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Comment by cmdshiftf4 | Hacker News Reader

An elaborate propaganda machine privately funded by, and for the sole benefit of, a billionaire. I'm sure the Republicans have their own, so let's not be partisan here but merely call it for what it is.

I did get a chuckle from the blurb in a job posting promoted below by one of the propagandists working on the machine though:

>You are: A dynamic, seasoned software engineer who can bring your in-depth expertise and computer science experience to save our democracy.

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Come help us weaponize data against the citizenry for our billionaire candidate, it will save democracy.

What an absolute circus US politics has descended into.

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This is a very theatrical way to respond to a wealthy person creating a web consulting shop to run their doomed campaign's Internet presence.

Late edit

I added a word before "campaign".

Why "doomed"? Would love to hear what you think about it.

Trump won in part because his Internet ground game was better. Look for the Dems and everyone else to not only copy but improve on that, fake news and trolling included.

Prepare to be force fed propaganda like a fois gras goose every election year. Welcome to the future.

This is a weird future though. Its not about the issues, its about who has better targeting. That's it.

And if both sides have equally good targeting, the result is an even split of the populations attention. No one wins.

So how does this cycle break. Where is Daenerys?

>> So how does this cycle break. Where is Daenerys?

It stops when people get so used to recognizing it that they give up social media and the usual news sources.

Everyone needs to watch "they live" and realize that it's happening more than ever.

Campaign finance reform.

> Its not about the issues

Politics isn’t about issues, it’s about ideology. You have no idea what the sausage maker that is Congress will churn out at the end of the day. But you know who agrees with you on the big picture principles of the universe. And targeting helps you find those people and get them to vote.

> Its not about the issues, its about who has better targeting. That's it.

Eh, it's never been about the issues. It's so rarely about the issues that we name political periods after it (e.g. Prohibition, Abolitionist, et cetera).

What it's about, what it's always been about, is identity. And targeting, at its best, lets one efficiently drive an identity message. (At its worst, it lets one send diverging messages to diverging groups. But that tends to backfire, eventually.)

Given identity is multifarious (common identities are forged on class, race, ideology, religion, dialect, et cetera), there is room for creativity as politicians craft their image to collect a coalition.

> Where is Daenerys?

That would be aliens.

Another interpretation of this is that it is even more about issues, though. At the end of the day, you're targeting people based on their interest in / feelings on particular issues. Everyone wants to be so alarmist about all of this, but the reality is that this is democracy functioning as intended. Candidates are trying to fit even more tightly to what the voters want.

Exactly. I don't care how many ads you show me, I'm not voting for a candidate that I don't agree with on some level.

Lying is a problem, not ads.

Unfortunately that’s not true. If you look at the thorough reporting of Cambridge Analytica’s operations for example, it shows that their targeting was not based on issues but on psychological profile, which they determined with personality tests. Specifically they focused their attention on people exhibiting signs of neurosis and anxiety, and then experimented with various content designed to amplify their fears. Once they got the right level of “engagement”, they hammered crucial electoral districts in swing states with a deluge of weaponized propaganda. In that election the issue (“payload” would be a better term) boiled down to “Hillary Clinton is corrupt and belongs in jail”. The point is not to convince millions of people to change their minds, but to manipulate a few tens of thousands of crucial undecided voters into distrusting one candidate without really knowing why, just enough to change their vote (or perhaps just stay home - Cambridge Analytica had conducted vote suppression campaigns in other countries as well).

This is essentially large scale human experimentation. We have to accept the fact that it works, and is not at all politics as usual. To expect to be targeted with “issues” is to expect to be treated like a human being. But to be targeted in this way is to be treated like a lab rat.

> Unfortunately that’s not true. If you look at the thorough reporting of Cambridge Analytica’s operations for example, it shows that their targeting was not based on issues but on psychological profile, which they determined with personality tests. Specifically they focused their attention on people exhibiting signs of neurosis and anxiety, and then experimented with various content designed to amplify their fears.

Sure, that was their marketing pitch. But we have no evidence that anything like that actually worked, or was meaningfully implemented at scale. Secondly, what does it mean to "target people with anxiety or neurosis"? Were they shifting their opinions? Or were they just saying, "Hey, are you afraid of stuff? Well, we've got the candidate for you". My guess is it's the latter, and if it's the latter, that's just another way of communicating issue alignment of their candidate.

I don't think there is any substantial evidence at all that CA or anyone like them was actually shaping opinion. As far as I know, all the evidence indicates that they were finding the issues people cared about, and explaining why and how Donald Trump aligned with them on those issues.

The underlying fact that nobody seems to want to face is that large numbers of people aligned with him on many important issues. Not because they were tricked, but because that's what they truly wanted.

Overall I agree. The left was ecstatic about Obama’s ground breaking use of social media and analytics in his first presidential campaign, but now are crying foul because the right has caught up and even pulled ahead. I’m not entirely happy about the tactics due to the privacy implications, but that’s a separate issue.

What does worry me is that the messaging being targeted in this way is often disingenuous. Parties will target one message at one demographic and a contradictory message at another demographic. So if a consistent message is simply being targeted effectively that’s fine, but deceptively tailoring the message to the target is a legitimate concern.

You’re making a false equivalence. The Obama campaign hired savvy analysts and marketers to run a modern web and email campaign. A lot of what they did was pioneer what is now standard in almost every campaign: heavy use of email follow-ups to keep supporters engaged; recruiting and coordinating canvassing teams nationwide; using social media as a primary channel of communication rather than a gadget.

