7 ms·
‘I made Bannon’s psychological warfare tool’ meet the data war whistleblower
- timeu 9y agoMercer's and Koch's are the oligarchs of the US thanks to Citizen United et al. Combined with 24/7 propaganda brainwashing by Fox News, defunding of public schools, the raising inequality and gerrymandering and voter supression, democracy is just a hollow shell and you end up with a guy like Trump as president.
- ryanx435 9y agoInteresting how when Obama used big data and targeted marketing to win, he was applauded and given accolades [1], but when Trump used big data and targeted marketing to win, he is painted as sinister and manipulative and evil. Almost like there is an anti trump propaganda narrative being pushed. Almost. [1] https://www.infoworld.com/article/2613587/big-data/the-real-story-of-how-big-data-analytics-helped-obama-win.html https://www.infoworld.com/article/2613587/big-data/the-real-...
- ryguytilidie 9y agoAnd its almost as though you're being as disingenuous as possible while trying to mock others for being dishonest. Why not just debate in reality versus saying "well, if I'm intentionally obtuse, I can find a way to make others look like hypocrites"? Who are you hoping will be convinced by BS like that?
- cat199 9y agoit's almost as though the post was being deliberately obtuse in order to be a bit sarcastic and tongue in cheek about it and has an expectation people would understand that.. almost
- ryguytilidie 9y agoSo you're saying they weren't actually doing that? Glad we agree.
- alwayseasy 9y agoInteresting how nuance is important: Obama's big data was public or obtained legally to supplement his campaign's ground game or TV buying. While Trump's big data was based on stolen data and used to discourage Democrats from voting.
- ryanlol 9y ago“stolen data”
- alwayseasy 9y agoDidn't read any news this weekend?
- ryanlol 9y agoYes, and I’d still go with “stolen” over stolen. This data was handed out, not stolen.
- res0nat0r 9y ago> I ran the Obama 2008 data-driven microtargeting team. How dare you! We didn’t steal private Facebook profile data from voters under false pretenses. OFA voluntarily solicited opinions of hundreds of thousands of voters. We didn’t commit theft to do our groundbreaking work. https://twitter.com/mbsimon/status/975231597183229953 https://twitter.com/mbsimon/status/975231597183229953
- stevenwoo 9y agoFrom the article, CA got 270,000 people to install an app. They then used those people to find and download the data for 50,000,000 from those 270,000 users without asking the permission of those 50,000,000.
- DonHopkins 9y agoYou're pushing a pro-Trump propaganda narrative by making a false equivalence between Obama's ethical legal use of data, and Trump's unethical theft of it.
- friendly_chap 9y agoWith a president who is under attack by the mainstream media? Democracy has just got a reboot, my friend. For the first time in ages the herds are not following what their slavemasters are telling them. I have no dog in this fight since I'm European, but I'm glad he won and I root for the people of America who denounce the cesspool of propaganda what is disguised as their free media. You are becoming true to your values again. I wish all Americans luck in your fight against the usurers.
- spiderfarmer 9y agoSigh. Political topics are always bringing out the crazy and delusional commenters. Can we just delete this from the homepage?
- friendly_chap 9y agoDon't worry, I will delete it a bit later anyway, I don't like to leave political comments behind. But thanks for the ad hominem.
- 908087 9y agoIf you didn't want to leave it behind, you shouldn't have posted it on a public forum. Good luck deleting it from any archival sites it has ended up on.
- friendly_chap 9y agoWell, I like having discussion with people, especially thoughtful people like here on HN. That does not mean that I want to persist said discussion.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- spiderfarmer 9y agoJust remember that most people want to live peacefully with the rest of the world, no matter their race or background. Haters are always the minority and no amount of hate spewing will make you seem friendly.
- fallingfrog 9y agoOh dear. 2 hours in and all the comments appear to me to be the kinds of politically trolling that we typically try to avoid on hacker news. The story is about technology and statistics and what the future of data mining might mean for democracy, folks.. can we keep the name calling to a minimum please?
- foolrush 9y agoIn fairness, everything is political, including notions of “technology” and especially statistics. See Lombroso and gerrymandering respectively.
- cloakandswagger 9y agoThere was already a massive topic about this story yesterday. I don't see what a new one accomplishes except exhausting HN's moderation team.
- fisherjeff 9y agoAnd now his Facebook account has been suspended: https://mobile.twitter.com/chrisinsilico/status/975335430043389952 https://mobile.twitter.com/chrisinsilico/status/975335430043...
- steadicat 9y agoTo be fair, Facebook announced they would, 2 days ago: > We are suspending SCL/Cambridge Analytica, Wylie and Kogan from Facebook, pending further information. https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/03/suspending-cambridge-analytica/ https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/03/suspending-cambridge-an...
- TazeTSchnitzel 9y agoThe video interview (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXdYSQ6nu-M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXdYSQ6nu-M) was really fun to watch. It's not every day you hear someone talking directly and honestly to camera about how their company's image was a fabrication, that they ran a propaganda machine, how they were bankrolled by an American billionaire, how they directly interacted with Steve Bannon, Facebook's broken app privacy model, etc.
- bhouston 9y agoVery interesting. I love where he says it wasn't a public campaign where one message was sent out and everyone could judge it, but rather it was designed to whisper the right message privately to each individual, the message most effective at converting their opinion given their psychological and demographic profile, even if the messages themselves were contradictory across different individuals. Hard to figure out what the future holds because we generally never get less sophisticated, but more sophisticated.
