I don't recall as much scare when people found out Obama's team used machine learning and data collection, as well as Hillary's later efforts, to influence voters or gain support.
I am not a Trump supporter, nor a Hillary or Obama fan; I am pretty disgusted with the US political system, however, I also recall people praising the IT/ML/Big Data teams for Obama and Hillary without even a mention of what data they were slinging or collecting.
I left FB years ago, and I feel much better for it, especially after reading this article.
Yeah. I mean, there were literal pro-Clinton astroturfing efforts that tried to pressure the media into covering the news in ways that favoured her, crafting a narrative that any negative media coverage of her or perceived sluggishness in running anti-Trump stories was proof of shameful Trump support: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/23/us/politics/hillary-clint... From what I saw, it worked; this became the dominant narrative on at least the parts of Twitter I saw. Yet there were no breathless headlines about Democrat "propaganda networks" that were "waging war on mainstream media", even though that's clearly exactly what they were doing.
Also see the media reporting on Trump's "voter suppression efforts", which were targeted advertisements to, say, Haitian-US citizens about some horrible things the Clinton Foundation did in Haiti. Apparently informing people of bad things a candidate is associated with is 'voter suppression', because it will increase the odds that the people won't go out and vote for that candidate. Using the same terminology, the Trump Access Hollywood tape was far more of a voter suppression effort than any targeted facebook advertising, but that for some reason falls under the guise of relevant and informative information.
Wasn't the Obama campaign tech effort more about coordinating organisers/canvassers/etc in a "data-driven" way, rather than the Cambridge Analytica "propaganda network" type?
Clinton did indeed have a programme similar to Obama's, which has since (perhaps uselessly overdue?) been panned heavily in the MSM[1].
This isn't to say that Obama/Clinton wouldn't have relied on a Cambridge Analytica type service for moral reasons (in fact IIRC Clinton's campaign did do something similar, but at a much smaller scale), though, but more that they underestimated its potency...
Obama and Clinton both had a 'consortium of behavioral scientists', who helped with such things as how to craft messages for maximum impact, and how to counter what they felt were lies floating around about their candidate. If Trump had the same thing, they would be labeled cold blooded propagandists.
Perhaps because what he refers to as lies are annoying truths and what Obama called lies were in fact imaginary malarkey like him not being an American or being a crypto Muslim?
What I find fascinating is many people on this forum work for companies etc that make this very thing possible. Its interesting to see their opinions, concerns or more telling the lack thereof.
Tools exist to do all the things that these articles describe. And the reality is very far from what these articles are describing.
Given behavioral targeting (highly effective), demographic targeting (less effective) and A/B testing (highly effective), you can construct customized messages to improve your conversion rates. You can sell skin cream to the hippie by emphasizing the organic ingredients, and to the vain lady by showing her a pretty lady with great skin using the cream.
That might get your conversion rate from 5% to 6%, which is HUGE WIN for your company - a 20% boost in revenue. That's also very far from the mind control being described here.
If you want to understand what Trump did, rather than paying attention to the people who completely failed to predict his victory (i.e. the mainstream media), I'd focus on the people who predicted it perfectly (i.e. Scott Adams and similar folks). It's only in the mainstream media that a sequence of failed predictions somehow makes a person worth listening to.
Thanks for thoughtful reply. I think I agree with all what you said. I am not the omg Trump is ending the world type, I see him as using the same "tools" as other political parties etc.
To me the real question becomes what happens when the government uses the big data to "sell" ideas to the public.
It would surprise me if the government doesn't already attempt to use such techniques to manipulate the public. I just suspect they do it badly, because while Trump/Obama/Hillary can fire people who perform badly and hire the best people for the role, the civil service cannot. They certainly engage in propaganda in general, however, mainly by going directly through the media.
The thing here which is actually interesting is not the use of propaganda. What's interesting is people outside the cathedral using it effectively.
I've always heard Moldbug referenced indirectly, but I never made the more direct connection, nor the Taylor commentary. Thanks. I suppose the question here is whether it is possible to escape the Cathedral; that is, whether the Cathedral is a panopticon whose construction was long ago completed and within which we already reside.
The trumpocalypse suggests that we may be able to escape the cathedral. But the very nature of the trumpocalypse suggests that if we escape the cathedral via democratic means, the result might be something even scarier than rule by the cathedral/administrative state/etc.
I suspect a more likely outcome - given the centralization of social media - is that the cathedral will succeed in suppressing the upstarts.
Twitter, in spite of Trump's use of it, is certainly attempting to do so. Zuckerberg seems to have briefly resisted, but now seems to have seen the light.
The next evolutionary phase of the Cathedral could be a Zuckerberg presidency. It may be his reward for "solving" (in the future) the problem of extra-Cathedral news consumption. But it's early days.
> I'd focus on the people who predicted it perfectly
It appears that I have a view not being mentioned here: Sure, can pay attention to issues, using data on the voters, crafting messages based on the data, making predictions, etc. But to me in this election, all of that was small potatoes compared with what really caused Trump to win.
Here's my guess:
(1) Analysis and Arithmetic. Broadly Trump did see from somewhere some statistics on states, counties, and voters. Then he did some simple arithmetic on votes and the votes in the Electoral College. Okay, we all can agree so far.
(2) His 757. Then Trump got in his Boeing 757 and started flying to selected locations to give speeches, rallies. Eventually a favorite approach was to rent a hanger at an airport, arrive in his plane, park his plane in front of the hanger with the crowd, give a speech, and then fly to the next stop. That was an efficient way to motivate 5,000 to 30,000 (in a sports stadium, etc.) potential voters at a time. And a lot of those voters communicated with others and influenced them. That he did this is easy to see.
(3) Polishing Lines and Delivery. Now we come to what appears to me to be the big, crucial point: At each of the rallies, Trump delivered one by one his then favorite lines, looked at the audience, and just observed, no numerical data, just with his two ears and eyeballs, how good the reaction was to the line. Based on such reactions, he selected and refined his lines and his delivery.
(4) Application. Then he took that technique in (3) and applied it like his life depended on it, maybe five rallies in three states in one day, then four hours of sleep, maybe on his plane, and do it again.
(5) Targeting. Crucially near the end of the campaign, he raised the intensity in (4), carefully selected his rally locations, and, then, applied his polished lines and delivery as in (3).
E.g., why was the election so close? Because really early on the mainstream media was correct -- Hillary was ahead in both popular and Electoral College votes. Then, for his attack, especially near the end, one candidate swing state, one promising county, one good rally location at a time, Trump did JUST ENOUGH to win the popular vote in that state and, thus, the Electoral College votes.
In a word, the Trump secret sauce was hustle as in super-salesman drive and 20 hour work days, 7 days a week, determination, in two words, insightful hustle, in the words of Ross Perot, personal "finger tip feel" for the people at his rallies but along with careful attention to the Electoral College map and the maps of the candidate voter characteristics of the states and the counties.
