New Cambridge Analytica Leaks
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Problem is, even if they are a free and independent thinker, voting populations are large enough that the "average is the outcome" phenomenon comes into play, and voters are on average demonstrably vulnerable to coercion. Not enough to flip people's opinions 180 degrees, but enough to, say, get a reality TV star elected over a politician with a checkered history (that has itself been subject to decades of effort and millions spent to make said history checkered).
Now, the impact on the politicians of fundraising, is not at all small. The primary advantage of personalized advertising and fundraising, is to help a campaign rake in more cash, which is both legalized bribery, and an incentive to stoke your base's outrate instead of reaching towards the middle.
The worst thing about the CA/Facebook scandal, is that it's become an excuse for a large swath of the Democratic party to decide that it didn't make any mistakes in 2016 worth mentioning (or correcting).
Skeptical about that.
I guess it depends on what you mean by "political advertising". Does that include targeted misinformation campaigns?
Surveillance capitalism does work, there's no question about that. What happens when a customer of these platforms "tweaks" them for the purpose politics instead of selling shoes (or whatever)? I don't think the answer is clear, yet, but I expect there's some very ugly stuff in there that's "not compatible with democracy"-- as Shoshana Zuboff has said.
> Sanders primary campaign out-fundraised the Clinton one
These are not convincing examples. They are utterly dominated by confounding details. Clinton had the name-recognition of Coca-Cola vs. an unknown Sanders and the less said about the Trump circus the better. To compare advertising spend of brand-name candidates, you need to account for the vast quantity of non-paid marketing they have received before and during the campaign.
Better examples would be between two similarly unknown candidates in city/county elections. I have heard it claimed (reddit) that these races are almost always won by the biggest spender but I don't have a real source.
Wouldn't that be misleading though? There are active disinformation campaigns that are linked to the same people and organizations doing political campaigning.
Cambridge Analytica has apparently been (at the least) tracking people via these networks [1] [2], and it's not much of a stretch to assume some of the same targeting data used for traditional political ads would also be used for disinformation (which is often designed so it doesn't appear to be political).
There are news and TV networks that constantly present confirmed lies (often stated by the politicians themselves) as "news", so the fact they still have viewers and are still in business must mean this type of disinformation is somewhere between somewhat and extremely effective. Whether this is "political advertising" is maybe less clear, but it's definitely designed to influence politics and political opinions.
[1] https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2018/03/19/cambridge-anal...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/membership/2018/sep/29/cambridge...
It’s nothing new - philosophers and media theorists have been writing about media manipulation for the past century or more. But the media got the last election so completely wrong that they have to find a grand theory to explain what happened.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/feb/17/obama-digital-...
> "Consciously or otherwise, the individual volunteer will be injecting all the information they store publicly on their Facebook page – home location, date of birth, interests and, crucially, network of friends – directly into the central Obama database.
The only difference is that at the time it was heralded as being technologically savvy because it produced results that the media and tech companies desired.
Obama's app was advertised as an app for the Obama campaign. People who used the app consented that the Obama campaign would get access to data about them and their friends. For better or worse (better for marketers, worse for the friends of these app users), this was all within how Facebook was expected to work.
Cambridge Analytica obtained similar data, but in a different way by breaking Facebook's TOS. A developer made an app, advertised as some kind of quiz, never saying that the data would be handed over to CA. Not only was the app developer not being up front about what the data would be used for, but they also broke FB's TOS [0] with its usage.
Plainly, there are key differences here beyond how it was heralded at the time (and it should be noted that even the article your provided shows Obama's data collection in both a positive and negative light).
0 - https://www.vox.com/2018/3/17/17134072/facebook-cambridge-an...
I see no material difference here. People shared their data and it was used accordingly. This is how Facebook is expected to work. It's not like the Obama app had a big button that said "upload your friends list to Obama's database!". That was covertly done behind the scenes.
Irregardless, all Facebook users should assume all of their data is being sold and sliced and diced a million different ways.
The main point here is that the media has tried to turn CA in to a scandal while they very much did not do that for very similar actions Obama was taking.
Obama's app was only ever installed on peoples devices that wanted it.
it was in effect preaching to the converted.
CA deliberately harvested people that were not politically involved and dissafected and whipped them into a fuhrer, and thats just how they got started and doesn't cover the outright lies they pushed and farmed.
That probably depends how and why it went the other way, just like it probably wouldn't have the same degree of currency if Trump had won but there hadn't been a widely-reported on pro-Trump propaganda campaign apparently separate from the official campaign that was being compared to the Russian military propaganda technique referred to in a RAND analysis as the “firehose of falsehoods” even before any actual suggestion of Russian support for Trump or collusion between the campaign and Russia was publicly made.
> But the media got the last election so completely wrong that they have to find a grand theory to explain what happened.
Like many politically convenient narratives, yours only works of you ignore the facts, in this case specifically that the media narrative you suggest was constructed as a necessary explanation for the media’s missed prediction of the election results was prominent in the media in relation to the election as far back as the primary campaign (and actually had been a factor in US political coverage, though prior to the evidence of the propaganda campaign referred to earlier, one whose prominence had faded significantly since the end of the second Bush Administration, since Rove's derisive “reality-based community” comment in 2004.)