- pmoriarty 9y ago"it was designed to whisper the right message privately to each individual, the message most effective at converting their opinion given their psychological and demographic profile, even if the messages themselves were contradictory across different individuals." When Netflix can't even recommend movies to me that are more than 50% likely to be enjoyable for me, I really have to wonder how effective messages designed to change people's political opinions based on demographic and psychological profiles really were.
- ritchiea 9y agoI understand the sentiment but propaganda and prediction are vastly different fields. Some of the things they were doing were: spreading misinformation, undermining trust in real information and spreading negative affect. Those all seem more concretely achievable than predicting whether you will like a film that has dozens to thousands of variables around tone, content and aesthetic. They don't really have to change people's political opinions. But they can know what makes people angry and give them more of it. They can know the lie they want to tell and make it more ubiquitous so it's harder to discern from truth. These tasks aren't anywhere near as abstract as predicting your taste in film. It seems like they knew angry people were showing up to vote for Trump, so just give people more of what makes them angry. And give people thinking about voting for Hillary more reasons to be skeptical about her weaknesses as a candidate.
- pdog 9y agoA year ago, it was widely reported that Cambridge Analytica had very little to do with the Trump campaign's digital strategy[1][2][3]. This was corroborated by GOP consultants, campaign staffers, and current and former Cambridge employees. What changed? [1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/06/us/politics/cambridge-analytica.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/06/us/politics/cambridge-ana... [2]: https://www.buzzfeed.com/kendalltaggart/the-truth-about-the-trump-data-team-that-people-are-freaking https://www.buzzfeed.com/kendalltaggart/the-truth-about-the-... [3]: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-12-08/no-big-data-didn-t-win-the-u-s-election https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-12-08/no-big-da...
- orf 9y agoMembers of the Trump team and GOP members lying about things, especially involving foreign countries/entities getting involved in the election? Who would have thought it.
- FLUX-YOU 9y ago1. The whistleblower coming forward with a story, and 2. Facebook's leaky API and how Kogan was allowed to continue by lying and saying the harvesting was for academic purposes
- api 9y agoBoth could be true. Trump himself may not have known much, but CA could have pushed for his election as part of a more global push for nationalism and identity politics.
- magoghm 9y ago"...and Darpa, the US government’s secretive Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is cited in at least two academic papers supporting Kosinski’s work." <-- DARPA is secretive? That sounds to me like sensationalism.
- cat199 9y agoin other news: media outlet manages to publish 'shocking expose' about how news media is easily manipulated by external actors, all the while painting it as something 'novel', 'else' and 'external' to the venue of publication itself..
- patcheudor 9y agoFrom last years DEF CON 25, pre-dating what we are now learning about Cambridge Analytica (CA): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5Hx86H3-mc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5Hx86H3-mc Ultimately this isn't a political issue, it's an ethics in engineering issue and despite claims by CA that it didn't impact the outcome of the election, independent research into this area by multiple independent researchers has been painting a picture, much like Chris Sumner covers in his DEF CON 25 talk that these techniques are effective enough as just a one percent swing is sufficient.
- joejerryronnie 9y agoI wonder if a large part of this social media psyops/fake news "crisis" is because the "bad guys" won. The bad guys here being Trump, Bannon, and the alt-right, who are disliked by both traditional democrats and republicans. Why did we not question Obama's original campaign and their use of social media? It is widely understood that Obama leveraged social media in novel and cutting edge ways to directly target voters predisposed to his message and to rally huge amounts of voters into action. Isn't this essentially what happened leading up to the election of Trump? Obviously there are some other factors at work like the involvement of a foreign entity and very questionably ethics in the gathering and compiling of these massive data sets. But do we really think that this is the first time Russia has meddled with US elections? And since when are we surprised when a politician (or their hired guns) exhibits unethical behavior? I'm not trying to excuse Facebook or the other platforms here. I would think they would be the first ones trying to combat this behavior and expose people leveraging their ecosystem without permission for some personal agenda - if, for no other reason, than the sheer pride of not being taken advantage of. And now these companies certainly need to take action to avoid huge social and political backlash (or try to stem the backlash that has already occurred). But I do wonder how large this backlash would be had Hillary won the Whitehouse in 2016. Edit: I hadn't seen ryanx435's comment and the corresponding replies before posting. While it's easy to dismiss his comment as purposely obtuse, I also think it's very easy to do so too quickly, thus avoiding actually thinking about this issue and perhaps falling into the same echo-chamber/bubble mentality that many accuse Trump supporters of.
- mnm1 9y ago"Obviously there are some other factors at work like the involvement of a foreign entity and very questionably ethics in the gathering and compiling of these massive data sets." I think you answered your own question. Those other factors are the crucial factors that make this situation different. Crimes were allegedly committed. This isn't about using social media, it's about the alleged crimes. I don't even see how you can draw a parallel to Obama's campaign. What crimes did Obama's team allegedly commit?
- joejerryronnie 9y ago
- Floegipoky 9y agoWe can't pretend that this is a political post. The ethical implications of this extend to the very structure of the modern Internet, which has become so entwined with targeted marketing. Democracy was not devised to withstand this.