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US billionaire helped to back Brexit
- gd1 10y agoThe left really is descending into tin-foil hat conspiracy madness.
- brad0 10y agoIt's depressing to see how our opinions are collectively shaped to further someone's agenda.
- averagewall 10y agoWe already knew that. Anyone who voted for Obama, Clinton, Trump or Bush knows that they did it because they were influenced by the expensive campaigns that existed to further their and their parties' agendas. Everyone also knows that those campaigns were paid for by people who did it to further their own agendas.
- brador 10y agoMore widespread use of adblockers would have stopped this.
- vixen99 10y agoHave your opinions been shaped to further someone's agenda or is it only those of others?
- edejong 10y agoI think it's depressing that, despite abundant warnings from experts, we cannot convince ourselves to stop using massively centralized social media services.
- yunolisten 10y ago> we cannot convince ourselves to stop using massively centralized social media services. some of us were smart enough never to start using them in the first place
- kkleindev 10y agoWhat makes a person like Steve Mercer, being extremely well educated and highly successful take part in such dubious procedures? Will a personal experience drive one into being involved in Breitbart and such or is clinical financial calculation fueling such decisions?
- threeseed 10y agoSome rich people do it for self interest e.g. Koch Brothers but most do it because they genuinely believe in the positions. They take a keen interest in politics and the world no different to most people.
- ptaipale 10y agoInteresting that you get downvoted for stating this. As if rich people couldn't have genuine interest and even altruistic ambitions.
- snsr 10y ago> As if rich people couldn't have genuine interest and even altruistic ambitions. The Mercers are behind Breitbart, Trump, Bannon and the British Leave campaign; I doubt that altruism has much to do with it.
- ptaipale 10y agoPersonal gain is not always a sufficient explanation, either. Often people do what they do because they think it is right, not because of other motives that you wish to pin on them.
- snsr 10y ago> Personal gain is not always a sufficient explanation, either. We're discussing the family's dubious actions precisely because they go beyond pure self interest.
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- doctorstupid 10y agoIt's clear that Facebook and its ilk are becoming the gatekeepers to elections and social movements. China must have foreseen this long ago when it blocked them. The means are now in place to steer the governments of the democratic world in the directions preferred by those able to pay Facebook. As an increasingly political group of corporations, perhaps these new social gatekeepers will one day like to do a bit of steering towards their own goals. After all, cybernetics is the art of steering.
- averagewall 10y agoIt's just the new and more powerful advertising medium. In the old days television filled that role, and it still does. Presidential elections in the US are always and only won by the candidates who spend the most money.
- rudrigu 10y ago> Presidential elections in the US are always and only won by the candidates who spend the most money. Did Trump outspend Rodham?
- BillyParadise 10y agoTouche! Maybe this old adage should be updated - (s)he who gets the most airtime wins.
- fosco 10y agothis can be explained by the mere exposure effect [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere-exposure_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere-exposure_effect
- averagewall 10y agoI was a bit inaccurate there. I meant only the candidates who spend on the order of republican and democrat nominees. Independents can't afford to and they don't get votes. Except one or two guys in the 90's/2000's who got a big share at a huge financial expense. Who even knows the name of any independent candidate? They don't have advertising to tell us what they stand for or make us believe they're big enough to win.
- tomp 10y agoHere is a fascinating (yet very long) account from one of the leaders of Vote Leave campaign, he details the use of Big Data as well. https://dominiccummings.wordpress.com/2017/01/09/on-the-referendum-21-branching-histories-of-the-2016-referendum-and-the-frogs-before-the-storm-2/ https://dominiccummings.wordpress.com/2017/01/09/on-the-refe... https://dominiccummings.wordpress.com/2016/10/29/on-the-referendum-20-the-campaign-physics-and-data-science-vote-leaves-voter-intention-collection-system-vics-now-available-for-all/ https://dominiccummings.wordpress.com/2016/10/29/on-the-refe...
- gaius 10y agoI am pretty sure that no-one's vote was swayed in either direction by either campaign and that every penny spent by both sides was wasted. Whether you are Leave or Remain, that is driven by underlying fundamentals, not by abstract arguments about balances of trade...
