Probably the most useful takeaway from CA's approach is that it's useful to realize how malleable opinions are of large swaths of "independent" voters. Ad experts and entertainment companies have known this for decades, but I get the sense the average American citizen still thinks of themselves as a free and independent thinker and not a product of their environment.
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).
I'm a professional FB marketer and have managed both large budgets for private companies and also done political campaigns. I guarantee the trump campaign doesn't use the low quality Cambridge Analytica scraped data in their targeting. They either use voter file records or lookalikes (like everyone else does). All CA data so released so far has been useless, untargeted stuff.
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!
> Probably the most useful takeaway from CA's approach is that it's useful to realize how malleable opinions are of large swaths of "independent" voters. Ad experts and entertainment companies have known this for decades, but I get the sense the average American citizen still thinks of themselves as a free and independent thinker and not a product of their environment.
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].
While I agree with "how malleable opinions are...", the actual answer is, "not very malleable". Every well-designed study of political advertising I've ever seen has shown that it's impact is very small, in some cases unmeasurably small. Thus, for example, the 2016 Clinton campaign raised a lot more $$ than the Trump campaign, whereas the Sanders primary campaign out-fundraised the Clinton one.
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).
You don't even need as good as on average in the right circumstances. Take Britain, which only has a sample size of its 650 constituents and whose votes within those are not represented if not the majority. In fact, the seat of power rests in those seats which can flip flop by very small margins.
>> the average American citizen still thinks of themselves as a free and independent thinker and not a product of their environment.
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.
> Ad experts and entertainment companies have known this for decades,
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.
>it's useful to realize how malleable opinions are of large swaths of "independent" voters.
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.
The biggest issue in democracy is that the majority of people vote irrationally. For example a lot of people will vote the same party no matter what or will vote for a candidate because they like him/her regardless of the program.
> Ad experts and entertainment companies have known this for decades, but I get the sense the average American citizen still thinks of themselves as a free and independent thinker and not a product of their environment.
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.
Anti-establishment sentiment has been brewing for awhile. Some candidates simply tapped into that (Bernie, Trump) whereas the losing candidates either pretended everything was fine (Clinton) or relied on older political ideas (Cruz). I don't think CA was responsible for forming opinions so much as knowing exactly how to exploit existing opinions. And anti-establishment opinions are still popular (Warren and Sanders are 2 of the 3 Democrat front-runners) despite media messaging.
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.
Ultimately a non-trivial number of people have a collection of views that confound traditional left/right political boundaries in the US. I think CA was (allegedly) very effective in promoting issues that emphasized particular collections of views well, specifically on immigration.
> Probably the most useful takeaway from CA's approach is that it's useful to realize how malleable opinions are of large swaths of "independent" voters.
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.
One thing I notice often gets glossed over when Cambridge Analytica comes up is that they didn't really shut down at all. While CA ceased trading, a company called Emerdata was created around that time by the same directors [0]. Their Company's House filing documents can be seen here: [1].
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.
After having seen The Great Hack https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9358204/ over the weekend, it's hard to imagine how the scope expanded again. They used the developing countries all over the world as practice for UK brexit and US's 2016 elections.
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.
The developer of the app "thisisyourdigitallife" handed over data collected from that app to Cambridge Analytica. Facebook claims this violates their TOS. Based on that, the data can be called stolen.
They were getting a small number of users to fill out quizzes on Facebook. Unfortunately, the Facebook API gave them information not just about the user who filled out the quiz, but of all of that user's friends.
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.
I remain unconvinced that Cambridge Analytica had any material impact on the election. Please give me some hard evidence to the contrary. This whole scandal seems like a red herring onto which people project their a) anger about their losing candidate or b) their personal and often unsubstantiated beliefs about the "harm" they could experience due to "big data".
The Senate intelligence committee report from October is the most detailed look into their operation. In sum, you're looking at an operation across platforms (FB, Twitter, etc.), with the manpower to generate endless content and avatar accounts, with this type of data in addition to what the political campaigns already had.
how would you prove the inverse of this? i.e cambridge analytics didn't have any material impact.
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?
Yes, FB & CA should be hold accountable for abusing user privacy, but real elephant in the room is about the legislation of political campaigns, specifically:
- amount of $ campaign may collect and spend
- granularity of users segment campaign may target
In politics , the best manipulation campaign is to have a vision that moves people. Why are american Dems stirring again the CA pot? It s frankly bad publicity at this moment to blame everything to the evil bad actors. It may appeal to a small part of their voter base, but conspiracies usually alienate moderate/undecided ppl
Conspiracies tend to have the connotation as stories believed by a small segment of the population hoping to have access to secret knowledge that tends to be wrong and based in narrative rather than facts.
Is this how you are using the word? Where are the lack of facts in how CA melded elections?
I think that people who are whistle blowers and release information like this are hero’s and deserve as much protection as civil society can offer them.
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.
The story incorrectly reports the company was hired for the trump campaign to do data work.
As per https://youtu.be/yjn6wK01cqk?t=1878 only staff were hired.
Specifically "which infamously used stolen Facebook data to target voters for President Donald Trump’s campaign in the 2016 U.S. election" from the article is inaccurate.
[+] [-] shadowgovt|6 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] cm2012|6 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] bart_spoon|6 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] rossdavidh|6 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] qmmmur|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sifar|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] JackFr|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] basch|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pier25|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomxor|6 years ago|reply
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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speaker_wire
[+] [-] Mikeb85|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] akhilcacharya|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] freepor|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] boobePhuu7iet7i|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] malvosenior|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Moodles|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] luxuryballs|6 years ago|reply
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...
https://youtu.be/CXmXd1xrBUQ
[+] [-] 0xADEADBEE|6 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] fmakunbound|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] growlist|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] sschueller|6 years ago|reply
Is that factually correct? I was under the impression that facebook gave them API access.
[+] [-] dfxm12|6 years ago|reply
https://www.vox.com/2018/3/17/17134072/facebook-cambridge-an...
[+] [-] everdev|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] thomasmarcelis|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xibalba|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rumblerock|6 years ago|reply
https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/docu...
[+] [-] nojvek|6 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] freewizard|6 years ago|reply
- amount of $ campaign may collect and spend
- granularity of users segment campaign may target
[+] [-] n4r9|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] buboard|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SpaceManNabs|6 years ago|reply
Is this how you are using the word? Where are the lack of facts in how CA melded elections?
[+] [-] mzs|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mark_l_watson|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] lerie|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] linusnext|6 years ago|reply
edit: provide link, and clarify.
[+] [-] Jakawao|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] linusnext|6 years ago|reply