As mentioned in the comments on the other hacker news post about facebook profiles being scraped by Cambridge Analytica:
1. Obama's 2008 election absolutely bragged about their use of social media to win. I vividly remember multiple long articles in the NYTimes talking about how they exploited new tech to reach voters.
2. During the 2016 election Clinton raised and spent nearly double trump. On top of that most of the money Trump got was towards the end of the election whereas Clinton had huge coffers from day one.
3. I read the guardian article linked and this is one of the few parts that seem to mention what exactly this "hacker" strategy was at Cambridge Analytica
>“And then I came across a paper about how personality traits could be a precursor to political behaviour, and it suddenly made sense. Liberalism is correlated with high openness and low conscientiousness, and when you think of Lib Dems they’re absent-minded professors and hippies. They’re the early adopters… they’re highly open to new ideas. And it just clicked all of a sudden.”
This is the insight that that apparently is being called a "psychological warfare tool?" You're telling me that Clinton's campaign didn't have sociologists and psychologists who were absolutely obsessed with exactly the same advertising criteria? This kind of psychological profiling is the kind of stuff you learn about in 101 classes at university. For the past 80 years (that I as a lay person know of, probably longer) people have spent their entire careers analyzing and applying propaganda and marketing to political campaigns. Why should anyone believe based on what's being presented in this article that not only was none of this stuff done before but that it somehow handed Trump one of the greatest election upsets in American history? The mental gymnastics people are going through to deny the fact that yes, many voters have conservative values, is getting out of hand.
Basically, Cambridge Analytica took the behaviorally targeted ad approach that's taken over the Internet, and applied it to political campaigns. So they're doing psychological profiling at the individual level. They targeted likely Clinton and Sanders voters with messages that discouraged voting. They targeted likely Trump voters with messages that bolstered support and encouraged voting. Messages in ads. In Facebook and Twitter posts by agents and bots. Telephone calls. Physical visits by canvassers, who carried phones with apps that provided real time access to individual user profiles.
That was new tech!
But of course, now everyone will be using it. If they can afford it, anyway. And what does that portend for democracy? Nothing good, I'd argue.
What laws, specifically, do you believe the Clinton campaign broke with their "collusion" and in what way was the Clinton campaign's social media strategy intended to deceive?
And for bonus points, why does this only, specifically, implicate Clinton, the Democrats and the left in wrongdoing, but not Trump, the Republicans or the right?
I suppose one could argue that this has been happening for a long time. I'm sure mass media and TV changed things, as did newspapers before that, etc. And while that does make the current 'narrative' a bit hysteric, I still think this general development through time is worth worrying about (and discussing).
Talking to people using their social media profiles, while identifying yourself as from a political campaign, is worlds away from what Cambridge Analytica are doing: which is not remotely open or honest.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2008-03-14/the-secre...
>One way the campaign sought to identify the ripest targets was through a series of what the Analyst Institute called “experiment-informed programs,” or EIPs, designed to measure how effective different types of messages were at moving public opinion.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/508836/how-obama-used-big...
>Among the insights that were shared are the fact the people like conform to social norms, both in their community and their own past behavior. So telling voters that their neighbors have already voted or reminding them about their previous support of a candidate, makes those voters more likely to take action.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/11/meet-ps...
>The real drivers of an effective social media campaign, however, are based on the psychology of social behaviors not the current technology.
http://mprcenter.org/blog/2013/01/how-obama-won-the-social-m...
The writer even claims that Facebook threatened to sue the Guardian before publication: https://twitter.com/carolecadwalla/status/974995682124804099
Really makes me wonder if there were any other big stories that got redacted pre-publication because Facebook threatened to sue the publisher.
My opinion about the elections: Each piece had to fit perfectly for Trump become president, and unfortunately (for the entire world), each piece did fit perfectly.
Knowing that he won while losing the popular vote, taking away a single piece would result in him not being a president today. Cambridge Analytica definitely seems like a piece that could have made all the difference, but Russia could have also been such a crucial piece.
And, if we do go under the assumption that both CA and Russia could have made all the difference, one is a private company operated in a country that's one of the closest allies to the US, while the other piece is a country that's basically the enemy of the US for the past 50 years.
Taking all of that into consideration, I would still prioritize investigating Russia over CA if I were Mueller.
The implications are hard to grasp. I think if they were more widely known then Cambridge Analytica would get the same kind of treatment that Huntingdon Life Sciences did (extremely personal terrorism from "animal rights" protestors)
Or you can let them vote to ban Dihydrogen monoxide and see them shoot themselves in the foot
Reminds me of the quote ~ "it's artificial intelligence until you understand how it works. Then it's just algorithms"
Can't you just 1. crawl public profiles 2. create convincing fake profiles by mixing around the info in real profiles, and then add people, and progressively crawl private profiles that way? 3. pay app owners to require more permissions and sell you the info, or create your own apps
I guess it's such a big deal because they managed to do it in a way that was legal, on first glance
That's exactly the point.
I find it difficult to believe it had a real impact though. I think they are just enjoying notoriety.