But that isn’t your argument, or at least what I’m interpreting to be your argument (your last paragraph is a single run-on sentence and it’s quite hard to understand.)
If the media weren’t completely wrong, they would have predicted a close race. Instead, they overwhelmingly showed Trump losing by a significant margin. Hence my point: the mainstream media messed up, big time, and instead of acknowledging it, they’ve embarked on a campaign to find a nefarious reason for the entirety of the events, when in reality the cause of election results are far more mundane and have more to do with economics.
Tracing causality in a single election is basically impossible for phenomena which aren't very similar to those in previous elections for which there is a solid base across many examples with many variations in alternative factors that themselves are well understood to provide controls. But the effects of the campaign aren't what drove the narrative of the post-truth era, it's existence which was a major media story starting fairly early in the campaign, and the absence of any disavowal of it was.
> If the media weren’t completely wrong, they would have predicted a close race
They predicted a race about as close as it was. They also (in many but not all cases) predicted a near certainty of a Clinton victory, because, as 538 pointed out before the election in explaining why their predictions were different and showed a much lower probability of Clinton winning than other media models, many models assumed that any poll-vs-vote differences would be independent between the states, while historically polling error is strongly correlated between the states.
> Hence my point: the mainstream media messed up, big time, and instead of acknowledging it, they’ve embarked on a campaign to find a nefarious reason for the entirety of the events
But, again, this claim doesn't work because (1) the media found the “explanation” before the events, and (2) no one except those trying to discredit the story describes it as explaining “the entirety of events”.
> in reality the cause of election results are far more mundane and have more to do with economics.
This is just as much of a self-serving and fact-ignoring explanation of the “entirety of events” as the propaganda as the narrative you are complaining about would be if anyone offered it for that purpose, the difference between yours and the other one is that no one—not even the center-right Democratic establishment, who has the most to gain from getting people to believe that story—offers the other narrative for that purpose.
And further that they thought the fact that Hillary was a woman should override any misgivings someone would have about her.
2008 was the first election where I was eligible to vote (I didn't). But the number of people I talked to who backed Obama solely because "how great would it be to have a black president" really dimmed my view of how seriously people take elections.
People treat the president like a mascot as much as anything.
If by “the Democrats” you mean “the center-right neoliberal Democratic establishment”, sure. The rest of the Democratic Party has been saying that was a deciding factor (though not the sole deciding factor; there are a number of things you could take away and flip the result) since the day after the 2016 general election (and predicting it even earlier.)
> I can see the Democrats making the same mistake again with Michelle Obama in 4 years’ time if they don’t win this round, I only hope she’ll be smart enough to stay out of it.
Michelle Obama has neither the general negatives that hurt Clinton nor (and there is no plausible way to change this in 4 years) the institutional establishment experience and position that positioned Clinton to win the primary in 2016 (or even the kind that enabled her to get close in 2008.) So, she's got neither what made Clinton powerful in the primary or what made her weak in the general. Once she's spent two and half decades out of the White House, half of them in the Senate and a few more in the cabinet she might acheive the former, but even then it would take something special to acheive the degree of antipathy Clinton has gotten from everywhere except the Democratic establishment, whether it's outside of the party or the non-establishment left within the party.
Plus, the rules that interacted with establishment support to facilitate Clinton's win in 2016 were abolishes almost immediately due largely to the influence the Sanders factions gained in the DNC despite not winning the nomination, so even a Clinton clone with an electorate with no hindsight to 2016 failures would have a harder time.
> On the other side of the aisle the Republican base was smart enough to send Jeb Bush swinging early on during the primaries, that’s why they now hold the Presidency
The Republican base wasn't smarter, the Republican Party just has different nominating rules. Like those in the Democratic nomination system that was operational in 2016, they generally tended (and this is by design) reinforce establishment candidates, but the two systems have different failure modes. The Republican system is designed to work by magnifying the perceptual impact of early victories, even narrow ones, epsecially if they are common across the early primary/caucus states; which usually, when the rules were set, were a matter of name recognition and establishment support. The Democratic ones in 2016 provided a more direct link to establishment support by way of superdelegates (which media tends to count in delegate counts from primaries though they are separate, which gives the establishment candidate an air of inevitability, momentum, and popular support beyond what is factually present.) The Republicans went into 2016 without a clear consensus establishment candidate, which combined with Trump's celebrity status allows Trump to reap the benefit of early victories.
Yeah, that's what I mean, and from across the Ocean it looked like those people "controlled the narrative" (to use an "americanism") well after the elections. I have to admit though that the recent prominency of both Warren and Sanders (who's less demonized compared to 4-5 years ago) make me think that those "center-right neoliberal Democratic" people you mention might have lost their grip on the party, which would be a really interesting development.
Re: Michelle Obama: she'd still be regarded as "dynasty" material, no matter how long she'll want to spend in Senate or as a potential State governor. And I have a feeling that if Trump wins it this year she'll be looked at in 2024 as a potential saviour for the Democrats and for the nation itself.