Any good salesman constantly watches his candidate customer, second by second, during the pitch and adjusts instantly, appropriately accordingly. Trump watched and adjusted, a week at a time, a day at a time, a rally at a time, and at each rally a second at a time.
All of that Trump super-selling skill, hustle, and determination is tough to quantify, analyze, and use to make projections, but IMHO that skill, etc. was the key to his victory.
Or, setting aside big issues of the future of civilization, Trump wanted to win, went to where Electoral College votes were potentially available, and got the votes by doing well with what lines would please the corresponding audiences.
Net, actually, in some important ways, Trump is a bright guy, e.g., he is good at filtering information from others, keeping only the best stuff, and understanding that; he has good intuition; although he has some rough edges that hurt him at times, he is good at being a super-salesman, one person at a time, one audience at a time; he is highly determined and takes a lot of personal pride in winning; he can go for months working 20 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Tough to use analysis of numerical data 12-18 months ago to predict the outcome. Better: In the last weeks of the campaign, look at some maps, county by county in the swing states, observe how good Trump was at using the Internet to announce his rally times and locations to candidate audiences, observe how good Trump was at getting his rally audiences up on their hind legs, look at where Trump was giving rallies, see how hard and effectively Trump was working, and then do some more vote counting.
Democracy is supposed to be about getting votes, for POTUS in the Electoral College, and that is what Trump concentrated on and did.
For the future? Maybe like a real super-salesman, Trump is continuing to sell to his audience, e.g., Twitter, meetings televised on YouTube, a weekly report, a big rally in Florida, etc. Trump has some bitter opponents, but he can continue to get his audiences enthusiastic and applying pressure to politicians, the media, etc. Likely before the end of 2017, nearly all the bitter opponents will tire of fighting, be discouraged from losing, calm down, and do something else, and the Trump Administration will be less contentious and more normal. E.g., for al the screaming about immigration, Trump can simply say that he's just actually enforcing long standing US immigration laws, policies, and procedures, and eventually that will be enough to get nearly all the opponents to calm down.
It was a bitter campaign. The Trump opponents tried hard to scare a lot of people about Trump; a lot of people are still scared but will calm down as they don't see actual big things to be scared about.
As I recall, the Obama IT effort was used to identify voters and get out the vote. This Mercer thing is pure psyops. It's intentionally trying to alter mass psychology for its own benefit.
I'd like to add that one of their primary intentions isn't to change minds. My guess is they use this big data social media system to influence people negatively. They identify independent liberal-leaning voters and influence them in a way so that they are turned off from politics and won't bother voting. So these potential voters probably see a lot of ads showing how equally horrible any candidate is, how nothing matters, and that no single vote is going to make a difference.
There is no comprehensible moral equivalence between outfits like Breitbart News (N.B. Steve Bannon is on the board of Cambridge Analytica) and the Obama campaign. What people use their tools for matters.
Yes, breitbart never drone bombed innocents in a foreign country without a declaration of war, and never used depleted uranium rounds against for instance, Syrians--and then lied about it.
First you say there is (I suppose you mean in absolute terms) no moral equivalence, but now you admit that Obama did the things I mention, but claim Trump will be worse.
Unfortunately, a objective retrospective comparison of the most recent two nuclear-weapons-controlling administrations isn't possible; we're fully aboard the train. We're forced to predict based upon the words and vision the president offers. Unfortunately, Mr. Trump's vision (in Mr. Trump's own words) is a dark one: "American carnage".
The promises of Trump have the potential to go far, far worse than the results of Obama. And no amount of blaming him will help.
>Unfortunately, Mr. Trump's vision (in Mr. Trump's own words) is a dark one: "American carnage".
"American carnage" is what Mr. Trump said he would stop. Not some kind of vision he has for the future. Personally I don't see the "American carnage" (if anything, it's the opposite), except if he means that us corporate interests (of which he is part, anyway) stomp on the American middle/working classes.
People outside of the US have even less the luxury of an "objective retrospective comparison". And a direct to-the-moment comparison is that the previous administration(s) were so much into wars, invading, meddling etc, and created so many open sores and hell-holes where they invaded or intervened or supported "national interests", that it will take a lot of work for Mr. Trump to be as dangerous to the world at large. If anything, he has shown to be quite isolationist, which would be a welcome change.
(Of course I understand that the lives of non-US citizens don't seem to be as much a concern to the US pundits, compared to say, whether something like "Obamacare" is repealed or whether someone with redneck-y ideals is in power. But it does matter to the people elsewhere who lose those lives).
There is no American carnage. That's the problem. We are, on average, the safest and securest we've ever been. Issuing travel bans fails to recognize economic interdependence, thereby drawing us into conflict. Putting Iran "on notice" draws us into conflict. Having a president who asked Russia to perform opposition research for him on July 27th, 2016 draws us into conflict. We need to stop.
Sure, "on average" our prosperity is at its peak; but the problem is that it's only on average. I moved from the midwest to the coast because of the economic disparity that is causing so much trouble. Have you been to Indiana? Large parts of it have transformed into a meth-addled, jobless, wasteland. There is "carnage" in the formerly agricultural and manufacturing states and that's a large part of what Trump tapped into.
I grew up there. It's relatively easy for me to understand why Hillary Clinton didn't get elected, and why there's disappointment in Obama: while we're still incredibly well-off in a global sense, the post-Bush 2009-2010 recovery was uneven at best. Automation and changing technical literacy requirements have shut a portion of America out of jobs. I get it. What's hard for me to understand is why anyone thinks Donald Trump – the guy with no experience and a giant ego who lies all the time – could possibly be an improvement.
The meth-addled and jobless need access to health care, extended unemployment insurance, affordable education, access to low-cost housing, and jobs programs. Donald Trump isn't going to deliver improvements in any of these areas. He'll actively make the situation worse, then lie about what he did. It's the only mode he's ever operated in. His next bankruptcy will be ours, and everyone will be worse off as a result.
>There is no American carnage. That's the problem. We are, on average, the safest and securest we've ever been.
Average is different than the median.
And there's a ton of wastage of e.g. american soldiers being killed (and especially: killing others) in the middle east and such, with no rhyme or reason as far as the public (and not trillion-dollar military interests) is concerned.
>Putting Iran "on notice" draws us into conflict.
Don't really disagree. But I fail to see how's that different from the previously administrations that constantly had Iraq, a presence that mostly minds its own matters and regional interests and, if the aggression was dropped, could not care less about the US, on the crosshairs (just for a chance for another multi 100-billion dollar war and resource plundering).
One way it's different: Donald Trump has openly discussed a desire to deploy nuclear weapons. He has repeatedly wondered why we make them "if we can't use them", aloud, to the press. The pattern is the same (war-mongering for profit), but there aren't any moral circuit breakers this time around – we elected an amoral serial liar. The potential consequences are now orders of magnitude higher than the Iraq travesty: we're looking at millions dead in Tehran and potentially irreversible changes to the biosphere.
Trump infamously asked "what have you got to lose?" to a predominately African American and Hispanic audience [1] while campaigning. The answer: still quite a lot.