- tankenmate 10y agoTheir system was deliberately targeted at swing voters; i.e. people who were "fundamental"ly unsure. It's just a numbers game like sales, you may not always be able to influence one particular voter but you can nudge a swing population X number of percentage points in your favoured direction.
- bhouston 10y agoTHere are always swing votes who are in the middle. In close votes, these voters matter.
- DanBC 10y ago> not by abstract arguments about balances of trade... People were not swayed by abstract arguments of balances of trade, but about lies told about paying £350m per week to the NHS rather than Europe.
- gaius 10y agoOr lies about immediate economic collapse followed by WW3? Both sides engaged in hyperbole but no amount of rhetoric would change what people saw around them with their own eyes. Some saw a thriving metropolis that benefited massively from the EU; others saw factory towns decimated by the switch in trade away from the Commonwealth and towards the EU. It just so happens there were more of the latter than the former.
- TheOtherHobbes 10y agoYou mean the factory towns that were getting EU money for regeneration, having been decimated by the UK's political own-goal swing away from industrial output to a London-centric "service economy" And the idea that the UK ever "traded" with the Commonwealth on anything like the scale it trades with the EU is nonsense. The UK did a nice line in imperial resource extraction from Commonwealth countries for a good century or so. But it was never "trade" in the common market sense. Any suggestion that it's possible for the UK to return to a time that never existed is obviously incorrect.
- BillyParadise 10y agoExtraterritorial corporate interests manipulating a decision arguably more important than a single election? Please, help me explore how this is significantly different than the Russia vs US election issue on the other side of the pond.
- jdoliner 10y agoWell, one obvious difference is that it's a private entity rather than a government. But you don't have to look very hard to find instances of the american government interfering in foreign elections. It's one of their favorite pastimes.
- carlob 10y agoArguably the Marshall Plan is one of the best examples of this
- mike_hearn 10y agoArguably given the context, Obama visiting the UK to tell the British that the USA would ignore them if they voted out (send them to the "back of the queue") would be the best example of this: direct intervention by a foreign leader into a national referendum.
- dredmorbius 10y agoGiven that CA worked for the Trump campaign, hardly different at all.
- nawtacawp 10y agoMercer provided Bannon and Conway to the Trump campaign as well. The Mercer family is invested in Breitbart news.
- dredmorbius 10y agoRobert Mercer and daughter Rebekah. Excellent WashPo coverage: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/pro-trump-megadonor-is-part-owner-of-breitbart-news-empire-ceo-reveals/2017/02/24/9f16eea4-fad8-11e6-9845-576c69081518_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/pro-trump-megadonor-...
- bhouston 10y agoAstroturfing things like reddit, twitter, facbook and other forums using AI is likely going to be very effective if it isn't already.
- FeatureRush 10y agohttps://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/ Can't wait!
- FeatureRush 10y agoIt may seem as a joke, but I really think that manipulating pseudo-anonymous Internet forums like reddit for political and marketing reasons will prove to be huge driving force for bot development in the coming decade. Right now it's super cheap to just hire some students or task interns with the posting, but remember bots don't leak, don't quit the job and while they do not understand reality you just can't teach human to consider 5000 data points for every comment! And the story about vote manipulation, as shady as it is, still proves that machine that does not understand emotions still uses them in a way that trained humans just couldn't.
- dredmorbius 10y agoI've decided that the outcome of that may not be quite so benign as we'd initially hoped.
- dredmorbius 10y ago"Reddit is Being Manipulated By Big Financial Services Companies" https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/5vxxyh/reddit_is_being_regularly_manipulated_by_large/ https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/5vxxyh/reddit_i... https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaymcgregor/2017/02/20/reddit-is-being-manipulated-by-big-financial-services-companies/#4739b1054c92 https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaymcgregor/2017/02/20/reddit-i...
- pessimizer 10y agoAI doesn't exist. Actual people do, and they're cheap to hire.