And then there's also the elephant in the room, i.e. race. Afaik Obama left aside almost all mentions of race during his 2008 campaign, or at least made them as brief as possible, for obvious electoral reasons (and those reasons proved out to be correct, as he won said election). He also didn't put much accent on race relations inside the US during his presidency, not even during his second term. I have a feeling a potential candidacy coming from Michelle Obama won't be able to leave the race thing on the side like her husband managed to, things have changed a lot in the meantime (and one could say that 4 more years of Trump will change things even more regarding this subject), can't see a potential Michelle Obama presidency campaign managing to be race-agnostic, at least not in this day and age and in this tense political climate.
I guess we'll have to wait and see.
Hillary won the primary with 16.9M votes to Sanders’ 13.2M, are you telling me Democratic Party has changed its rules such that someone wins the vote like that won’t win the nomination?
Elections that have coverage of results during voting are known to experience very strong positive effects from perception of success already attained (and in US Presidential nominating contests particularly this is known to affect voting both directly and by effecting fundraising, endorsements, etc.), and the coverage of the 2016 primary featured reports of delegates “won” in the nominating contest to date including both pledged delegates secured by voting and superdelegates who had made public commitments, on the basis that those were the expected first ballot votes. Because of her strong early establishment support, the absence of significant establishment competition, Clinton had huge superdelegate commitments at the outset of the nominating contest.
They've changed the rules to prohibit superdelegate voting on the first round unless the result is already determined, and to exclude superdelegates from the total on which the majority needed to win on the first ballot is needed.
The amount of dollars directly contributed by the campaign is a red herring. Trump had WAY more earned media than Clinton, to the tune of billions of dollars.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/16/upshot/measuring-donald-t...
Edit - examples of anti-establishment sentiment prior to Sanders and Trump are Occupy Wallstreet and the Tea Party. Recently I watched 'Saving Capitalism' with Robert Reich (Bill Clinton's former secretary of labour) and it chronicled the rise of anti-establishment sentiment quite well as well as the growth of inequality and how all this lead to the current political landscape. Based on Trump's messaging (his economic platform is basically the canonical right-wing solution to increase wages and employment), CA obviously tapped into all of this.
For people who pride ourselves so much on understanding how systems work, we’re consistently really bad at understanding this one.
Maybe public opinion in the US is fickle or uninformed. Maybe it’s not. Either way it’s not reflected in the US political landscape, for the simple reason that the US political landscape reflects many things more consequential than public opinion.
The idea that a particular candidate was cheated because they won a symbolic but politically irrelevant victory that the competition wasn't even trying for is not a particularly good argument. In fact, it's positively Trumpian; he famously used the "popular vote" argument to discredit Obama's victory.
What Clinton was trying to do was not so much “win the popular vote” but “maximize down-ballot coattails associated with an expected electoral victory” (and, thereby, assure that members of Congress of her party felt thet owed her.)
It's perhaps worth remembering that inability to marshal support from Congressional reps of his own party, particularly it's liberal wing, is what handed her husband two stinging early embarrassments (one of which was defeat on an issue she was the face of): the lesser being NAFTA passing with strong Republican support but widespread and strong Democratic opposition, and the greater being the humiliating defeat of Clinton's signature campaign initiative, health care reform.
How? I rather thought that Nixon (or Ted Kennedy, the principal sponsor of the bill) did that with the Health Maintenance Organization Act of 1973, the federal law that required employers with 25 or more employers to offer them if they offered traditional insurance plans, almost 20 years before Clinton took office.
What Bill Clinton did do after he big health reform failed was HIPAA.
> For people who pride ourselves so much on understanding how systems work, we’re consistently really bad at understanding this one.
Well, CA seems to have understood that what matters is opinions across enough states to win the Electoral College vote. As you said, it's a system. They optimised for the system that exists.
Even if a majority voted for Clinton, there's enough discontent across the US that Trump won the election quite decisively (304 to 227 electoral college votes). Anyhow, look at the current landscape. Warren + Sanders make up nearly 50% of the Democratic primary polls and their popularity seems to be growing as others drop out and as we get closer to actual voting.
The far-left wing of the Democratic party felt that 4 years of chaos under Trump was an acceptable tradeoff in the long-term for moving the party (and the country) to the left on the economy. So they stayed home on election day and made the race close enough for Trump to win. In the current climate, moderates are going to find themselves left out in the cold in national races -- exactly because moderates are relatively easy to pull to one side or the other via targeted campaign advertising.
No, all the polling and other research I've seen showed that non-Clinton supporters on the left (particularly Sanders supporters) supported Clinton more strongly on 2016 than Clinton 2008 supporters supported Obama. What people (largely because it conflicts with the simplistic linear left-right model where people vote for whoever is nearer their position on that line that so many people have internalized as how US elections work) is that Sanders polled substantially better among the disaffected independents, rural working class whites, and other demographics outside of the Democratic liberal base (and even outside of the Democratic Party at all) than Clinton did. Those are the people that, whether by voting the other way or just not turning up to vote at all the way they might have for a candidate that offered them something to turn out for, that made the difference.
> In the current climate, moderates are going to find themselves left out in the cold in national races -- exactly because moderates are relatively easy to pull to one side or the other via targeted campaign advertising.
