Cambridge Analytica were the tip of the iceberg
graphcommons.com
graphcommons.com
---
When Obama won in '08 and '12, his team of data "nerds" were lauded as geniuses.
Examples:
How Obama Tapped Into Social Networks’ Power
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/10/business/media/10carr.htm...
When the Nerds Go Marching In
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/when-...
Can someone distinguish between what Obama and Trump were doing when it comes to digital campaigning?
Amused at the downvotes. It is true. You can not like Clinton and not vote for her, or Obama. I don't judge and people can disagree. But the amount of false content in those campaigns (which came to be known as "fake news" after the fact) was unprecedent, was aided/spreaded by foreign sources, and was largely on partisan lines. Evidence includes https://news.stanford.edu/2017/01/18/stanford-study-examines... among countless others). It would be just as wrong if, say, the Sander campaign did the same thing.
I would be in favor of that if we also blocked media coverage of the election other than strictly objective dates and times style coverage. No opinion sections in newspapers, no “John Oliver” type shows talking about politics, no Fox and Friends, etc.
Otherwise, you give tremendous power to the owners of media companies and then all the previous funds that were raised will go towards buying or starting media companies so they can give your candidate favorable coverage.
If we only fixed the media coverage of the election while still not allowing Puerto Ricans to vote in the Primaries, and still allow super governmental agencies (like the DNC) to conspire with candidates, I don’t think a lot would change.
But it’s been widely accepted since West Wing first aired that corruption in America’s electoral system (and politics generally) can be traced back to campaign finance reform as patient-0.
Representatives are constantly campaigning and raising money for the next election and the rest follows from freeing them to actually do their job.
Edit: I’m not sure which reforms you are referring to, but I bet that corruption existed in American politics before that, even before election financing was a thing. Corruption is a serious problem in democracies that have serious and strict regulations on campaign financing. A prime example here is Israel.
Right now it is literally all graft and no progress at all to the point that we can barely pass the same bloated terrible budget we pass every year.
I'm sorry, but I think this kind of practice should be banned no matter if it's true, false, political, commercial, non-profit, or whatever.
That said there is still a world of difference using it to spread your agenda, vs. using it to spread false information in order to spread your agenda.
While microtargeting is a fact and not forbidden by national law, we need to understand why people use it and universally condemn it when people use it to spread lies.
... and Facebook thinks that's a problem because it's using Facebook to compete with Facebook, not for other moral reasons. They were breaking the part of the TOS where app developers were banned from trying to reconstitute the social network dataset outside of Facebook via secondary signal.
Don't confuse using "FB advertising platform" with "stealing FB data outside of their terms and selling it"
If CA was not involved and Trump campaign merely used FB advertising, we wouldn't be arguing about this particular point. Still bad on FB, but that is a different matter.
So, campaigns I agree with getting their message out is great, but campaigns I disagree with can’t use these technologies.
"Timeline of investigations into Trump and Russia (2019–2020)" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_investigations_int...
I have no interest in accusing anyone of anything but will point to timelines of documented activity that are hosted on a website widely considered to be a reliable source of information. I think those accusations are distinct from "Pizzagate" in ways that are obvious.
Is there even any proof that these micro-targeting campaigns swayed the election in anyway? Has anyone stopped to consider that maybe enough people just preferred Trump over Hillary and the election outcome was not the result of a some facebook ads?
Murder and attempted murder are both crimes.
With the premise that advertisements are information streams that are designed to modify a person's behavior, I have few questions for you:
1. Do you believe that advertising is effective?
2. Do you believe that targeted advertising is more effective than non-targeting advertising?
3. Do you believe that misrepresenting information in an advertisement is acceptable?
There is no evidence of this though. Have you considered that whatever you have read to suggest that a "disproportionate" amount of disinformation is from the right is itself a disinformation campaign by the left?
Maybe another way to look at it would be: Nobody would give a shit if "micro-targeting" had been used against Trump. The hand wringing over all of this is solely the result of a humiliated establishment trying to save face by pretending some Facebook ads cost them the election rather than their own hubris.
I'll ask again, what evidence is there that these micro-targeted ads swayed a single vote, much less the entire election? At what granularity is it "okay" to target an advertisement?
Much of it spread by himself, no?
You are not alone in not seeing any evidence. Professional journalists with years of experience have the same problem.
But until we either learn how to overcome this limitation with new investigative techniques, or—better yet—regulate political campaigns with national laws, I suggest we remember the fact that: “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”[2]
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymaWq5yZIYM
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance#Absenc...
Could you point me to some resources so that I might have a better understanding?
> When CA was closed down many employees simply moved to new companies doing the exact same thing. One of the more well known of these is Emerdata, not just sharing some of the same workers from CA but also funded by the same family.
> Not everyone is aware, but CA was just a small part of a parent organisation called SCL. Pretty much all of the companies shown (in blue) on the left are/were part of this group.
https://idlewords.com/talks/ancient_web.htm
Basically we've seen this kind of cultural manipulation on a massive scale before more than once. The last time it happened the manipulators were people like Joseph Goebbels. Remember the first thing the Nazi's did when they annexed a territory was to seize all forms of mass communication. Radios were replaced with new radios that could only be tuned to Nazi stations.
But I heard from a talk given by a Hungarian Jew, Robert Holczer, who was secretly working for the Antifa in the city of Prague that was under control of the Nazis in the 40s. Even when listening to Nazi radio with their propaganda, he could tell when the tide had turned against Germany. There are always clues, he said; He figured out that the Normandy Invasion was successful by listening to Nazi Propaganda, for example.
Eventually the culture-hacking turns against the hackers.
edit: found a recording and a transcript, https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn504887
An undecided voter told MSNBC their cynical coverage of Sanders made her angry enough she said ‘Okay, Bernie’s got my vote.' On live TV.
I'm not really sure why this is such a surprise. Think about the dot com boom. People were hopping all over the place. I remember one friend who was a developer and chased the money from company to company to company. All the companies wanted to be the next "future of the internet backbone" technology companies.
I would imagine its the same here. You have a specific set of skills, when one company gets shut down, you hop to the next company doing the same thing where you can continue utilizing the skills you were using at the last company.
To me, this is just standard career trajectory. The fact the work they're doing is morally questionable obviously doesn't concern them when they're making fat money doing it.
edit: in case anyone here is just reading the headline, be sure to go through to the end. Seeing Parscale connected to this is concerning (though it may be a tenuous connection).
When Obama was doing it nobody wanted to beat that bastard.
What happened?
Who were manipulating search results in his favor. And will again.
Particularly when the goal of KGB like entity is not necessarily to prop up one particular candidate or policy, but to generally sow discord. The fact that propaganda aligns with your views does not mean it isn't propaganda. We are not only particularly vulnerable, but playing right into these actors' hands when we pretend that only one side of our bipolar politics is subject to nefarious influence.
It's very easy to conclusively show only one side of the story if no one reputable is looking into the other.