I'd love to see some public works and upper-bracket tax increases aimed at bringing that median closer to the average. I just don't want the incompetence, nuclear saber-rattling, risk, and political instability of a Trump administration. This guy still lies about his inauguration crowd size to this day, and is now whining about Obama and "paid protestors" somehow being behind anti-Trump rallies. He's departed reality, and is wholly unqualified even compared to George W. Bush (the guy who at least anticipated and tried to head off post-9/11 anti-Islam sentiments).
I can't wait for Russia to compete with our massive small dick complex and build more nukes, I was hoping my recent move to a small town would save me, but at this rate they'll have a nuke for areas populated with just tree frogs.
I think the issue is exploitation to stoke hatred against minorities and women. Have you ever read the comments section on Breitbart? It's the new normalized Stormfront.
Yes, I am fully aware of the vitriol, and again, not making a case for it. I am simply trying to be objective on the way manipulating media is perceived by the public and press. The ends don't justify the means for either side is what I am saying, and how surprised you don't find any cautionary tales from the other campaigns mentioned.
I am a privacy advocate, and since taking media classes at NYU in 1982, I have always known this was going to happen - control of the media and public mindset. Polarization of the US into just a two-party system has allowed this to happen. It's good guys vs. bad guys simplicity - a much easier sell on the public for either side.
The world isn't burning. The opposing party won this election cycle and is using the power it was granted to mold the nation to their view of how our society should look. It's a peaceful transfer of power and a modern miracle, as these things typically were accomplished with blood and fire throughout most of human history.
In 2-4-6-8 years we will have te opportunity to peacefully transfer power back to another group that has a vision closer to yours. Assuming the majority of regions within our union agree with you.
If that's not a system you can live with, fight for a weaker federal government and stronger state rights.
I think you're overly optimistic about things being peaceful. America is more politically polarized than ever, and becoming even more so every day. I fully expect shit to hit the fan soon. There is, after all, historical precedent for it.
Well it seems the right has the same opinion... Are they going to ask Cali, aruz, new Mexico and Texas if they want a wall? Are they going to ask each state how many nukes they want to build?
Scientific consensus can be divided and misguided but generally indicates a single direction.
The main reason the left avoids leaving important decisions to states is that state representation is biased toward the people living outside of cities. Even when they're the minority with lower economic output they have a bigger say in how a state is represented in state and federal congress. Republicans dominate state governments and have non-urban demographics wrapped up right now, so of course democrats will prefer to not give them more power.
It's not an "edge point". One can discuss the inherent moral goodness or lack thereof of using a certain tool, whereas you seem to subscribe to the view that something is bad if "evil people" use it and not otherwise. With similar train of thought one may argue that nuclear weapons are good for the US to have but not for an evil empire such as the USSR (actual argument that was used by people), or a gun is bad when it's used by a criminal but good when used by someone in self-defense.
You see that in these cases one can discuss the merits of the application but also argue about the whole ban of the tool itself, irregardless of who's using it.
Also if you hate HN noone is forcing you to be here.
A tool cannot have inherent moral goodness or lack it. A tool is inanimate. It is amoral. By itself it does nothing. Only humans can put tools to uses that may be good or bad for other humans. Morality does not exist outside of human perception.
> A tool cannot have inherent moral goodness or lack it.
I disagree. A registry of Muslim/Jewish/... people is a tool with inherent discrimination, which has next to no known good use for society. Only for evil.
They mentioned the census as a use of database (tool) that is not immoral not as being equivalent to a Muslim/Jewish registry. You seem to be missing their point
Is it fair to judge a web site by their comments section? I'm sure "The Guardian" or even Hacker News get pretty nasty comments, too.
You could demand censorship, but maybe some people simply are against it.
Oh it's absolutely fair when there are calls for genocide against an entire people. Do you really want me to perform a statistical analysis on Breitbart comments with the word "muslim" or "black" or "jew"? Come on now, don't insult my intelligence - we're all smart people here.
I haven't looked at their comments - but sure, why not make such an analysis? What do you mean by "we are all smart people here" - everybody knows the earth is flat?
Edit: perhaps you could at least provide a link to a typical Breitbart comment section, full of hatred and calls for genocide?
Cambridge Analytica first supported Cruz against Trump. So there is little hard evidence that it is such a powerful weapon. Bannon is on the board of the company and these articles feel like company-fed buzz.
I led Mercer's old team at IBM for a few year and we also developed NLP/ML-based profiling technology. They work better than chance but not much better (there is lots of published literature on the subject) and definitely not enough to make a big difference from just feeding fake news to everybody equally.
When you're dealing with razor thin margins in individual electoral districts, and 300M people, even slightly better than chance can be pretty powerful.
Razor thin margins seems to lead to a multitude of arguments for how a variety of things could have swayed the election. None of these things explain why the election was close, but that seems like a much more important thing to understand.
Yes but so are many other factors. In a tight election you can attribute the win to a plethora of factors, doesn't make each of them more meaningful. Plus the profiling itself not being very reliable, I have big doubt as to their ability to change people's opinion based on that.
The key to success with Facebook advertising is making ads which get more attention than all of the other potential ads that could be shown to the user at that time. Because it is an auction system that requires only a very tiny advantage over the competition.
Politics, in my opinion, is creating a product capable of fitting more people inside than the other candidate can. Certainly it is vastly easier to make out-performing political ads based on data points like pro-gun, hunter verse making ads for Coca-Cola based on data points like breast feeding, yoga.
Perhaps this is more about category discovery and targeting (vastly more difficult without Facebook) than any cutting machine learning.
Remember that they're responding to demand. Trump was closer to what the Red states wanted than Cruz. Demand shifted in his favor. So, then the tools for responding to demand had to shift to Trump. It's just like in marketing where you always have to target the offering to what the audience wants.
If you want to understand that demand, below is my favorite article on what Trump was tapping into and how liberals were coming across to them. Next liberal candidate needs to change marketing to appeal to some of these in the swing states. They certainly had opportunities but substituted mockery for appeal to them.
That article is ridiculous. Yes, I understand there is a country culture that supports Trump, but let's not pretend they live some special life of toil and oppression at the hands of the liberal elite.
Sure, they might believe in their victimhood, and Trump is fluent in speaking that language. Doesn't make it true. We all struggle to survive in this economy and we all have our own problems -- the difference is those of us who will not drag the country down by supporting a transparently dishonest conman in an attempt to lash out at those we perceive to be doing better but undeserving.
Have you been to those areas? It's pretty rough. The mortality stats have been rapidly worsening in rural areas, vs. rising for all other groups.
How you feel about their vote and how you feel about the material circumstances of their life are two distinct things. It's quite possible they've got a legitimate grievance, and nonetheless voted poorly.
I say this as a member of the liberal elite in urban Canada. Things are great right now for my set!
I've been to Pittsburgh and rural Vermont within the past year, as well as NYC. In Pittsburgh I happened to be in a hospital waiting room and saw some of the poorest looking white people I've ever seen. Missing teeth, ragged clothing, leathered skin, sunken eyes. It was shocking.
