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Robert Mercer: the big data billionaire waging war on mainstream media
- nabla9 10y agoIs 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.
- dukeluke 10y agoDoes it surprise you? People smart enough to interpret these social datasets would be the ones who recognize its potential to manipulate the population.
- facetube 10y agoSteve 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.
- rtx 10y agoInform the electorate about their view point.
- MisterBastahrd 10y agoNo, intentionally mislead the electorate.
- facetube 10y agoTheir 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.
- eggy 10y agoI get the gist of the article, and it is scary. 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.
- throwaway_374 10y agoI 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.
- eggy 10y agoYes, 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.
- TheRealDunkirk 10y agoUsing 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.
- kristianc 10y agoAnd 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.
- HarryHirsch 10y agoThe 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.
- kristianc 10y agoThe 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.
- ed_blackburn 10y agoAs 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.
- sjg007 10y agoBig data wars 2.0
- crusso 10y agoWhat 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?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- ed_blackburn 10y agoWe 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.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- techrich 10y agoIf you dont use facebag they have no power!
- domfletcher 10y agoNo, if everyone doesn't use Facebook then they have no power. My decision has, at best, a tiny marginal impact.
- Mendenhall 10y agoSad 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.
- flocial 10y agoSocial 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.
- nickpsecurity 10y ago" 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.
- davidf18 10y agoMercer 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] [1] 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... [2] 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... [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-... 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. [4] https://www.wsj.com/articles/democrats-elect-tom-perez-party-chairman-1488054192 https://www.wsj.com/articles/democrats-elect-tom-perez-party...
- jsmthrowaway 10y agoAn opportunity to link to CNN, of all places? Why would I pass that up? http://www.cnn.com/2016/12/01/politics/keith-ellison-anti-defamation-league-middle-east/ http://www.cnn.com/2016/12/01/politics/keith-ellison-anti-de... They even quoted "disqualifying" in the lede.
- macawfish 10y agoPlease 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.
- ryanmarsh 10y agoThis is the new normal. Get used to it. 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.
- FLUX-YOU 10y agoIt 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.
- pault 10y agoThe problem is, reading all sources of journalism and synthesizing them into a coherent narrative does not necessarily get you to the truth.
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- ryanmarsh 10y agoI love how the article uses the phrase "our data". LOL. We shout from mountain tops and then whine when people record us.
- pesenti 10y agoCambridge 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.
- raverbashing 10y agoSo maybe the secret is in the marketing
- AJ007 10y agoThe 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.
- jacobolus 10y agoFriendly note: you want “versus” or “vs.”, not “verse”.
- zzalpha 10y agoThey work better than chance but not much better When you're dealing with razor thin margins in individual electoral districts, and 300M people, even slightly better than chance can be pretty powerful.
- pesenti 10y ago
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- binarray2000 10y agoShould we take this journalist seriously when she writes: "This is a billionaire who is, as billionaires are wont, trying to reshape the world according to his personal beliefs."
- nickpsecurity 10y agoI 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.
- Trundle 10y ago>This is a billionaire who is, as billionaires are wont, trying to reshape the world according to his personal beliefs. This is what anyone who votes or participates in the election process is doing. Hell, it's what this journalist is doing. >They’re dead, I learn, because they – we, I – “cannot be trusted”. Please, as if you hadn't worked out you can't be trusted before. You knew what you were doing with the above line.
- macawfish 10y agoWe 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.
- cschmittiey 10y agoYou may be interested in patchwork: https://github.com/mmckegg/patchwork-next/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/mmckegg/patchwork-next/blob/master/README...
- rtx 10y agoWho will be responsible for security?
- fixxer 10y ago> 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.
- sitkack 10y agoThere is a distinction between deeply understanding someone at scale and using that understanding to either bait them computer generated propaganda or suppress their vote.
- nickpsecurity 10y agoThat'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.
- sitkack 10y agoIf 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.
- rtx 10y agoNo they should be going after voters who voted for Trump.
- return0 10y agoGood to see the all powerful msm have some competition
- hrodriguez 10y ago/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.
- nickpsecurity 10y ago"/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.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- facepalm 10y agoThe 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.
- nickpsecurity 10y ago"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.
- facepalm 10y agoMaybe 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.
- heisenbit 10y ago"data analysts controlling our emotions" 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.
- sehugg 10y agoThere's another Guardian article from yesterday about how Mercer donated free help to the Brexit Leave campaign: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/26/us-billionaire-mercer-helped-back-brexit?CMP=share_btn_tw https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/26/us-billiona...
- dghughes 10y agoI 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.
- coding123 10y agoI 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.
- pohl 10y agoThis 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.