- FeatureRush 10y agoThe main point from this article seems to be that the service was provided for free, without registering it as a donation. Some details on the actual technology are in this related article: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/26/robert-mercer-breitbart-war-on-media-steve-bannon-donald-trump-nigel-farage https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/26/robert-merc... > On its website, Cambridge Analytica makes the astonishing boast that it has psychological profiles based on 5,000 separate pieces of data on 220 million American voters Then there are some speculation what data could it be and how would it be used. From that, it seems that the difference between other "Better audience targeting" tools used for typical commercial advertising campaigns would be mainly scale and accuracy? As a side note, does anyone else thinks that this specific photo in article about manipulation was used to manipulate my emotions and invoke negative view of the other side? https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/26/robert-mercer-breitbart-war-on-media-steve-bannon-donald-trump-nigel-farage#img-4 https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/26/robert-merc...
- adnzzzzZ 10y ago>Then there are some speculation what data could it be and how would it be used. From that, it seems that the difference between other "Better audience targeting" tools used for typical commercial advertising campaigns would be mainly scale and accuracy? Some of it is explained on this 5 minutes video (ignore the clickbait title). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yo3gOoOSdhY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yo3gOoOSdhY According to this professor one of the things they used for better targetting is a person's Big 5 personality profile that they extract from Facebook likes.
- bamboozled 10y agoThanks for sharing that, he raises some really good points!!!
- FeatureRush 10y agoOh, so it's also a better underlaying model. Looking now at the company website they are using less popular name OCEAN Personality Model for Big 5. As far as I know Big5 is not the final, definitive model. There is this famous quote about performance of NLP machine learning system going up after firing a linguist, I wonder if we will someday hear similar comment about psychologists?
- guilhas 10y agoSome backed brexit, some backed remain. Bohoo..
- vixen99 10y agoJust out of interest, how many nameless or otherwise, billionaires backed Remain?
- ionwake 10y agoSorry for the ignorance, I do not know much about politics. But why would a billionaire want to even back something like Brexit? Is there a potential business type benefit for it?
- dredmorbius 10y agoMedia and information systems fundamentally change societies and their power structures and dynamics. They always have. They always will. Often the changes, or at least the immediate periods of change, are highly disruptive, often painful or deadly, sometimes to tens of millions. The dream of uniting humanity through better communications is at best exceedingly incomplete. That idea occurred to me a few months ago. I've been researching it in some depth, and like most good ideas, I'm hardly the first to stumble accross it. In recent memory, Elizabeth Eisenstein has pursued the idea to a greater extent than nearly anyone else, in particular in her 1980 book The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. Review here (full text available via https://sci-hub.cc https://sci-hub.cc): https://www.jstor.org/stable/2779560?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents https://www.jstor.org/stable/2779560?seq=1#page_scan_tab_con... I'm aware of a number of those transitions, and there's good evidence for nearly all of the corresponding changes. 1. Speach and language itself: increased intra- and inter-tribal communications. Strong evidence of rapidly advancing toolmaking, including stone tools, and weapons. 2. Writing. Co-incident with the start of civilisation itself, cities, and agriculture. Spread like wildfire from regions in which it first developed over a period of a few centuries for the most part. 3. Printing. Moveable type, in Europe, corresponded with thhe Reformation, schism of the Catholic Church, and a continent-wide 30 Years War. 4. Incremental improvements in literacy, papermaking, and printing: the American and French revolutions. 5. Steam-powered, iron-framed prresses, greatly increased literacy, and much cheaper paper: the Revolutions of 1848, in which 50 nations in Europe and Latin America experienced revolutionary uprisings. 6. Mass media, especially radio, public address systems, cinema, audio tape recording, grammaphone, and ever cheaper and faster presses: the rise of Fascism in Italy and Germany, demagogues in the United States (Huey Long, Father Coughlin, Joseph McCarthy). 7. In the 1950s - 2010s, mass social movements piggy-backing on radio, mobile PA systems (bullhorns), mass music, television, CB radio, call-in radio, telephones, mimeographs, Xerox machines, Fanzines, dial-up, broadband, and mobile Internet, Web-based apps, social media. Profiling, targeted messaging, and other elements operate similarly. The overall dynamics are complex, and I've omitted other elements, but the overall concept seems quite strong. Many authors have commented on elements of this, though few look to the darker side. Le Bon, Mackay, Bernays, McLuhan, Chomsky, Mander, Shirky, and boyd are among those who have.