In Vermont, I heard many stories of the opioid crisis. It sounded quite severe.
I've also driven through rural Maine with my family. Rusting cars and junk heaps in every backyard, doors falling off the hinges, chickens running amok.
Certainly they're not the only group to have struggles. But to dismiss their troubles is part of what got us here.
It's rough because they keep voting in people to represent them at the state and federal level who institute the policies that rob them of their dignity. They vote for failed policies, and then double down when those don't work. It's a problem that occurs when people believe that faith is as good as fact.
Thomas Frank's book _What's the Matter with Kansas_[0] explores this pretty well. Some of what he proposes is a bit over-simplified (ie that all conservatives prefer to vote for morals over pragmatism[1]), but his main thesis -- that the conservative platform has created a moral argument convincing poorer Americans to vote against the very social programs that they rely on -- is a good starting point for considering this.
Personal note: I grew up rural California; Frank's thesis describes the adamant, self-defeating narratives that I regularly heard from my neighbors.
Wrong. It's wrong mainly because elites in big cities obliterated their jobs and companies in the name of efficiency. I'm from rural Indiana and live in big cities now so I've seen both sides. The pillaging by the city elite is real. I can't fault big city business people because capitalism is good, but to place the blame solely on the poor rural people or their elected officials isn't understanding the problem.
I understand what you're saying. I think there's a tension here, at least in your comment.
elites in big cities obliterated their jobs and companies in the name of efficiency.
One argument I hear sometimes from those who express statements like this is that there should be less government and that business and the market are the best ways to handle issues that provide some sort of social safety net in part because they're more efficient and will cost less. Businesses and the market will tend to reduce labor costs in the name of efficiency.
Have you noticed this as well? Please note I'm not disagreeing with you. I think the situation is pretty complicated.
Edit to add: Looks like you updated your comment while I was composing mine, and it now addresses in part what I've written.
... the red states are full of politicians who say all the right backwards things on social issues and then follow it up with the false mantra of "personal accountability," which is a coded phrase which means "rob you blind." The "elite" don't have enough people to vote their guys into power. They need willful idiots.
Sam Brownback didn't happen in Kansas because the city dwellers wanted him in power. His disaster of an administration happened because he demonstrated that he understood all of the phobias his constituents have been fed for over a generation now.
There's been broad support for economic globalization since WWII. Old-school conservatives (now "libertarians") and populists have opposed it. But it's been an antiwar strategy for liberals, and a profit-maximization strategy for capitalists. And it's gutted the US middle class, or at least the blue-collar part.
I agree we all struggle but article states their perspective pretty accurately. Ive listened to rural folk long enough to know. Some accurate claims are depiction in media, politicians mocking them, huge poverty left doesnt care about outside welfare availability, and so on. Their politics and capitalism cause a lot of it but not all. They might vote in a better person if people outside Republicans were pushing stuff that appeals to them or treating them with respect. I dont care if the Trump alternative is Democrat or Republican so long as they're better than Trump & appeal to those voters next cycle.
Although I'm pro-Trump (Obama overthrew a democratic government in my country, Brazil), I totally agree with your point.
> the difference is those of us who will not drag the country down by supporting a transparently dishonest conman in an attempt to lash out at those we perceive to be doing better but undeserving.
The only thing I'd point out is that in the previous path, we'd probably be at WW III with a clash between Rússia and US. Hell, Clinton lost and it is still fueling a rivalry between these countries.
I keep telling people, things are going to get really weird. You tell me, what happens in a complex adaptive system when the cost of information (transmission and storage) goes to zero? Yah, shit gets weird fast.
Does anyone think Cambridge Analytica is the sole proprietor of tech like this? Will they remain the only ones? What if one person leaks the model? What if someone open sources a better one? We know this story. After some time this is going to become as accessible as any other tech, and Things. Are. Going. To. Get. Really. Weird.
It doesn't have to be. We don't have to accept manually reading through news articles and spending precious time digesting that information and connecting all of the dots in our flawed heads with our flawed memory.
We need tools for information digestion and management to cast more informed votes. Unless we just want to admit that voters can't keep up with their government and hold it accountable, in which case we need tools to manage a government that cannot manage its own information input/output.
Critical thinking is nice and the most basic requirement, but it doesn't enlighten you to facts that you simply don't have time to discover. You can make educated guesses and you could be right, but they are still guesses.
To go and find all of those facts, you have to spend an enormous amount of time reading all sources of information (Breitbart, MSM, alt-right, ADL, etc.) or you have to admit you are making decisions with incomplete information. You also have to watch videos, listen to sound bites, and read tweets.
Time is the real enemy and the reason so many people give up in the face of this information-saturated reality is that no one has enough of it to continue using their eyes and ears to parse the world's raw data. Anything that reduces the time cost of being an informed voter is going to have the greatest impact of managing information and governments.
It's something to be taken into account, but no, the tools will probably not be a "truth meter". But for every 10 articles the media pumps out, maybe I only have to read 1 article. This is always going to be lossy, but it obviously should be less lossy than a human.
I think that it will be easier to make tools to manage and summarize accurately than to limit the rate of growth or output of information.
This was the old problem. It was solved by having groups of experts and journalists.
This wasn't popular because one group of people kept Having their feelings and biases attacked. They were later served by the media empires built to serve their views.
They got their experts and their talking heads to say things they felt needed to be said.
In so doing the first false dichotomy was established - feelings and opinions are the same no matter the facts and the experts disagree.
So the first layer of agreement/expert concord was breached.
This results in the problem you describe.
What we face now is fiction being camouflaged as news sites, and super insulation/echo chambers.
This is happening at the margins. Topics and people which are capable of being attacked in this manner. Later the surface are of attack will increase as technology, technique improve while human fatigue sets in.
There is little evidence that there is much to "leak", really. Cambridge Analytica is just one company among others providing these services, and nothing proves that they have played an important role in this election, it's all conjectures.
Using big data and propaganda to nudge elections was already well enough known to be a minor plot thread in House of Cards a few years ago. The one thing I find lacking in discussing anything like this is that the articles are always written from one side. You can say that this article is about Mercer, so it should only focus on his activities, but it's really about controlling influence in conservative politics, when this is all being done in the presence of George Soros. There was enormous detail in the article. I'd rather read half that detail, and then look at the activities from the liberal side, and compare and contrast. To me, the interesting part isn't that one side or the other is doing these things; it's what BOTH sides are doing to US.
And there you've slung just enough mud to implicate Obama in the same kind of antics without offering any tangible proof. And conflated Big Data and propaganda too. Nice.
The Obama campaign's use of technology was well documented - a two minute Google threw up detailed articles from MIT, Forbes, Technology Review.
If you have a substantive point to make about any of that, or any proof at all that the Obama campaign has indulged in the kind of propaganda Bannon et al are neck deep in, you should make it instead of resorting to hand wavy arguments like this.