Moderates aren't easier to pull, people whose variation from the political center isn't along the main axis of variation between the parties are easier to pull. That's not the same thing as moderates.
There's some irony in admonishing people for not understanding systems, while simultaneously failing to understand the electoral college. That's the system that decides who becomes president.
You're forgetting that we're not as a single, monolithic country; we're designed to be a union of (mostly) independent states. It is those state who select the head of the executive however they see fit individually. There is nothing stopping a state from issuing electoral votes by percentage and not by winner-take-all.
Since the Civil War and especially with the expansion of the commerce clause, we don't act quite like (mostly) independent states any more, but those basic premises and rules are still there. To be honest, the system works much like it's intended to -- the rural/agricultural states maintain some power even though since they're rural there are fewer people. This isn't inherently bad; however, I'd argue that making the number of people represented by a single representative essentially unlimited instead of having a bounded maximum like initially designed is the root of our problems. It's possible for states to gain or maintain population and loose representatives and electoral votes under the current system, which is the main issue.
I really find it shocking how extremely biased outlets like MSNBC are in favor of pro-corporations candidates like Clinton, Biden, etc. I very rudely mock my friends who are Democrats and who swear by what the paid shills on MSNBC do to negatively cover any candidate who does not tow the corporate state party line. Of course, it is the same for the rare republican candidates like Ron Paul who also are not paid shills for the corporate state.
How about American business magnate and billionaire playboy who even in his 70s was loved enough by the public to become a TV star?
Yeah I just played the opposite card but for the sake of balance and honesty, here:
https://www.c-span.org/video/?187762-1/united-nations-headqu...
Unless he is simply anti-corruption that doesn't benefit him directly, in case rampant and obvious nepotism is not incompatible with his goal (but, I assume, not what voters were actually hoping for when they elected him).
(1) It's also possible that the Trump family isn't actually as wealthy as they claim to be on paper, in which case being in a position to actually directly influence executive regulatory policy can have significant direct financial impact on their enterprises that they have no opportunity to exploit otherwise. For example, they could have a hand in implementing tax programs while owning significant financial interest in companies regulated by those tax programs (https://www.citizensforethics.org/press-release/crew-files-c...).
The president needs people he can trust. If that means hiring family, I'm fine with that. Other politicians seem to have their kids work for Ukrainian gas companies, which is a lot more disturbing.
Wealth involving real estate is difficult to estimate, but typical estimates are several billion. For example, a drop from 4 billion before the presidency to about 3 billion now is one estimate. This is notably the opposite direction from a typical politician. Increases in wealth are far more suggestive of corruption.
We'll have to agree to disagree, because that is more or less the justification for every system that devolves from meritocracy into capture by a few trusted by connections and back scratching, be it the aerospace partnerships between the military and trusted contractors that exclude less expensive alternatives, the NSA and CIA becoming composed of family members that the agency already believes it has vetted, the Hapsburg dynasty, or the Trump administration.
American is redundant. It is _literally_ a requirement of the office that you be an American. You might remember this because Trump spent almost a decade pretending to believe his predecessor wasn't American. Countries which are more confident don't have such a rule but the American Founding Fathers feared a European power might try to seize control.
Magnate just means wealthy or powerful man so it is also redundant with your other qualifications.
Billionaire is based on Trump's claims, he has gone out of his way to ensure nobody actually knows what he's worth. One of the dirty secrets about "rich lists" is that all the interesting people on them don't have verifiable wealth so the list makers invariably resort to guesswork or fiction.
So that leaves "playboy". My dictionary explains that a playboy is single and devotes their life to pleasure, typically sexual pleasure. But Trump is on his third wife and his main pleasure appears to be either golf or soaking up praise from other people.
In the spirit of the founder of Y Combinator, I'd suggest that perhaps the emotive response signals that there is a sacred cow worth exploring here.
Think about where the data originally came from. People in 2015 downloaded an app, and the app scraped their friends lists. You know what's better than targeting 87 mil loosely connected people? Using the FB algorithm, which targets 330m much, much more accurately and with more connections!
There's a strategy/tactics divide to consider. Relying on FB's targeting algorithms is tactical - that'll give you great targeting once the time comes to execute your campaign.
But CA data, even if noisy, has been exfiltrated out from under privacy controls, so that you can get a much more direct look at it. That allows an analyst to get a more detailed sense of what social networks actually look like. I imagine that is more useful for figuring out what kinds of people you should be targeting in the first place, in order to maximize the leverage of your campaign.
Admittedly I based a bunch of this on Alexander Nix's utterly fascinating OMR presentation (https://youtu.be/6bG5ps5KdDo). As per the parent, it always amazes me at how easy it is to influence someone if you know the right levers to pull.
Just to caveat again - not my specialty, but very interesting all the same!
It’s well known that the data is crap, and much crappier than what both the DNC and RNC were using going into 2016.
So the question remains about why CA generates so much headlines? And is associated so strongly with something magical, nefarious... something that potentially transformed 2016?
The answer is simple, to fit a narrative that 2016 was something other than voters duly electing a legitimate president.
