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The application is different, but not 'completely different". The use of friend lists harvested from an application to target ads was not known by users. Much

The application is different, but not 'completely different". The use of friend lists harvested from an application to target ads was not known by users. Much of political campaigning, and advertising in general, is exactly as you describe, "using manipulation and psychological techniques to convince". I would agree with you that the purpose of the application was deceptive, but don't most applications that use Facebook logins attempt to monetize this data?

bostik 9y ago
> Much of political campaigning, and advertising in general, is exactly as you describe, "using manipulation and psychological techniques to convince". Please, just call it what it is: propaganda. Whether you're selling a product, a service or an idea, you're still doing your best to manipulate your target audience. The techniques are the same. And I use the term in a purely clinical sense: manipulation at scale, the subtler the better.
- darawk 9y ago
  > Please, just call it what it is: propaganda. All political campaigns are propaganda, though.
fny 9y ago
This is political weaponization of data and information for the purpose of putting an individual in power. It's not me trying to sell you a pug plushie or get you to use my accounting software. It's deliberately lying to seed fear, distrust, division, and hate between citizens. It's deliberate manipulation to create distrust of government institutions. It's the destruction of civil society and civil discourse for the purpose of winning an election. This should not be tolerated of anyone, particularly of our own head of state.
- StanislavPetrov 9y ago
  The problem here, as is the root of almost all the problems we face in society isn't Cambridge Analytica. The problem is people lack basic critical thinking skills and the capacity to make good decisions. > It's deliberate manipulation to create distrust of government institutions. Nobody with any knowledge of history or good sense trusts any government institution. >It's the destruction of civil society and civil discourse for the purpose of winning an election. This would require having a civil society filled with civil discourse to start out with, which we didn't (and don't) have. The simple, irrefutable truth is that governments and those in other centers of power have been using propaganda to control feeble minds and society at large since Woodrow Wilson founded the first official state-run propaganda machine (the CPI) over a hundred years ago. Everyone is trying to find a "reason" that people rejected "traditional American institutions" and the establishment candidate (Hillary Clinton) in favor of a classless, boorish carnival barker in Donald Trump. They point to the evil Russians, or the dastardly villains at Cambridge Analytics, because they don't want to accept that "traditional American institutions" have been utter garbage for decades. They don't want to accept that many, many Americans are simply rejecting the status quo. Americans may not be smart or informed enough to know exactly what is wrong with "the system", but they know its horribly broken, it doesn't work in their interests, and many of them are reflexively rejecting that system. They aren't rejecting it because of the Russians, or because of some Twitter trolls, or some facebook ads - they are rejecting it because they have seen their standards of living plummet over the last few decades while those at the upper echelon of society have gotten fabulously wealthy. They are rejecting it because so many people are one illness or accident or lost job away from being homeless. They are rejecting it because they have seen (and continue to see) a race to the bottom for working people while the "elites" push for open borders and a massive influx of cheap labor that will make their lives even more difficult. So keep on crying about the evil Trump and the dastardly Russians, and whatever other phantoms you invent to explain away the growing national discontent while keeping your head in the sand about the real problems we have.
  - fny 9y ago
    I don't disagree with you about at all about the ground truth of American polity. (I have a lot of family that voted for Trump.) From my perspective, the election sent the right message but through a profoundly dangerous messenger. For me, Russia and Cambridge Analytica are not scapegoats: they are other problems that need to be addressed which are not orthogonal to addressing the economic inequalities aggravated by the current system.
    - nopriorarrests 9y ago
      It worth remembering though, that this messenger was deliberately picked from the crowd of 16 (!) people during primaries. Voters spoke when they abandoned Kasich, Jeb and the rest. It's not like they had no choice. They had.
      - orangecat 9y ago
        There was an interval of about 3 months where if Cruz, Rubio, and Kasich had agreed to draw straws and support the winner, Trump could have been stopped relatively easily. But instead they all assumed Trump could never win, and thus spent a lot of resources attacking each other and splitting the traditional Republican vote.
        eadmund 9y ago
        And that was due to two insane factors: first, that we use primaries rather than caucuses; second, that many of them define the winner as the one with the most votes. On the first point, a representative democratic republic really shouldn't be choosing its candidates by popular vote. A caucus system empowers parties to moderate & modulate the voices of their voters. As horrifically corrupt as Clinton, Inc. were in the 2016 election, in general it's a good thing for party insiders to seek a more electable candidate. On the second point, it simply makes no sense at all for a 40-30-30 split to go to the fellow with 40% of the vote. Instant runoff voting or a similar method would be far preferable to the current way we count votes.
      - 9y ago
- philwelch 9y ago
  > It's deliberately lying to seed fear, distrust, division, and hate between citizens. It's deliberate manipulation to create distrust of government institutions. It's the destruction of civil society and civil discourse for the purpose of winning an election. So...politics?
- mattmcknight 9y ago
  My point was not that it was good. My point was that it was very similar, but still a little different in terms of the app, to what the Obama campaign, and to a lesser effective extent, the Romney campaign did in 2012. My second point is that advertising, to include political advertising tends to be manipulative. So many ads are deceptive, so many play on fear. I do agree that populist messages around the world tend to be simplistic, but that is more of a criticism of political advertising in general than anything specific to this campaign. I am not convinced this use of Facebook was more effective than a typical ad targeting operation. While the people involved may have had other aspects of the operation that were more sinister, the surprise at how Facebook and ad targeting works has been widely reported in the last election. The extreme response to these events seems to be more about who was elected than how.