"And there you've slung just enough mud to implicate Obama in the same kind of antics without offering any tangible proof. "
Are you kidding? Obama invented the use of social tools to get elected. [1]
Google, who, as an org make up probably 95% Obama voters, have a deep relationship with government [2]. And Sheryl Sandberg worked for the Democratic apparatus.
There's nothing entirely wrong with either things (possibly), but the point is that it's 'nefarious' when conservatives have money and access but not when massive and institutional entities like Google do for the Democrats? Google and Facebook are two organizations that, if they chose to, could control the outcome of the election - that's a pretty scary conflict of interest. Exxon certainly couldn't. Where is the uproar?
Surely, it's worth pointing out where 'big money/business and politics collide', but it's very hypocritical to scream about the plight of one side, and not the other.
If anything - this somewhat hypocritical posturing, generally supported by the MSM, gives credence to those who argue the MSM is at least softly biased in one direction. Though I tend to generally trust most of the big news orgs, I believe there is a degree of 'sidedness' on this issue.
"how the Republicans' failure to do this proved they were behind the times"
I distinctly remember that. Then there's a fit now among liberals that the Republicans are doing what liberals say they should've been doing. Hell, they're doing it better. Liberals will need to up their game plus have a final candidate that's worth something in next election.
Up their game by enlisting the help of a foreign nation to help stand up an entire group of social network trolls whose entire mission is to muddy the waters and push fabricated stories?
Elections have always been dirty. It seems winners now use social media or trolls. So be it until that is banned and policed. Losing a Presidency because you followed the rules feels much worse than gaining it breaking some. I don't even think it's possible any more for honest plays to happen given superficial voters with conflicting needs/wants that cost average of $200 mil of others's money to reach.
The substantive point is nudging people on their unconscious biases has always been iffy. The practice doesn't turn distasteful when a nasty figure employs the tool, it had always been that way, even in the hands of the good guys.
The point stands - produce specific instances of the Obama campaign doing the same and then we can talk about whether they're morally equivalent.
There are some uses of nudge theory - using it to lower college dropout rates, encouraging tax payments - where the ethics are not clear cut and you can make an argument one way or another. 'It happened on House of Cards' isn't going to cut it.
Don't you wish politicians would be voted into the office based on the strength of their arguments and their track record, instead of the insights of their data science team? That's how democracy is supposed to work; knowing who to pay for their data science expertise isn't a suitable performance metric.
> The commenter said 'This has been happening for ages, Obama did it too'
You're the only one mentioning "Obama" in this comment tree. You were quick to assume a defensive position for whatever reason, but his is aimed at both parties in general.
> What you appear to be asking for is 'balance' - I'm asking of you, what's missing from the account in the OP?
You're assuming again. I do not expect the Guardian to expose its party, but it would be interesting to see both sides laid bare next to each other.
"isn't that one side or the other is doing these things; it's what BOTH sides are doing to US."
There's a weak implication there that the Democracts are doing something similar to Big Data + troll armies that this article covers. I'd have asked for clarification before jumping straight to "Obama doing same thing" but I see where kristianc is getting the impression.
As a Brit it concerns me that somebody can donate the use of such a powerful tool for a political campaign without registration. Especially as the donation was from a foreign citizen.
There is far too much shadiness going on. Yes the horse has bolted with Brexit but there are more elections around the world and if the democratic process _may_ be being distorted then I think it needs investigation.
What is distortion of democratic process, specifically?
Most political processes are distortion. Political ads are never basic presentations of fact. At best, they're just exercises in cherry picking, but typically they're spin and outright lies.
Major media outlets all have their political slants and their subsets of slants presented by their various journalists. More distortion.
Is it political distortion when you bus in voters of a particular party to the polling places who would otherwise not have bothered to vote?
We don't really have political ads in the UK, it's certainly illegal to lie in any advertisement in the UK.
I meant a tool was used and was not registered as a donation. This may have distorted the campaigns because the two sides had to disclose all donations.
That one chose not to, is in my view dishonest, thoroughly inappropriate and may very well have been ilegal.
I am not naive, hence my comment. For future elections election officials will need to be observant.
Social media optimisation could very well be the cancer that kills democracy. Still I find it hard to imagine the likes of Trump or Farage to be these evil masterminds orchestrating media manipulation and shifting popular sentiment with advanced AI. Perhaps they are mere pawns of technocratic billionaires fulfilling a grand plan like Asimov's Foundation series.
" Still I find it hard to imagine the likes of Trump or Farage to be these evil masterminds orchestrating media manipulation and shifting popular sentiment with advanced AI."
Think of it more like CEO's with their executive dashboards, Wall Street journal, stock tickers, and trusted advisors. They're going day-to-day with their finger on the pulse of the company and markets. They have people constantly advising them on various things that pop up. They mix their own style and ideas with that advise to determine course of action. It happens so much it becomes natural for them.
Probably like that but in direct & orchestrated way given how election campaigns work.
Is it just me, or do these new players who operate in the background have more technical knowledge, quant mindset and solid data analytics connections.
Mercer is CEO of Renaissance Technologies and seems to own piece of Cambridge Analytica. Peter Thiel and Palantir. Even Mark Zuckerberg seems to have political ambitions.
Steve Bannon (the Breitbart News figurehead) is on Cambridge Analytica's board. Yes, that Steve Bannon, chief strategist for President Trump: a guy who – completely coincidentally – has already started his campaign for 2020.
Big data, microtargeting, and social graph analysis are being used to manipulate the electorate.
Their view point and reality are incompatible. For instance, Breitbart repeatedly claimed that the airport protests were "terrorist-funded" by CAIR. There is no factual evidence that the airport travel ban protests were funded by any politically-motivated group seeking to wage violence against the United States. It's a viewpoint, sure. But it's wrong.
Does it surprise you? People smart enough to interpret these social datasets would be the ones who recognize its potential to manipulate the population.
This feels like the invention of gunpowder, to me – but for the art of deception rather than war. Up to this point, a politician could say a different thing depending on who was in the room, and we would get an occasional peek at that: like HRC's public & private positions on Wall Street, or Romney's 47% comment. But now there can be 220 million different things to say in 220 million psychometrically-crafted rooms. That feels disruptive.
I went through the tweets of a trump troll on Twitter, non-stop pro trump co tent nearly 24/7, no way this person has any job other than literally being a Twitter troll. Someone is bankrolling this and much more.
Sad that political sides is what rises to the top in this conversation. I would hope the "big data" and how its used could be looked at by both sides with the same thought "is this a good idea?"
I hope whatever side of politics you fall on that you can see its not a single party or even just the government,its the propagation and use from every day citizens and their ignorance of what and how information will be used.
I don't know what or who to beleive anymore even these comments here and should I even be commenting now! Maybe that was the plan to make everyone paranoid? Is this just another bit of data about me for "The Machine or Samaritan" to consume.
> Cambridge Analytica makes the astonishing boast that it has psychological profiles based on 5,000 separate pieces of data on 220 million American voters – its USP is to use this data to understand people’s deepest emotions and then target them accordingly.