The reason for my skepticism is the crappy podunk nature of the leaked material. The FSB spends billions every year spying on US politicians, surely they’ve managed to find stuff a lot more embarrassing than the boring emails of some dude whose password was “passw0rd”?
Here's some dangling questions brought out from the Mueller report:
* Mueller’s decision not to interview Assange – a central figure who claims Russia was not behind the hack – suggests an unwillingness to explore avenues of evidence on fundamental questions.
* U.S. intelligence officials cannot make definitive conclusions about the hacking of the Democratic National Committee computer servers because they did not analyze those servers themselves. Instead, they relied on the forensics of CrowdStrike, a private contractor for the DNC that was not a neutral party, much as “Russian dossier” compiler Christopher Steele, also a DNC contractor, was not a neutral party. This puts two Democrat-hired contractors squarely behind underlying allegations in the affair – a key circumstance that Mueller ignores.
* Lawyers for Stone discovered that CrowdStrike submitted three forensic reports to the FBI that were redacted and in draft form. When Stone asked to see CrowdStrike's un-redacted versions, prosecutors made the explosive admission that the U.S. government does not have them.
They never even turned over the servers to the FBI? They only submitted a draft report?
Also, why use a Ukrainian company for something so important, do we not have the expertise here in the US to do this? If there's anything we've learned about Ukraine in the last few months, it's that many politician children were making a lot of money there through... let's just say questionable arrangements.
https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2019/07/05/...
CA 'outrage' stories are nothing more than the media wagging the dog.
When you get basic facts like this wrong, it makes me wonder what your interest really is.
The dossier was oppo research. There’s literally nothing controversial about any of it, other than it was leaked and its target successfully spun the few disputed claims into evidence of mass political conspiracy.
"Alperovitch is a naturalized American citizen born in Russia who came to the United States in 1994 with his family."
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dmitri_Alperovitc...
"Dmitri Alperovitch is co-founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of CrowdStrike – responsible for the company’s overall technology vision, strategy, and architecture as well as R&D initiatives."
https://www.crowdstrike.com/about-crowdstrike/executive-team...
It does seem odd that the FBI has claimed in legal filings not to have taken the DNC computers into its possession for forensic analysis, relying entirely on 3rd party analysis, though. I believe this info can be sourced from filings in the Flynn case, which I really wish someone would put up a full archive of, it's been pretty crazy.
[1] https://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ICWSM13/paper/view/...
Any reference from the 50s?
Also, anyone care to recommend modern references that go into these topics? (David Ogilvy comes to mind but that's from the 60s).
Edit: For a reference, https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/75bb/e8a5de1fef2b9da44ca1ed... (dense as heck, but imagine you're an ad man from the 50s when reading it)
It's been a slow build to add layers of targeting on as the media machine grows. It started out with time-based targeting by showing ads for home goods during the daytime (e.g. soap operas were used to sell soap to housewives). Cable TV was a big step forward -- you could craft shows that appealed to narrower demographics like 8-14 year old boys and then sell ads targeting those demographics.
Psychographic segmentation became prevalent along with cable TV and direct mail, but it was limited to a few dozen "personas" until Google came along and allowed keyword targeting, which then gave way to social targeting. It got exponentially more effective with each step, which is why it seemed to come out of nowhere.
I think "since the 50s" should be taken as evidence against these models. Myers-Briggs first came into vogue in the late 1950s, and has been used for career counseling and hiring since despite being utterly unfit for purpose. Priming work dates to the 70s, and now it appears that many of the long-term uses advertising relies on don't replicate. The 'decoy effect' that drives many product strategies was formalized in the 1980s, and recent work suggests it exists only under very narrow conditions. Modern industry leaders like the Food and Brand Lab have apparently spent the last 20 years publishing absolute nonsense. Even results 'validated' with A/B testing are in many cases just noise from misusing statistics.
Precisely because we didn't have microtargeting or consumer-level feedback, all we've had since the 1950s is the belief that we can build and use these models. We know ads basically work, they improve brand recognition and reputation, but the Don Draper psychological rationales are essentially just-so stories written in the absence of data.
(As far as CA, no one seems to have dug up any seriously unusual patterns in 2016 voting. So unless they paired high-impact psychological targeting with an elaborate statistical coverup, what they actually did with the data wasn't exceptional.)
1. My understanding is that CA wasn't just executing FB ads. Is your assumption that this was their only technique?
2. Are you aware of the specific techniques CA used?
3. What would be the purpose of CA obtaining the data then?
2) Nothing beyond whats publically available.
3) It's not unusual to test different audiences, I've definitely tested all sorts. I'm sure thats how it started for Cambridge. Of course now, tin pot dictatorships hire them all around the world now to be basically a subpar FB agency, so they're happy with the PR.
Both google and FB are financially incentivized to provide as much granularity in targeting as possible so they can charge more money to advertisers, who'll get a better return and get promoted. All up until the point that it becomes a liability. Thats the line they're walking - you can totally target quite a few things that end up correlating to say, neurotic people, if you know your audience is neurotic people. You have enough of the dataset at that point.
Or so the story goes. Is it actually true that tighter audience restrictions (targeting) produce better returns?
Mostly the standards of rigour in the field of psychology are deemed flimsy and a lot of findings have failed to replicate.