- chiefalchemist 10y agoThis is the second article I've read on this firm. Neither provides proof their means are effective. The only claims made about effectiveness are made by the firm itself. So of course, as a for profit venture, it's going to say it's worth the money. Of course. As for the rest of the article and the graph of influence. I wish some SC wiz kid would build a "revenue Big Brother" DB so we can see and track all these often nefarious connections. We have video games out the ass but no way of knowing and seeing a graph of relationshios that for all practical purposes paints a picture of corruption. When will we finally get something that useful?
- mike_hearn 10y agoThis is just one of a constant stream of stories from the Guardian that boil down to "people are sheep and their opinions are formed by a sinister conspiracy to manipulate them". It is a fundamental part of their worldview, which is why they're so against referendums to begin with. Indeed, the entire premise of this article is that people make up their mind based on what they see on Facebook, although Leave voters trend old (i.e. the people least likely to heavily use Facebook). The idea that it's sinister and scary comes from an academic "expert". This way of thinking has been pushed so hard by the left wing and pro-EU segment of media and society: • Trust experts, not yourself. • People who disagree with us are merely influenced by lies. • It should be (pro-EU) MPs, not a referendum result, that decides what happens. • When courts overrule referendums, that's democracy. • Referendums are a bad idea because the outcome is pre-determined by whoever lies the most/spends the most money/is best at manipulation/etc. It's a worldview that dehumanises anyone who disagrees and makes fools of anyone who adopts it, as the endless shrill cries of "what about the £350 million for the NHS" make clear - as if no lies were told by the Remain campaign! Emergency budgets that never happened, an insta-recession that never happened, Cameron saying he'd stay on and then immediately resigning, Obama saying the USA would shun the UK, the £4300/yr figure that was dropped the moment the Treasury produced it because it was clear this "expert prediction" was nonsense, the "we can stay in a reformed EU" despite the actual leaders of the EU saying that wasn't going to happen, etc etc. But despite all that, only one side constantly harps on the idea that the vote wasn't reliable because of nonsense said by politicians: the side that never believed in voting to begin with.
- js8 10y agoI didn't downvote you, but I disagree strongly. I am leftist and my experience with other people on the left is that they overwhelmingly disagree with the points you ascribe to them. (Except perhaps the first one, I think it's quite sane to trust experts.) It's perhaps because you listen to "left-wing" politicians and people in power, and you're out of touch with people who have actual leftist opinions, that you get this impression. But it has nothing to do with being left-wing as it has it with being in power. So, I think you should stop labeling those things as leftist (they are not - democracy is in fact very much a leftist idea), you're only hurting your own cause, by seeing enemies where you could have allies.
- davidf18 10y agoMercer does have a point about the bias of MSM: I read NY Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, The Atlantic, WSJ while NY Times, WaPo came out against Steve Bannon for being anti-semitic when he decidedly is very pro-Israel and very against anti-Semitism and yet, didn't say a word about Keith Ellison who was running for DNC chair. MSM criticized Trump for not being strong enough on anti-Semitism but where silent about Ellison. Among other things, Ellison was one of only 8 members of Congress to vote against funding Israel's Iron Dome missile system -- a system which protected Israeli civilians from Hamas rockets [1]. The Anti-Defimation League whose reason d'être is to combat anti-Semitism came out with a statement against Ellison on Dec 1, 2016,[2] but you won't see MSM mention the ADL condemnation of Ellison. [1] http://jpupdates.com/2014/08/03/rep-ellison-explains-anti-iron-dome-funding-vote-need-cease-fire/ http://jpupdates.com/2014/08/03/rep-ellison-explains-anti-ir... [2] http://www.adl.org/press-center/press-releases/israel-middle-east/speech-raises-new-doubts-about-Rep-Ellisons-ability.html http://www.adl.org/press-center/press-releases/israel-middle... [3] http://dailycaller.com/2016/11/17/democrats-must-scrutinize-keith-ellisons-anti-semitic-past-and-ties-to-radical-islam/ http://dailycaller.com/2016/11/17/democrats-must-scrutinize-... Of course choosing Ellison as a candidate to lead them was truly a lack of judgment on the part of the DNC but for some reason, NY Times, Washington Post, etc. failed to report Ellison's views and the ADL statement. EDIT: The Wall Street Journal, unlike NYTimes and Washington Post does bring up Ellison's anti-Semitism, but only after the fact, not before the election: "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] [4] https://www.wsj.com/articles/democrats-elect-tom-perez-party-chairman-1488054192 https://www.wsj.com/articles/democrats-elect-tom-perez-party...