This is nothing new. This is the Obama data machine/Civis/270/etc etc (who didn't Eric Schmidt fund after 2012?), AFL-CIO/Catalist, the party databases... This is the basic strategy today regardless of side. Whatever business layer Cambridge Analytica has on top of that data is not novel.
The "conspiracy" to manipulate is truly bipartisan now.
There is a distinction between deeply understanding someone at scale and using that understanding to either bait them computer generated propaganda or suppress their vote.
That's my take. They kicked it up a notch from human execution to computerized execution of the models they were collecting before. Their models might be better, too.
If I was a federal prosecutor, I'd go after Cambridge Analytica for computer mediated election fraud. Effectively, it is using AI to run a dynamic con job.
Map out exactly what the voter wants to hear, bury your message inside a wrapper of fake news that speaks directly to them.
The part that makes it so insidious, is that ad targeting is so fine grained, that only the victim will be able to see the ads, it is an imperceptible enemy. Literally zero rebuttals given.
You have to prove that there was an impact on the electorate and that it wasn't just a matter of hating HRC or desire to shakeup the GOP.
Really hard to prove attribution. The assumption that the election was won because everyone who didnt vote like you was "manipulated" is insulting. We're all just getting more entrenched.
As for shell accounts, tinfoil hat is all I'm hearing. Prove it. There is more substance in DNC leaked emails than any of this left conspiracy nonsense.
You are putting my words in my mouth to construct a straw man. You have no idea how I voted or what I think. My comments were only directed at automated techniques for generating and disseminating propaganda.
Facebook absolutely has a log of every ad shown to every user, ever. Who bought the impression and who viewed it.
We need trusted, asynchronous, peer to peer, encrypted streaming applications, and we need them to become normal! These centralized data repositories need to rot in the ground!
Why couldn't something like Twitter or instagram be built out of p2p protocols? Where users actively curate their connections predominately in person with people they actually know? I think there's actually a demand for this. People I know are tired of the polluted mainstream social media channels, but know no other options.
Mercer does have a point about bias in MSM. MSM called Steve Bannon an anti-Semite when he is in fact very, pro-Israel and very much against anti-Semitism. However, they failed to report that the Democratic National Committee candidate who almost won, Keith Ellison, was mentioned by the Anti-Defamation League, "Ellison’s remarks ‘deeply disturbing and disqualifying’". [1]
He was one of only 8 members of Congress to vote against the Iron Dome anti-missle system which protected Israeli civilians from Hamas rockets. [2]
MSM chose not to report the Anti-Defamation League statement (ADL says Bannon is not anti-Semitic BTW) about Ellison nor did it report that he was one of 8 members of Congress to vote against Iron Dome, an anti-missle system that protected Israeli civilians from Hamas rockets.
EDIT: After the DNC election which Ellison lost, the Wall Street Journal disclosed the following:
"Mr. Ellison, who is an African-American Muslim, also faced complaints about his past associations with the Nation of Islam and statements he has made that were perceived as criticizing Israel. Haim Saban, an Israeli-American donor who funded the construction of the DNC’s Washington headquarters, in December publicly called Mr. Ellison “clearly an anti-Semite.”"[4]
But they should have disclosed this information before the election.
Well, that's just about the misleading conceivable way to cite the ADL, which has an whole page that is entirely critical of Bannon, its first headline reading "BANNON HAS EMBRACED THE ALT RIGHT, A LOOSE NETWORK OF WHITE NATIONALISTS AND ANTI-SEMITES." (em. original) and, in literally the next paragraph after the one you're paraphrasing about his antisemitism, says:
Nevertheless, Bannon essentially has established himself as the chief curator for the alt right. Under his stewardship, Breitbart has emerged as the leading source for the extreme views of a vocal minority who peddle bigotry and promote hate.
Embracing the alt-right is not being antisemitic. Particularly given the fact that, as the ADL documents and any casual perusal of Breitbart would reveal, Breitbart is mainly anti-Muslim and pro-Jewish. From what I can tell, Bannon's view is that the west should embrace it's Judeo Christian heritage in order to win an upcoming war against Islam. He also seems to feel that Israel and the Jewish people are important allies in this fight.
That's not antisemitism. It's certainly anti-left, but that doesn't make it antisemitic.
Similarly, a protestant's failure to be catholic doesn't make them a satanist.
Take it up with the ADL. This whole story really doesn't belong on HN, and I flagged it, but I couldn't let that misleading comment go without a rebuttal.
Really? Because this story is about the real world implications of technologies that many on HN are personally responsible for. I think it's very appropriate.
The point is the ADL issued a statement about Ellison and his fitness of leadership for the DNC. Certainly newsworthy, but the NY Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic and other news organizations declined to report this vital piece of information.
I don't care about the broader point being made, because it was made in part by deceptively taking something the ADL said out of context. My contribution to this thread is simply the observation that the ADL hasn't exonerated Bannon for antisemitism; they've done practically the opposite thing.
Thanks for the reference. I hadn't seen anything at all until yesterday. Curiously, the article was on page A18 -- way back on in the "A" section. Nor did it mention that he was one of 8 Congressmen to vote against funding for additional missiles for the Iron Dome anti-missle system that protected Israeli civilians from Hamas rockets.
There was at least one Op-Ed about Steve Bannon and anti-Semitism but no opinion piece of Op-Ed in the NYTimes or otherwise about Ellison and his views.
The ADL doesn't say he's antisemitic and explicitly say he isn't.
They merely say he isn't left wing and allow the reader to draw the vague inference that he may be somehow associated with others (second or thirdhand) who are. I can understand why you might have been mislead by this, however.
That is because the ADL withdrew their statement of Bannon [1], again not reported by MSM even though MSM reported the original ADL statement. Proves my point that you cannot rely on MSM to give you newsworthy information.
So let's say you're an assignment editor at NYT or WaPo. A presser crosses your desk: "ADL walks back earlier inflammatory rhetoric about Steve Bannon". You immediately toss it to your politics editor, who prioritizes it below the vast cornucopia of election shit happening in the mid-November cycle because nobody cares except Steve Bannon fans. Appeal is important, and "that thing they said, they don't say it any more" is not really a story; it's an update on the "that thing they said" story, of course.
Before, we'd call this newsworthiness. Now we call it a vast MSM conspiracy to suppress coverage of an entire spectrum of people. It's weird that the kind of person who reads Hacker News and ostensibly understands creating products for a target market would then look at decisions such as these and not see them as understanding broad audience appeal. The Hill, Politico, Breitbart, all mastheads that cater to deep politics, all ran it.
It's cool to see a narrative be created that broad appeal mastheads not running something is an indictment of "mainstream media" (the clue is in the name!) simply because the guy you like is not getting the attention you want. And then someone links the MSM running the very story that started you down this path (on CNN!) and you ignore it and continue peddling your version of events.