It's my understanding that Big Five has been replicated consistently across different languages and cultures over the last 90 years and is one of the only things we're fairly sure of in psychology at this point.
The accusation was that it was "unproven hogwash". That doesn't check out.
Depends on how much of a premium you pay for that precision.
But one question I wanted to ask is, which is very non-expert: was the value of the CA dataset that you can see how people are linked? I understand that you’re far more likely to believe a message if it comes from someone you know. So if CA could identify “sharers”, they could simply hit them again and again and again with information that would be forwarded. Or does FB give this functionality too?
From an advertising performance standpoint yes, lookalikes and segmented email lists might perform best on the basis of maximizing engagement, shares, etc. that traditional reporting would suggest. But for a political campaign, enhancing the precision of issue-based messaging to target specific groups should theoretically have yielded gains beyond what the FB algorithm would optimize for – which would likely be more generalized based on in-platform behavior, and muddied by swaths of broadly viral content. While the desired signals might lie somewhere within Facebook's black box, I doubt that the algorithm is generally optimized for this type of political work, when FB's real money comes from driving product sales, signups, etc. In the cases of these political campaigns a lot of this content extended beyond spin to blatantly false information (i.e. made up / completely fake news, inflammatory memes, etc.) – therefore the variance in messaging could be unfathomably massive, limited only by the ability to generate huge amounts of content, which is where content / troll farms came into play.
And advertising aside, the Senate intelligence reports from a couple months ago suggested that the most powerful and far-reaching operations run by CA and similar parties were not based on advertising, and moreso around Facebook groups, Twitter bot / follower networks, and Instagram influencer spheres – recruiting real people into them, then propagating information within (e.g., a 2nd amendment group, run by false avatar accounts aligned with this voter profile, recruiting similar actual users in, and then propagating the desired information within). I've personally seen prior examples from 2014 of these types of mass influence campaigns, namely in the 2014 Senate race in North Carolina, where the seat was flipped to Tillis (R) from the incumbent Hagan (D).
If they had account information / emails, psychographic data, voter rolls, and were operating across platforms – the richness of the data would dictate how far you could go with it. According to the Senate report many of the hired trolls maintained multiple accounts across multiple platforms, were given marching orders each day for messaging, and quotas for performance. Match that with sheer manpower to create content to feed across these platforms, and enough horsepower on the analytics side to optimize based on performance, and you're staring into a frightening abyss.
We'll likely never know how far this went, but based on the data points I've seen from my own work and various reports on the CA / Russia campaigns, I see no reason why something this powerful couldn't exist with enough data, and enough money to put it to work.
The senate intelligence report is essential reading on the topic: https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/docu...
What makes you think that people are malleable? This article doesn't say anything about the effectiveness of what CA did. It's impossible to say if people voted the way they did because of a FB ad. My >20 years of experience in the consumer technology (ad) industry tells me that ads had little to no impact.
> Not enough to flip people's opinions 180 degrees, but enough to, say, get a reality TV star elected over a politician with a checkered history (that has itself been subject to decades of effort and millions spent to make said history checkered).
Clinton vs Trump wasn't an option people were waying. No one switched from Clinton to Trump (or vice versa) because of an ad or anything else. Those that hate Clinton voted for Trump, those that hate Trump voted for Clinton. It's really is as simple as that.
Have you ever met or even heard of someone who supported one of those candidates but switched to the other? I haven't.
People tend to stick to a small number of news sources, so these sources only tell one side of a story.
You need as much of the info as possible to think for yourself, and you can be manipulated by what you have witnessed.
Everyone who you will ask will absolutely say they aren't influenced by advertising, yet the branded products are still successful despite being more expensive.
For example medication, people still are buying Tylenol, Mortin, Aleve despite there being cheaper alternatives that are essentially the same thing: Acetaminophen, Ibuprofen, Naproxen. They will start buying these generics only after they are educated that these things are the same thing.
If you're looking for an insurance company (for a car, life etc) you will tend to chose companies that you heard the name of. You might pick up one that's not familiar (to you) only after you do research or someone else will recommend it to you.
It's same with politics, if you would do research I don't think those campaigns would influence you much, but most people won't have time to do a research.
Delivery of the Trump message absolutely resonated with and flipped voters who normally vote democratic or who wouldn't vote. Union members, Catholics, etc. In my county, which hasn't elected a GOP candidate in 30 years, it drove 5% more republican votes than 2004/2008/2016. That matters in competitive places.
Bernie Sanders was very similar on the democratic side. Many people not so happy with the mainstream party candidate were attracted to his message, which was delivered mostly via social media, especially early on.
Don't discount the power of social platforms. The impact of a good targeted message is real on its own, but is magnified when your dad/cousin/friend/boss implicitly endorses the message by commenting or sharing. If you look at Trump's campaign, that made it possible to say and do socially unacceptable things. "Make America Great Again" means something to people who support him... they find it inspirational.