bostik 9y ago

> Much of political campaigning, and advertising in general, is exactly as you describe, "using manipulation and psychological techniques to convince". Please, just call it what it is: propaganda. Whether you're selling a product, a service or an idea, you're still doing your best to manipulate your target audience. The techniques are the same. And I use the term in a purely clinical sense: manipulation at scale, the subtler the better.

darawk 9y ago
> Please, just call it what it is: propaganda. All political campaigns are propaganda, though.

fny 9y ago

This is political weaponization of data and information for the purpose of putting an individual in power. It's not me trying to sell you a pug plushie or get you to use my accounting software. It's deliberately lying to seed fear, distrust, division, and hate between citizens. It's deliberate manipulation to create distrust of government institutions. It's the destruction of civil society and civil discourse for the purpose of winning an election. This should not be tolerated of anyone, particularly of our own head of state.

StanislavPetrov 9y ago
The problem here, as is the root of almost all the problems we face in society isn't Cambridge Analytica. The problem is people lack basic critical thinking skills and the capacity to make good decisions. > It's deliberate manipulation to create distrust of government institutions. Nobody with any knowledge of history or good sense trusts any government institution. >It's the destruction of civil society and civil discourse for the purpose of winning an election. This would require having a civil society filled with civil discourse to start out with, which we didn't (and don't) have. The simple, irrefutable truth is that governments and those in other centers of power have been using propaganda to control feeble minds and society at large since Woodrow Wilson founded the first official state-run propaganda machine (the CPI) over a hundred years ago. Everyone is trying to find a "reason" that people rejected "traditional American institutions" and the establishment candidate (Hillary Clinton) in favor of a classless, boorish carnival barker in Donald Trump. They point to the evil Russians, or the dastardly villains at Cambridge Analytics, because they don't want to accept that "traditional American institutions" have been utter garbage for decades. They don't want to accept that many, many Americans are simply rejecting the status quo. Americans may not be smart or informed enough to know exactly what is wrong with "the system", but they know its horribly broken, it doesn't work in their interests, and many of them are reflexively rejecting that system. They aren't rejecting it because of the Russians, or because of some Twitter trolls, or some facebook ads - they are rejecting it because they have seen their standards of living plummet over the last few decades while those at the upper echelon of society have gotten fabulously wealthy. They are rejecting it because so many people are one illness or accident or lost job away from being homeless. They are rejecting it because they have seen (and continue to see) a race to the bottom for working people while the "elites" push for open borders and a massive influx of cheap labor that will make their lives even more difficult. So keep on crying about the evil Trump and the dastardly Russians, and whatever other phantoms you invent to explain away the growing national discontent while keeping your head in the sand about the real problems we have.
- fny 9y ago
  I don't disagree with you about at all about the ground truth of American polity. (I have a lot of family that voted for Trump.) From my perspective, the election sent the right message but through a profoundly dangerous messenger. For me, Russia and Cambridge Analytica are not scapegoats: they are other problems that need to be addressed which are not orthogonal to addressing the economic inequalities aggravated by the current system.
  - nopriorarrests 9y ago
    It worth remembering though, that this messenger was deliberately picked from the crowd of 16 (!) people during primaries. Voters spoke when they abandoned Kasich, Jeb and the rest. It's not like they had no choice. They had.
    - orangecat 9y ago
      There was an interval of about 3 months where if Cruz, Rubio, and Kasich had agreed to draw straws and support the winner, Trump could have been stopped relatively easily. But instead they all assumed Trump could never win, and thus spent a lot of resources attacking each other and splitting the traditional Republican vote.
      - eadmund 9y ago
        And that was due to two insane factors: first, that we use primaries rather than caucuses; second, that many of them define the winner as the one with the most votes. On the first point, a representative democratic republic really shouldn't be choosing its candidates by popular vote. A caucus system empowers parties to moderate & modulate the voices of their voters. As horrifically corrupt as Clinton, Inc. were in the 2016 election, in general it's a good thing for party insiders to seek a more electable candidate. On the second point, it simply makes no sense at all for a 40-30-30 split to go to the fellow with 40% of the vote. Instant runoff voting or a similar method would be far preferable to the current way we count votes.
    - 9y ago
philwelch 9y ago
> It's deliberately lying to seed fear, distrust, division, and hate between citizens. It's deliberate manipulation to create distrust of government institutions. It's the destruction of civil society and civil discourse for the purpose of winning an election. So...politics?
mattmcknight 9y ago
My point was not that it was good. My point was that it was very similar, but still a little different in terms of the app, to what the Obama campaign, and to a lesser effective extent, the Romney campaign did in 2012. My second point is that advertising, to include political advertising tends to be manipulative. So many ads are deceptive, so many play on fear. I do agree that populist messages around the world tend to be simplistic, but that is more of a criticism of political advertising in general than anything specific to this campaign. I am not convinced this use of Facebook was more effective than a typical ad targeting operation. While the people involved may have had other aspects of the operation that were more sinister, the surprise at how Facebook and ad targeting works has been widely reported in the last election. The extreme response to these events seems to be more about who was elected than how.