The flaw in MSM is that there simply isn't enough time in the day to run everything, and every time I see commentary like this around a specific event, the math on newsworthiness immediately makes sense to me because I've been an assignment editor. But unfortunately it leaves an opening for your side to say "see! the terrible left is ignoring us!" and it sounds like a legitimate gripe to a lot of people.
Please don't conflate Israeli nationalism with support for Jewish people on the whole. And don't conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism. As a matter of fact, the majority of Jewish people I know, American and Israeli as well, are quite critical of the Israeli state as it has acted historically.
Please read the Anti-Defamation League statement regarding Ellison. What is notable is that MSM did not report the ADL statement of Dec 1, 2016 when it was very much newsworthy. The point is that one can't rely on MSM to give us important reliable news.
> As a matter of fact, the majority of Jewish people I know.
Well, the majority I know, both American and Israeli are not critical of how the state was re-established, rather they understand that the Palestinians turned down their state in 1948 and tried to destroy the newly established Jewish nation.
It is useful news to know that the DNC was supporting a candidate who was one of only 8 to vote against Iron Dome anti-missle system funding meant to help protect Israeli civilians from Hamas rockets.
I find Bannon's positions quite comical to be honest; when he says the Judeo-Christian religion my opinion is that this is code for "white people". I have this ominous feeling that they really are going to attempt to round up the 11 million illegal Mexicans, which really doesn't bare thinking about. They don't say it directly because they really believe they aren't racist, they just want America for white people, like it used to be, never.
> MSM chose not to report the Anti-Defamation League statement about Ellison
Do you seriously think you can make stuff up here and nobody is going to bother checking it? You literally just have to type Keith Ellison ADL into Google to demonstrate your claim is false.
Really? Where is the NY Times citation, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic? Please cite links that refer to the ADL statement about Ellison before the DNC election.
I did google each of these publications and found nothing. Nor did I find anything that cited how he was one of 8 members of Congress to vote against the Iron Dome anti-missle system that has protected many Israelis civilians from Hamas missiles.
If you meant a specific newspaper did not post about it before a specific date, then perhaps you should have said that, rather than instead making a completely different claim that isn't true.
> Where is the NY Times citation, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic? Please cite links that refer to the ADL statement about Ellison before the DNC election.
All dated within 48 hours of the ADL statement, almost three months ago.
> I did google each of these publications and found nothing.
Now you're just proving you're lying. If you type this into Google:
Keith Ellison ADL site: [each of those publications]
those pages are the very first results.
> Nor did I find anything that cited how he was one of 8 members of Congress to vote against the Iron Dome anti-missle system
Do they routinely report on what he votes against in Congress? Or are you saying the "MSM" should for some reason focus on everything you personally happen to think is newsworthy?
> Do they routinely report on what he votes against in Congress?
This is an important vote and for Ellison to be one of 8 members of Congress suggests that he is very anti-Israel.
I had earlier googled on Ellison and anti-Semitism and did not find articles. Meanwhile, the media went crazy over Bannon who in fact is not anti-Semite in the slightest and he is very pro-Israel.
Indeed. Bias is unavoidable. Mistakes are unavoidable. Outright lies are unavoidable. Today's news operation is a blazing fast click bait operation. But even back in the days of slow news the MSM got things really wrong on a regular basis. That's largely how people like Rush Limbaugh built their right wing media empires, by pantsing the MSM on a daily basis for decades. The narrative that the MSM is biased/wrong/propaganda is such a bedrock multi-decades old belief on the right that all Breitbart and CSN had to do was SHOW UP.
> even back in the days of slow news the MSM got things really wrong on a regular basis
This is false nostalgia. The mainstream media may be terrible today (and I think it is) but it's still better than it has ever been. Not long ago people subscribed to a single newspaper that never needed to print retractions. There were no comment sections to set the record straight. Journalists wouldn't get held to account on twitter. Journalists used to be middle-class white men, now it's more diverse.
None of this is as clear-cut an improvement as you're suggesting. For example, take the rather dubious story about Trump's supposed secret communications channel with Russia - a dozen or so outlets refused to touch it, but the moment Salon decided to ignore the obvious issues with it and run it anyway it spread like wildfire on social media even to people who wouldn't normally read them. Social media effectively reduces the standards of the media as a whole to whatever the most clickbaity outlet is willing to initially run. Random members of the public and journalists who don't consider journalistic practices to apply to their social media also start dubious claims which spread wildly. Any corrections, retractions or debunkings never reach the same level of virality and go unseen.
We are more inundated with clickbaity trash journalism than ever before, but we also have more access to serious in-depth investigative journalism than ever before. So if you really want to figure out what's going on in the world, you now can. Corrections and retractions and debunkings only reach a fraction of their original audience, as you say, but this has always been the case. When was the last time the NYT ran a front page mea culpa, for example?
Untrue - you could figure out what was going on in the world before. Until people were allowed to get away with creating a media empire that could just pander to their audience.
Hence stuff like creationism or global warming denial first enjoying a campaign of FUD and then landing up on the news as "teach the debate" or other catchy jingles.
And then the internet came along and destroyed paper after newspaper. Magazine after magazine.
The remainder got bought over and committed 100% to survive in the shortened media attention world.
These pitfalls were highlighted but lost in the cheerleading and revolution of citizen journalism.
We lost many editorial boards and years of experience. That experience is now being relearned by people manning forums as moderators who don't have the benefit of mentors, or bloggers who are fighting for clicks.
The world Was made less clear. A false narrative was used to elevate spurious arguments, emotional coddling to Drive advertising.
When the internet hit, the structure gave way to the new necessities of survival.
The PR industry has engaged in FUD and disinformation campaigns since the 50s, far before the advent of the internet. Business and other establishment interests have attempted to control the media for much longer. Journalists that didn't fit the mold just wouldn't get hired by any newspaper, and as a result the media has always had enormous blind spots.
The loss of many editorial boards is regrettable, but in exchange we have gotten access to news from all over the world. Desperate fighting for clicks conflicts with journalistic values, but newspapers have always depended on advertisement income. The newspapers of old didn't dare offend their advertising patrons.
Major news organizations in every country should be funded by the public, just like we fund the other checks and balances in society like the courts system and law enforcement.
/rant/ So another hit piece on someone that supports Trump. This is the new left-wing extremist strategy... ie, destroy powerful voices fighting to safeguard our country and improve American lives. The Mainstream Media wants to be taken seriously with this tactic. Never heard of cnsnews.com either. Went through it and it's rather right-wing conventional. Nothing like this over-the-top ranting lunacy of an "article" disguised as journalism.
The author made sure to paint another Trump supporter in a bad light by using words like antisemitic, islamophobic, scary, brainwashing, disrupting the MSM, extremist sites, creepy, propaganda, amplify particular political narratives, playing to emotions. These words and many others have become their divisive talking points. I was surprised that I didn't see Hitler, Fascist, Racist and Sexist too. It's laughable if they weren't so transparently vulgar.
