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Yeesh. I've seen the company discussed but hadn't really looked into what they were doing differently than other data-driven campaigns in recent years: > Trump

Yeesh. I've seen the company discussed but hadn't really looked into what they were doing differently than other data-driven campaigns in recent years: > Trump’s conspicuous contradictions and his oft-criticized habit of staking out multiple positions on a single issue result in a gigantic number of resulting messaging options that creates a huge advantage for a firm like Cambridge Analytica: for every voter, a different message. Mathematician Cathy O’Neil had already observed in August that “Trump is like a machine learning algorithm” that adjusts to public reactions. “Pretty much every message that Trump put out was data-driven,” Alexander Nix explained to Das Magazin. On the day of the third presidential debate between Trump and Clinton, Trump’s team blasted out 175,000 distinct test variations on his arguments, mostly via Facebook. The messages varied mostly in their microscopic details, in order to communicate optimally with their recipients: different titles, colors, subtitles, with different images or videos. The granularity of this message tailoring digs all the way down to tiny target groups, Nix told Das Magazin. “We can target specific towns or apartment buildings. Even individual people.” > In the Miami neighborhood of Little Haiti, Trump’s campaign regaled residents with messages about the failures of the Clinton Foundation after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, in order to dissuade them from turning out for Clinton. This was one of the goals: to get potential but wavering Clinton voters—skeptical leftists, African-Americans, young women—to stay home. To “suppress” their votes, as one Trump campaign staffer bluntly put it. In these so-called dark posts (paid Facebook ads which appear in the timelines only of users with a particular suitable personality profile), African-Americans, for example, were shown the nineties-era video of Hillary Clinton referring to black youth as “super predators.”

leereeves 10y ago
In 2008 and 2012, Obama pioneered the use of A/B testing to refine campaign messages. "175,000 distinct test variations" sounds like a more ambitious effort at the same strategy. And targeting relevant information at wavering voters seems like a common strategy in 2016. House of Cards had both fictional Presidential candidates doing something similar in their fictional election, and Bloomberg once wrote "[Hillary's] campaign is looking to build on the digital engagement strategy devised by the Obama team, customizing the messages e-mailed to the estimated 8.6 million people on its list to make them as personal as possible."
- humanrebar 10y ago
  Yeah, these tactics are nothing new. It's not like older techniques like get-out-the-vote buses were careful to be bipartisan. As long as Americans are resolute in their opinions and uninterested in facts and open discourse, campaigns will be focusing of scaring them into turning out or disgusting them so they stay home.
mcintyre1994 10y ago
It's interesting that "dark posts" is used to refer to "paid Facebook ads which appear in the timelines only of users with a particular suitable personality profile", which appears to describe every paid Facebook ad.

leereeves 10y ago

In 2008 and 2012, Obama pioneered the use of A/B testing to refine campaign messages. "175,000 distinct test variations" sounds like a more ambitious effort at the same strategy. And targeting relevant information at wavering voters seems like a common strategy in 2016. House of Cards had both fictional Presidential candidates doing something similar in their fictional election, and Bloomberg once wrote "[Hillary's] campaign is looking to build on the digital engagement strategy devised by the Obama team, customizing the messages e-mailed to the estimated 8.6 million people on its list to make them as personal as possible."

humanrebar 10y ago
Yeah, these tactics are nothing new. It's not like older techniques like get-out-the-vote buses were careful to be bipartisan. As long as Americans are resolute in their opinions and uninterested in facts and open discourse, campaigns will be focusing of scaring them into turning out or disgusting them so they stay home.

mcintyre1994 10y ago

It's interesting that "dark posts" is used to refer to "paid Facebook ads which appear in the timelines only of users with a particular suitable personality profile", which appears to describe every paid Facebook ad.