What the Trump campaign did was go to Paul Manafort, the guy who fixed Ukrainian campaign using black ops disinformation campaigns on behalf of Putin, and hire him to run his campaign!

The only thing those campaigns had in common is that they used the Internet efficiently. But they used them very differently to achieve different goals. To compare them as equivalent is irresponsible.

You keep implying differences, while not actually stating them. Who was hired is not a salient difference, in this context. The tactics employed by each are essentially the same: Heavy internet advertising with effective, outcome-based targeting. For all of Cambridge Analytica's marketing puff pieces, I see no evidence they were doing anything fundamentally different.

Just to be clear, you are willing to say on the record that the Obama campaign and Manaford, a convicted criminal who is known to have worked for a mass murdering autocratic regime as their expert electoral fixer, are “essentially the same” in their use of the Internet?

If so, you’ll have to find someone else to engage in debate with you. If you are capable of believing such a thing, we simply don’t have enough moral common ground to have a productive conversation.

I will say for the benefit of others who might read this, that how successful Cambridge Analytica actually was in manipulating US voters in 2016 is irrelevant to whether or not A) mass disinformation is a real threat to elections everywhere (it is) and B) the Trump campaign employed Cambridge Analytica to manipulate US voters using mass disinformation (they did).

> Just to be clear, you are willing to say on the record that the Obama campaign and Manaford, a convicted criminal who is known to have worked for a mass murdering autocratic regime as their expert electoral fixer, are “essentially the same” in their use of the Internet?

In their use of the internet in relation to their respective presidential campaigns, yes. Do you have specific evidence to the contrary?

> If so, you’ll have to find someone else to engage in debate with you. If you are capable of believing such a thing, we simply don’t have enough moral common ground to have a productive conversation.

So, just to be clear, at the first sight of a challenge and request for literally any supporting evidence at all, you're backing away, while pretending to do so out of contempt?

It's become quite clear that you don't actually have any evidence to back up your claims here. Though feel free to prove me wrong.

Any time a presidential candidate has dominated in the mass media of the day, they've won the election. FDR did it with radio. Kennedy did it with television. Obama did it with traditional social media. Trump did it with guerilla social media.

I can't necessarily say these presidents weren't elected on the basis of issues, but beating the competition at getting your message on the popular mass media does seem to be a common factor in all these elections.

If there were a way to disrupt the economy of information that Cambridge Analytica types can manipulate democracies with, we still wouldn't break the whole cycle, but we would at least break this latest and most uncomfortable iteration.

>> its about who has better targeting.

In a dark way, this is expected, right? Politicians often lie. But targeting now allows them to tell a different lie to different groups, each seemingly serving a sub-population's desires -- without groups hearing each-others messages.

Anything paid for by the campaign is required to say so. Paid trolling does not work unless it is done illegally or by non-American entities who are not subject to those regulations.

So far that seems to be how its done.

What about the mass of money paid for by secret Super PACs with vague sounding names like "Paid for by Concerned Mothers of America"

Staffers for political campaigns don't include paid for disclaimers on their Tweets, even though they are paid a salary by their employing committee

"Trump won in part because his Internet ground game was better."

It really wasn't though.

Trump had one of the most poorly managed campaigns of every kind in history.

It was mostly just him and his Tweets.

He didn't have some giant, coordination 'on the ground' or 'tech' operation.

In a manner of speaking, it was highly 'authentic' however absurd he is in reality, it wasn't any kind of 'tech savvy operation'.

If anything, Trump disrupted the notion that these 'well oiled machines' win. Hillary inherited Obama's pretty good infrastructure, and all of the goodwill of tech people across the land and still lost.

I think it's fair for Bloomberg to want to run an ad campaign, but I think the amount he donated should be public and subject to regulation, just like anything else. And of course, same for everyone else.

I wonder if Twitter and FB could literally attach 'fact check' addendums to every tweet from someone in political office. Here's me thinking it might make a difference in Trumpland, alas, it probably wouldn't.

Might want to look into Cambridge Analytica:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/mar/23/leaked-cambr...

It was pretty sophisticated and they obviously had access to a lot of Facebook data with which to microtarget people.

No - Cambridge et. al. had little effect on the outcome of the election - their execs even knew this and they completely oversold their capabilities; and the story was widely overblown.

(FYI I was personally involved with FB at the time of these major dealings, in a similar scenario, but not Cambridge).

Neither really did the Russians.

The Trump campaign was run mostly by people lacking political experience, and their technical operations were scant. It was literally Trump family (his son in law etc.) giving him a lot of his most direct advice. For example, how to handle the fallout from the p*y grabbing scandal came from Kushner - not a political operative.

It's hard I guess for some people to swallow that Trump won on his platform of outrage, rather than some secret, sophisticated and back-handed GOP operation, but that's the stark reality of his populism.

I don't know why this was voted down. Obama had an excellent ground game and an excellent (for its time) Internet/social media game. They were quite public about it and everybody took notice. The GOP definitely upped its game and of course candidate T had been working the social media channels since the 80s.

As with advertising in general nobody really knows what works and what doesn't, but these national campaigns have the budget to just try it all.

Are you talking about Hawkfish, CNBC, Bloomberg or Washington Post?

Bloomberg is clearly extremely competent. Pluralism won't win, determinism will. If you feel it's broken, and you do nothing, you are much lower than a successful person who is attempting to do something.

You mean 'determination'? There are lots of determined, unsuccessful people.

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