The difference here and ordinary ad is, that unlike ads which target people based on where they live, interests, gender, income and many other things, here they categorize people by a psychological profile and then use whichever triggers work best. They also use other information to trigger emotional responses. For example my family member is a veteran who is a Republican. He forwards plenty of messages that has intentions to scare him and make be even more to the right. For example some article of a parent of a soldier who got a note on his car from supposed liberal wishing him that his son would be killed, or liberals burning flags, or democrats not standing up and clapping when a widow of a soldier that died (it was in 2017 I believe) was honored by Trump etc. It is trivial to manipulate pictures or recreate scenarios that would trigger, but those things work really well on him, and he wasn't even a nut before.
> Clinton vs Trump wasn't an option people were waying. No one switched from Clinton to Trump (or vice versa) because of an ad or anything else. Those that hate Clinton voted for Trump, those that hate Trump voted for Clinton. It's really is as simple as that.
> Have you ever met or even heard of someone who supported one of those candidates but switched to the other? I haven't.
Yes if you're hardcore Democrat or Republican and only vote in party lines, it's unlikely that you will be changed, but then you would be classified as a different profile.
The effort was to discourage Democrats from voting or even make them vote 3rd party (for example there was a campaign that made Clinton look quite evil, and frankly it fooled me too), everyone else was encouraged to vote for Trump (in different ways depending on their profile).
Back in 2016 I saw on /r/AskReddit a question, someone was asking why Trump supporters were planning to vote for Trump. What stick with me was one response where person acknowledged that Trump was bad, but he still was going to vote for him, because he hated establishment and "it needs to get real bad before it gets better". People have different personalities and reasons but if you can categorize them correctly you can provide them reason they want to make them cast a vote for candidate you want.
What we say was a constituency that was upset with the status quo. When given a chance to vote for an outsider, they jumped on it. I think advertising played little to no role in the 2016 election and I've yet to see data to suggest otherwise.
The messages were more in the tune: "Trump maybe is not the greatest, but Hilary will be a catastrophe."
https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/docu...
I'd say its entirely irrational to vote for the program as outlined by the candidate speeches. Because they rarely happen.
It's not a problem with democracy. Its a problem with people and power.
First step you examine all the available options objectively, like any other decision.
Do you think the majority of voters do that?
> I'd say its entirely irrational to vote for the program as outlined by the candidate speeches. Because they rarely happen.
Right, but this another problem altogether.
I'm getting some cynic vibes from your comment. Are you against voting?
That is to say, they don't vote in a manner consistent with how you perceive their interests.
There's quite a lot of literature on the topic, and it's quite fascinating. For example, higher education has a tendency to change people's answers to a variety of survey questions (summary of this and other phenomena in the book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_the_Rational_Voter).
Having interests is not mutually exclusive to acting irrationally.
A party is a semi-formalized way of acknowledging those long-term bargains. They are sets of people with overlapping concerns -- sometimes distantly overlapping, where A and B have things in common, as do B and C, but A and C barely recognize each other. But if you can't get A, B, and C all to work together, none of them get what they want.
And in the worst case for them, X, Y, and Z achieve what they want instead -- positions that A, B, and C all agree are bad. The party that behaves with unity will get things that some of its members want and all members can live with. The party that has people opt out every time they disagree will achieve less-than-nothing.
The point is that a party can be a rational long-term decision even if it seems in conflict with short-term interests.
Only assuming that there is something like a constant ideology that party members adhere to over the decades.
I'd say it's not unreasonable to commit to a party and re-evaluate that commitment every decade (or perhaps 8 years is a better figure in the US). That's not to say that you won't be constantly looking out for new information, like a technological change that makes you reconsider your ideas or the discovery that some candidate is very untrustworthy. But if you want anything nontrivial done, it's not going to happen on a time frame shorter than a half-decade -- and your allies are going to want to believe that you'll still be with them once they've achieved your top priority.
But that's a rational attitude and not what I was describing initially.
A lot of people commit to a party for all their voting life which generally is quite a few decades. Sometimes this even goes for generations.
And a new alliance isn't easy to construct. You can't just go to the opposite party and say, "I've swung to you, so start catering to my priorities". Usually, you'll spend some time voting for nobody, in hopes that somebody will notice you, but that's hard without some level of organization, and that's work. In the meantime, you're failing to vote for a party that you had at least some sympathy for, and possibly losing to a party that has no reason to be on your side.
So a lot of people make party-line decisions based on inertia. They could improve their situation, but it's not as simple as changing their vote, since the existing alliances have priorities that won't change for a few votes. That leaves a lot of people in limbo, where there is no really great rational choice.
At the end of the day, one of two people almost always win. Either the person who spent more, or the person who was more outrageous. Democracy largely reduces to a competition to be louder, and those are the primary means to the ends.
Ad experts and entertainment companies have claimed this for decades, and who knows, it may even be true. But it is true that it's how they justify getting paid.
I would dispute this claim, as it has yet to be proven any of the work Cambridge Analytica did was in any way influential or effective. As someone who has worked extensively in data science, including on marketing campaigns, I'm becoming increasingly convinced that the effectiveness of advertising, or at least targeted advertising, is so overstated as to be bordering on snake-oil. Others working in the space agree [0].
[0] https://thecorrespondent.com/100/the-new-dot-com-bubble-is-h...
