other 100 elections in the other 30 countries that were claimed to be won by SCL Elections, CA's parent company?

edit - and what do you think of CA's effect on Brexit? Am in the UK, so have been thinking about CA in light of that, more than any involvement they had with Trump.

Big talk, no walk. They didn't succeed in building a piece of software that would allow more economical targeting than Facebook already has with its custom audience system. If they helped win, which I would be intensely skeptical of, it's because they ran digital ads at all in places that weren't accustomed to doing so, but their supposed tool for targeting didn't help.

Do you think they have buried having been working on 100 other elections that they failed in? As it would seem to be unlikely to get a good track record on this by accident.

They don't have a good track record. They have good marketing. It is very hard to demonstrate (or disprove) efficaciousness in online persuasion, and as a result, it is easy to take credit for client victories. It is a great chain of bull shit

also, for your edit, I'd stand by my claim. SCL might have been running ads (I have no idea if they did), and those ads could've made a small but important difference. But I don't believe that the software CA claims to have built had any impact in running those hypothetical ads at all.

Thanks for your opinion on this. I suspect personally that they were only one small part of it. Mainly because there was so many other things going on, such as the acquiring of much of the Labour Party's election data by Election Data Limited, after the company was pinched from UKIP by Labour

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/nov/10/labour-part...

https://libertystratcom.org/2018/04/30/brexit-breach-labour-...

Who exactly in the Labour party thought it was a good idea to pinch an election strategy firm from UKIP, that chooses to trade under the name EDL, is beyond me.

thanks for listening, inflatableDodo! I'm glad I was able to share my perspective with you.

You mentioned being in the same space. Does your stuff work?

Fair question, yes it does. We've pivoted quite a bit so where we landed has nothing to do with optimizing ads for campaigns, even though it's where we started. What we sell now is much closer to "Slack for political and nonprofit organizing", and it works very well for helping our clients retain their volunteers!

Cambridge Analytica didn't work on Brexit, though. You've been reading too much Guardian.

https://order-order.com/2018/11/06/information-commissioner-...

(My source could be criticised as biased, but click through to to the actual report by the Information Commissioner's Office if you are suspicious.)

>You've been reading too much Guardian.

No, just the early statements from Cambridge Analytica and Leave.EU.

Was rather odd that Cambridge Analytica and Leave.EU both claimed to be working together until it started to look bad - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-cambridge-analyt...

Yes, they were going to work together. Nix was a salesperson and wanted to sound like business was going well, and I suppose leave.eu wanted to sound like they were getting things done. I refer you again to the ICO report.

Another reply from me. You can also review this report from Julian Malins QC.

https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/static.assets.commercial....

I am somewhat suspicious of a report funded by the people being investigated. - https://www.malinschambers.com/2018/05/julian-malins-q-c-and...

Well, I think you should be willing to give a little weight to the fact that this is a QC. But still, fair I suppose.

Knowing one or two, not really.

Based on your experience what was CA good at except the marketing part. In how far were they able to deliver results for their clients or did they limit their results to strategic recommendations?

> what was CA good at

I am not really sure we were good at anything. The company had no direction coming from upper management, so we weren't really able to become experts at anything. The salespeople used the psychographic nonsense to sell to clients, which everyone internal knew was nonsense, so we were sometimes forced to use nonsense to solve problems. We were also forced to tackle impossible challenges because of salespeople's promises. There was very high turnover.

The technical teams were nice and had a lot of smart people. Most were fresh out of uni; first job.

> except the marketing part

I don't think we were particularly good at marketing, unless you mean marketing ourselves as evil geniuses. In which case we were too good for our own good.

Soo... You worked at CA? Might be informative to note that in your comments....

I think there are two issues with the FB data being conflated here: CA's targeted advertising and the population data itself.

For the advertising, concur there's a lot of disagreement over whether or not CA's models worked.

For the data though, having a dataset on population preferences and network connections is useful for things besides just advertising. For example, most people agree the Russian campaign was based on dividing the population on divisive issues; the data exfiltrated from Facebook should reveal any particular group's divisive issues.

TLDR; There's other uses for the data besides targeted ads in the broader topic of data privacy.

I think that very few people who buy ads in politics believe CA's model works. I think Russians could figure out that race was divisive in the US because they've known that and their propaganda has long centered on American racism. It doesn't mean it's not a scandal to have all that data exfiltrated, but it's not materially impactful.

No one in this thread has mentioned the Obama campaign of 2012.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/feb/17/obama-digital-...

Barack Obama's re-election team are building a vast digital data operation that for the first time combines a unified database on millions of Americans with the power of Facebook to target individual voters to a degree never achieved before.

Digital analysts predict this will be the first election cycle in which Facebook could become a dominant political force. The social media giant has grown exponentially since the last presidential election, rendering it for the first time a major campaigning tool that has the potential to transform friendship into a political weapon.

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