There's also stuff about tracking and usage habits but not a word about Google, Facebook, Twitter, George Soros (and his countless disruptive sites) and the REAL power (the MSM) - all engaged in extremist misrepresentation, censorship, outright lies, news coverups, blacklisted topics, paid rioters, banning users, manipulation of trending topics, physical assaults on the public by paid thugs. He mud-slings terms like "ethical regulations" in regard to Mercer when the real power has been documented to have long crossed the line and hold the details of our lives in their data-sharing databases with NO accountability.
He segues into "playing the victim". The privileged elite that has long held the reins of manipulating public opinion is (laughably) the victim now. The MSM, which has engaged in massive coverups to support their candidate, that has used fear-mongering through misinformation, that holds ALL the keys and power is now the victim. I would borrow the following from the race-baiting left... "check you privilege at the door", in response.
I started off as a fairly objective person during the political process. I liked Bernie, grew to despise Hillary and her divisive rhetoric (and noted how often the MSM media blacklisted explosive stories about this corrupt politician who was selling our country away, piece by piece). I wasn't even a Trump supporter and NEVER visited anything right-wing. I was long sold on the idea that the right-wing was racist. I got ALL my news from the MSM. They betrayed my trust and continue to do so daily. The author has learned nothing.
"/rant/ So another hit piece on someone that supports Trump. This is the new left-wing extremist strategy... ie, destroy powerful voices fighting to safeguard our country and improve American lives. "
They haven't safeguarded anything. The last time Republicans were in control of the military-intelligence complex led to wars on false pretenses that killed more Americans and foreigners than 9/11. The cost was hundreds of billions of dollars with estimates of several trillion in long-term liability. Money that could've been spent on education, healthcare, infrastructure improvements, business subsidies... anything with provable benefit to Americans' lives. ISIS formed as a direct result the Iraq war as predicted those of us protesting. They killed even more people. The local surveillance then failed to spot a guy in Boston spewing out hate speech online and visiting red flag countries... the ideal case for mass surveillance.
So, conservative policies previously led to the murder of thousands of Americans, maiming of thousands more, more terrorists in Middle East, tons of tax dollars lost w/ no gain to average voter, and some defense CEO's getting richer. That's not safeguarding our country. That's an active threat to it. It will be interesting to see whether history repeats given the new Republican President is quite different from priors. More like a knockoff of Silvia Berlusconi in Italy given all the campaign stunts/claims on top of corrupt, business dealings.
I don't know. I've noticed many people reading articles, including Trump supports I met, think that a billionaire is necessarily more knowledgeable in business... more areas than they made billions... in general. Additionally, many of them sincerely believed a billionaire saying he wanted to get rid of corrupt politicians and that he was honest. Maybe this is what author had in mind when reminding readers that billionaires are usually incredibly selfish people that, like all people, want to influence the world based on their own beliefs and preferences. People can forget sometimes that they're people, too. Very, aggressive people with money to make stuff happen.
The article seems to be a good example of why people don't trust the press anymore. Little actual information, but a lot of fear mongering: "billionaire trying to control the world", "data analysts controlling our emotions", the ad ban on Breitbart as a proof that they are evil and antisemitic (rather than showing examples of them being evil and antisemitic), and so on.
Obama already used data science in his campaigns, and Hillary spent more money than Trump afaik. Advertising and user targeting are not new inventions.
is really nothing new. Sensing the emotions expressed by someone and then nudging them through targeted advertisement is a multi-billion business. It is proven to be effective in that realm. Is it fear mongering when one wonders about the political impact of this technology when employed on a massive scale?
Little actual information?
"Cambridge Analytica worked for the Trump campaign ... it was reported that until recently he had a seat on the board."
"A few weeks later, the Observer received a letter."
"earlier this week, I ended up in a Pret a Manger near Westminster with Andy Wigmore, Leave.EU’s affable communications director"
Concrete facts about how people and organizations relate. Events and named sources. First hand interviews.
It's not news that Trump employed Cambridge Analytics. Their actual impact is overblown. I think that has been discussed several times before.
In any case, as you say, it is nothing new, and open to everyone with enough money (as Clinton had). If you want to suggest it was unfair play, then maybe you should rethink how the president is elected in general. Should TV advertisements be allowed? They also manipulate people, and favor the candidate with the most money. How could you ensure that people vote without having been manipulated? Maybe nobody should be allowed to consume any media for 2 years prior to the election?
There are also presumably entities with far more data available than Cambridge Analytics, as have been mentioned on HN frequently before. Advertisers have been collecting data on people for a long time.
If you want to suggest it was unfair play, then maybe you should rethink how the president is elected in general. Should TV advertisements be allowed? They also manipulate people, and favor the candidate with the most money.
There are definitely people who are looking to reform election campaign rules and the influence of money. There's been plenty of debate regarding cases such as Citizens United.
The point is - everybody could have employed CA, or other firms with similar offerings. That is the game of the presidential election, which one candidate won. To suggest something sinister went on is far off.
Edit, since HN doesn't let me reply: the point is the article suggest something sinister going on, whereas it is mostly just business as usual. Note that claims about the effectiveness of CA also come mostly from CA executives. It could almost be a PR article for CA...
Other aspects also reek of conspiracy theory, like the "you set up outlets like Breitbart to replae the established media" - really, just like that, you set up news sites that are more popular than the established ones? And with a shocking, enourmus investment of 2 million dollars, too? It really seems as if Billionaires control everything, don't they? In fact, reading the article, I get the impression that rich people are generally evil - leftist ideology much?
Half of your comment addresses questioning how presidents are elected, implying that the parent ignores other issues with election campaigns. It does not support your point that using services like CA were open to anyone with money.
"The article seems to be a good example of why people don't trust the press anymore."
I agree it's possible. It's a combo of facts either side might use, facts cherry-picked for one side, logical fallacies, and pure rhetoric. I think there's more to it, though. These techniques go way back to point that my first analysis of logical and rhetorical persuasion was the Declaration of Independence that used both. Old media articles are a laugh, too, given their bias was so obvious.
Maybe it is precisely because people have more information sources available now that they realize more often how lacking some articles are.
For example, I have witnessed first hand the campaign for banning ads on Breitbart (which was often pointing to Milo articles like "the pill is making women ugly", falsely claiming they were mysognist), and I have followed Milo for a long time. I was following him on Twitter when he was banned, so I know he didn't call for racist attacks on the Ghostbusters actress as many articles claim. I have asked people to prove to me that Breitbart is antisemitic (while employing Jews like Milo) and received no replies. Therefore the article simply seems laughable to me. In fact the way Milo is mentioned is often a quick way to judge an article - if they claim he called for harassment of the Ghostbusters actress, it is bunk.
I don't recall as much scare when people found out Obama's team used machine learning and data collection, as well as Hillary's later efforts, to influence voters or gain support.
I am not a Trump supporter, nor a Hillary or Obama fan; I am pretty disgusted with the US political system, however, I also recall people praising the IT/ML/Big Data teams for Obama and Hillary without even a mention of what data they were slinging or collecting.
I left FB years ago, and I feel much better for it, especially after reading this article.