If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future

Jill Lepore is also a staff writer at New Yorker, whose writing appears regularly in it.

But I guess her recent book is one reason why all these media outlets are covering the same historical topic right now!

This realization really pushed me away from mainstream media entirely. I explicitly remember and can still find articles about Obama's campaign being cutting edge by using "behavioral data" (https://theweek.com/articles/451328/how-obama-won-internet). Yet when the same actions were taken by conservative candidates it was ridiculed. As an independent I just couldn't trust these sources any longer.

Yes the methods of data collection were slightly different between Obama's campaign and what Cambridge Analytica did and sold to conservative candidates. Obama's campaign claimed they didn't do as much with the data and it was within the FB ToS, but these claims don't change the ethics and since 2004 both parties have been building their data infrastructure out to sway voters (https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2012/10/obamas-secret-we...).

Both parties are nefarious in their use of data and attempt to persuade voters through micro-targeted outrage, and it makes me wary of ever voting for either of the two parties' candidate.

Is there any evidence the Obama campaign did what Cambridge Analytica/Trump was being criticized for?

Which was harvest private data (including messages and news feed) from Facebook users and their friends via an app that was ostensibly non-political, and then in turn sell it to a super PAC that for microtargeting. I'll note that the super PAC involved was likely coordinating with a campaign in violation of FEC campaign finance laws.

The CA scandal resulted in a $5 billion fine to Facebook by the FTC.

I think it's disingenuous to say what the Obama campaign and Trump/Cambridge did were close to the same.

Ya, the double standard is obvious. I laughed when I read all these articles about Trump which were the same about Obama on this issue, but with a completely different tone.

Obama's was a get out the vote campaign which is different from Trump and Russia's active misinformation campaigns.

This doesn't show it worked. It shows that CA is connected to other similar companies either through a direct relationship or a tortured, barely tenuous connection (the slide on how some employees went to work for other companies in the same space is silly). Regardless, at no point does it attempt to even show that anything that CA did made one lick of a difference or that anything they did was even unprecedented in the space. For example, I don't believe for a second that Democratic campaigns haven't been using similar social media aggregation techniques in present and past elections. I even remember glowing articles written about how the Obama campaign was able to harness social media for purposes of political targeting and messaging.

So what are we talking about here?

And the entire thing is even more ridiculous in the larger context of how incompetent and disorganized the Trump 2016 campaign was.

Thanks, I somehow missed this, will read shortly.

Meanwhile, one aspect of the 2016 presidential coverage that drives me nuts is the omission that HRC's voter file was stolen and likely used by GOP, Trump, Russia.

Meaning they knew exactly who to target.

A campaign's voter file is it's Crown Jewels, it's secret sauce. It is the campaign.

HRC knew they had a problem in MN, WI, PA. They just couldn't figure out what was going on in time. Plus a zillion other things going on.

Again, will read your link soonest. It might help me fill in a few more of the puzzle pieces.

Okay. I quickly scanned the linked graphcommons presentation (?). Instead of responding to that directly, I'll share the thesis I've been chewing for a while.

I worked on election integrity stuff for about a decade. Opposing the touchscreens, tabulators, and other blackboxes. Advocating for better administration. That kind of stuff.

Like with all learning, my understanding of the problem dramatically changed over time.

The biggest threat to election integrity is change. With great reluctance I came to the view that any future changes had to be slow-rolled, even the phase out of the touchscreens. Think of it as how first responders stabilize the patient before transporting that patient.

The second biggest threat is noise. It's the asymmetry of bullshit principle. It's just so fucking hard to figure out what's going on. We spend all our time chasing wild gooses. So much slips past our attentions.

Only then can I think of the actually machinery of democracy. Stuff like form of elections, procedures, transparency, etc.

This frame and my own campaign work (stumping, GOTV, etc) informs how I regard CA and others.

The biggest threat CA poses is Steve Bannon's "flood the zone" with bullshit strategy. With so much activity below the radar, it's impossible to talk rationally about this stuff. Because there's always more to the story. Which is the trap, the exact purpose of Bannon's strategy.

The skeptics say CA, social media, etc. didn't effect voter behavior, specifically costing HRC the election.

That's entirely besides the point.

Other factors absolutely moved voters. We could stack rank them. Comey's betrayal is probably the biggest. My two personal faves are HRC's reliance on negative partisanship (too many attack ads), and HRC's desperate need to tangle with corporate media (instead of just creating HillaryTV and speaking directly to voters like Trump did with Twitter).

But there are many fights in the margins that most commentators completely ignore or outright dismiss. What we election integrity people called "death by a thousand cuts." It's never just one thing that makes the difference. That's too obvious and will eventually be corrected. Rather it's the cumulative damage of 1,000s of small attacks. Asymmetric war fare.

By keeping the contest "close", it becomes possible for the jitter (noise) to make the difference, depending on timing of the snapshot (when you measure).

And now we get to what CA and others did. Buried in all the noise, they used HRC's stolen voter file to precisely target and overwhelm "undecided" and low motivation voters. Maybe 500,000 voters in total. Tiny percentage of the electorate.

And Trump got lucky. It was just barely enough. Smaller in impact than say Jill Stein's spoiler. But on top of every thing else, it made the difference.

("Undecided" in quotes, because that's another topic onto itself.)

Some people (largely on the left) like to treat Cambridge Analytica as a dark boogey-man that broke politics.

This is partly true, however, a lot of hysteria around it is based off taking CA's marketing copy at face value.

The Cruz campaign (IIRC) fired them because they were useless.