Many people are marketing averse, and marketing at them will have a negative effect. It just seems that there are enough people around who respond positively to marketing to make it a successful business.
I'll support the authors (and their conclusions) by clicking on the ads links on the site /j
I feel like I've just experienced an extreme microcosm of this: I recently treated myself to an expensive power amplifier... and reluctantly embarked on the painful process of choosing appropriate audio cables. Through the other side I am still in disbelief over how entrenched the market and consumers are in their pseudo scientific BS - so much craziness - and almost every successful cable manufacturer and professional reviewer is in on the game (of which there are countless).
I'm usually of the opinion that within healthy competitive markets, capitalism tends to provides a kind of democracy, hopefully with emerging attributes such as honesty which naturally push the consumer towards making good decisions without being deeply informed - but clearly that is not always the case.
It's relatively simple to become informed about the basics of audio cables such as speaker wire [0], but that's not enough, you need a strong disposition of skepticism to wade through the sea of nonsense claims based on (real) electrical properties plucked from the science of general EE and sprinkled irrelevantly all over audio cable marketing and reviews and then echoed by it's users... that's the easy bit, next you will have another sea of anecdotal ABX reviewers that start to persuade you that the science could be missing something, now you enter the world of improper ABX tests, and the psychology of greater_cost+any_change = perceived as improved (e.g improving sound through simply disturbing wire connections, causing destabilisation of older amps by increasing the wire capacitance and hearing the added artificial oscillations as "detail").
TL;DR
It's possible to wade through all this, just like it is with political BS by looking up or testing every single claim - but it's exhausting! especially when there are so few people doing it.
I think we need to somehow fundamentally change people's attitude towards new information: with a high degree of scepticism... at some point it will become easier when the balance between BS generated and people debunking BS makes it undesirable and risky to bother generating BS.
I still remember in the late 90s early 00s some friends claimed that some blank CDs were better than others for audio and sounded better. Then I asked if when burning a word document to such CDs it had better text than on the cheaper CDs.
More importantly, these people have realized it is far easier to shape the environment to the individual than mould the individual to the environment. When you can engulf an individual in his own filter bubble, you no longer have to predict his behavior, but can literally shape it.
I'm not yelling 'conspiracy!' or anything, but it's notable that this isn't more widely reported. I'll be watching them with interest.
[0] - https://www.newsweek.com/what-emerdata-scl-group-executives-...
[1] - https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/10911848/officers
Is there any rock solid evidence around this yet? As far as I'm aware it's still in the realm of conspiracy theory. Given how far she's spun hearsay, circumstantial evidence and speculation, I'm betting if Carole Cadwalladr etc. did have anything concrete we'd never hear the end of it.
https://www.politico.eu/article/cambridge-analytica-leave-eu...
Is that factually correct? I was under the impression that facebook gave them API access.
Back in the mid-'00s, we started implementing something against FB's API and I was more than a bit shocked to discover that their solution for preventing someone from building a parallel network of friend relationships out of the available dataset was "Please don't do that, and anyway if you try to do it at scale we'll probably detect the bandwidth consumption and shut you down." Not great.
It was against the Facebook ToS, but the data was still provided easily via the API. That's what allowed them to quickly build a database of most eligible voters with very little direct outreach.
https://www.vox.com/2018/3/17/17134072/facebook-cambridge-an...
They can call it that sure, but if they didn’t restrict access it’s hard to take this as anything but Facebook covering the entire point of their api—to get user data. Hell, if this is theft I should add “master burglar” to my resume—scraping in spite of being an obvious TOS violation is common in the industry. It’s certainly not a crime.
I think most are basing it on the assumption that CA with the help of Facebook could target millions of americans in a personalized way and display ads that would nudge them to a certain political candidate.
No way to say it's a guaranteed method, but it's as effective as bill board marketers proving their ads change people's opinions about a brand.
That's where most of the presential election fund raises go to anyway right? to reach out to people and sway their opinion?
I don't know, but that alone isn't a convincing argument.
> ...ads that would nudge them to a certain political candidate
> ...that's where most of the presential election fund raises go to...
Perhaps. The question is, what is the effect? I would wager it is very small to nil.
It was quite a genius marketing method to reach millions.
https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/docu...
- amount of $ campaign may collect and spend
- granularity of users segment campaign may target
Is this how you are using the word? Where are the lack of facts in how CA melded elections?
CA's job was to meddle in elections, the question is if it's effective. there is very little evidence that it worked.
Off topic, but I feel like saying it: here in the USA, the administrations of presidents Obama and Trump have really tried to stomp out valid whistle blowing efforts. I hope that history is very harsh on both presidents in this issue in the future when people start to ask how democracies got so subverted by corporate/elite interests.
edit: provide link, and clarify.
https://www.wired.com/story/what-did-cambridge-analytica-rea...
Cambridge worked both for the Trump campaign and a Trump-aligned Super PAC.
Cambridge Analytica was paid $5.9 million by the Trump campaign, according to Federal Election Commission filings
If you have a source that shows otherwise, please share.
Either way, I'm not sure the distinction you're making is very significant?
Parscape's denial is not in itself evidence, but I do agree with rsynnott that it's neither here nor there.