- huac 10y agoThere's a huge difference between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. There's no real way to engage with somebody who willfully tries to remove that distance. It is also very much possible to be anti-Semitic and pro-Israel, but I won't go into those mental gymnastics here. Edit: the mental gymnastics that have been offered elsewhere basically boil down to, "we hate Jews, but are fine giving them their own country if it means they leave America." White supremacists are also pro-Israel because they think having a Jewish homeland justifies having a white homeland (America, Europe, etc).
- coldtea 10y agoSo? From Soros to Gates, many US billionaires also helped to back Bremain. https://www.forbes.com/sites/derekxiao/2016/06/22/from-disaster-to-cobblers-billionaires-weigh-in-on-brexit/#3ce2d3867fb3 https://www.forbes.com/sites/derekxiao/2016/06/22/from-disas... Including most of the mainstream media, tv personalities, actors, etc.
- ascorbic 10y agoThere's a big difference between expressing support for a campaign and secretly providing hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of donated services to a foreign political campaign, and the campaign not declaring the donation as required by law.
- coldtea 10y agoWhereas Bremain supporters and politicians didn't get such covert donations? Not to mention that they had the full cooperation and support of the state, that was supposed to be neutral. Plus thinly veiled (or open) threats from all kinds of businesses, heads of foreign states, etc against a Brexit.
- rbg246 10y agoThere has been no evidence of any secret donations but who knows there could have been but they probably didn't need the resources as much as the leave campaign so less likely. Giving advice as a foreign leader to other countries is what politicians do and besides it usually has the opposite intended effect which was why every European leader had their mouths tightly clamped during the campaign with a few minor slips from memory. Finally, the state was against brexit, that was their stated position they were never neutral except they promised to keep quiet during the official campaign as per normal election rules Secondly, they merely stated the facts as the civil service saw it regarding exit providing the frank and fearless advice that is their job.
- coldtea 10y ago
- zakk 10y agoRich people backing political causes? Is it something new?
- owebmaster 10y agoA lot of them (and the secretary of state) also planned and executed the overthrow of an elected brazillian government past year. The spread of american corruption over other countries polítics is absurd. Even more absurd is to see americans attack Trump as if the previous Administration wasn't one of the worst for global security.
- NPMaxwell 10y agoIn terms of how this is done, the Big 5 personality theory is like a squirrel in the movie, Up. The powerful tool is testing how individual level data predicts the incremental impact on behavior of actions (ads etc.) that the campaign promoters can take. The behavior you care about ultimately is voting, and you can't train models on voting, but you can train models on campaign donations, Facebook liking, sharing, and copying-and-pasting. These are behaviors that are likely to correlate with voting later. The role of a theory like Big 5 is to help guide the selection of what to test, and is ideally balanced with what is easy to test.
- woodpanel 10y ago> Martin Moore, of King’s College London, said that “undisclosed support-in-kind is extremely troubling." In all fairness: Isn't "extremely troubling undisclosed support-in-kind" exactly what Bannon and Mercer are charging the "mainstream media" with? (Disclosure: No Trump supporter, nor Ukip. Not a citizen in both countries)