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Comment by tempsy | Hacker News Reader

My issue with the whole CA debacle is that I’ve seen no proof that the services they offered were actually effective in persuading anyone.

They were a consulting firm that exaggerated claims on their own effectiveness like every consulting company and the media took those claims at face value and presented them as some magicians when they in actuality had nothing more than some suspect personality data and your likes.

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I’m saying this from a British perspective; but arguing about the effectiveness of CAs incredibly targeted advertising is missing the forest for the trees.

They broke several electoral laws and even if they didn’t. The intent was to target people on the fringe leaving no possibility for dissemination, discourse or even a record of what was shown.

There’s no justification for that, that is poison for democracy. It doesn’t matter if it works or not.

Which electoral laws did they break?

Laws surrounding capital spend for campaigning mostly.

https://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/who-we-are-and-what-w...

Most of the money used to pay Cambridge Analytica came from Aaron Banks, who got it from... "somewhere".

Well, it’s not evidence, but haven’t they won every election they’ve been hired to manipulate?

I especially find the way they did it in Trinidad interesting. They set up an anti establishment movement saying “don’t vote” which grew into actual grass roots. They targeted it at everyone, because their data showed, that one side of the political spectrum would still vote, despite participating in the movement. At the election their predictions came completely true and only one side refrained from voting.

What worries me is that CA is just one company. Now that the cat is out the bag, everyone is going to do this.

They worked on Ted Cruz's campaign and he lost.

He won his senate re-election campaign in 2018...

CA worked on his presidential campaign, not his Senate campaign.

And Obama or PAC's used the exact same tactics in 2012 it has been shown, but nobody cared then because the home team was doing the doping and nobody knew about them yet.

Obama isn't a foreign power.

This is an interesting claim and any information about this you could provide would be helpful

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

FWIW, I don't think this is particularly revelatory. The Obama campaign was known for its effective and widespread use of digital voter information.

e.g. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-the-obama-campai...

Double reply, but for a different angle it might be interesting to read The Gamble: Choice and Chance in the 2012 Election. It paints an interesting picture of what was effective and what wasn't in political advertising (classical advertising mostly, less focused on social media). In some cases, it's remarkable how close the margins were and how little change campaigns might effect.

There were conservatives who cared then. But yeah, traditional media tends to be more liberal so you heard about it more this time. I guess that's the tradeoff we have. In America, media tends to bias towards liberalism as we know it whereas other industries like military and police might have a more right-wing bias. At least in the former, it might hurt people's feelings when the media says things you don't like but the power the latter has over people's lives is even more worthy of mention, which it rarely is. Sorry about the whataboutism but that was also your argument.

> At least in the former, it might hurt people's feelings when the media says things you don't like but the power the latter has over people's lives is even more worthy of mention, which it rarely is.

The military or police don't really play a large role in deciding who's going to be elected though.

You've never served, have you? The military is highly influential, especially among family, in influencing political views. Not to mention social media which gives us all a pen as well as a sword, proverbially. Either way, if you complain about being oppressed by powers, all the aforementioned are a potential force of it so it's mostly moot to complain of the bias of one without mentioning the bias of the others.

> The military is highly influential, especially among family, in influencing political views

That's something very different vs the media. If you break it down to "they can influence somebody", then well, kindergarten teachers have influence over elections.

> so it's mostly moot to complain of the bias of one without mentioning the bias of the others

As soon as the military starts a coup and takes power, you'll be absolutely right. Until then, they don't decide domestic elections.

My big issue is that Share Blue and Correct the Record did the exact same thing at the same time and they are ignored because they are aligned with the other side.

https://mobile.twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/963804731759038...

did the exact same thing at the same time

Your tweet suggests that a person paid companies that paid humans to tweet.

How is that the exact same thing?

they are ignored because they are aligned with the other side.

The New York Times reported in 2016: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Outrage Machine, Allies Push the Buttons - https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/23/us/politics/hillary-clint...

They are ignored because they lost, don't you think the GOP and/or Brexiters would be jumping on top of it if they had lost also?

Shareblue's tactics were also used against other democratic candidates including Bernie Sanders, which is perhaps the main reason they lost, and this story has not been converted at all.

David Carroll tweeted "... effects cannot be measured. There are no control groups in elections" [1]. His stake in it was getting access to his data though, not coming at it from a data science perspective. I'm not sure I agree with his assessment about it not being measurable though.

[1] https://twitter.com/profcarroll/status/1161446789850906624

What threshold of proof are you expecting?

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