8 ms·

New tapes reveal Cambridge Analytica CEO’s boasts of voter suppression

191 points by byproxy 8y ago

andrewla 8y ago
The story is written in long form, so it's difficult to figure out what methods of "voter suppression" were used. I hesitate to cry "fake news" here, but only barely. Typically, in my experience, "voter suppression" refers to techniques designed to prevent certain targeted groups from voting -- things like voter ID laws are often accused of having this motive, or closing polling stations, or limiting polling hours, or refusing to protect workers from discipline for taking the time to vote. These are almost always structural in nature; creating barriers that prevent people from voting. It appears that the voter suppression they are referring to is a completely different beast -- they reference this [1] Bloomberg article, which says: > “We have three major voter suppression operations under way,” says a senior official. They’re aimed at three groups Clinton needs to win overwhelmingly: idealistic white liberals, young women, and African Americans. Trump’s invocation at the debate of Clinton’s WikiLeaks e-mails and support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership was designed to turn off Sanders supporters. The parade of women who say they were sexually assaulted by Bill Clinton and harassed or threatened by Hillary is meant to undermine her appeal to young women. And her 1996 suggestion that some African American males are “super predators” is the basis of a below-the-radar effort to discourage infrequent black voters from showing up at the polls—particularly in Florida. These are not "voter suppression" in the sense used above; this is just dirty campaigning; or arguably even just campaigning. For a long time the fact of the matter is that a campaign, especially a presidential campaign, is trying to increase the turnout of your supporters, and decrease the turnout of your opponent's supporters -- nobody is convincing anybody to change sides; everyone is just trying to convince people to not vote. As long as it is done through non-structural means, convincing people not to vote is a perfectly reasonable persuasion technique, and it pains me to see the marketing hacks at Cambridge Analytica elevated to some sort of gurus that can magically hypnotize people. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-27/inside-the-trump-bunker-with-12-days-to-go https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-27/inside-th...
- moorhosj 8y ago
  >As long as it is done through non-structural means, convincing people not to vote is a perfectly reasonable persuasion technique What if it is done fraudulently? For example, lying to people about when/where to vote or lying about your opponent's positions. That doesn't seem like a reasonable technique to me.
  - andrewla 8y ago
    That's a ridiculous straw man. None of the cases cited above or the referenced article refer to any techniques even bordering on that. I suspect those techniques are rarely used because when they are exposed as being fraudulent they are massively counterproductive to voter apathy.
    - metamet 8y ago
      Pretty sure they were an integral part of pushing purely fraudulent conspiracies like Pizzagate, bolstered by Bannon's very own media arm's ability to amplify. > Breitbart is known for its anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim and anti-feminist sentiments, as well as for promoting far-right conspiracy theories like Pizzagate. > “We were testing all kinds of messages and all kinds of imagery. That included images of walls, people scaling walls. We tested ‘drain the swamp.’ Testing ideas of the ‘deep state’ and the NSA watching you—the government is conspiring against you,” the former Cambridge Analytica employee, Christopher Wylie, told CNN late Monday. Wylie said his work for Bannon went back to 2014. https://www.newsweek.com/watch-did-cambridge-analytica-use-facebook-data-snatch-election-trump-853351 https://www.newsweek.com/watch-did-cambridge-analytica-use-f...
    - moorhosj 8y ago
      You made this comment: ==As long as it is done through non-structural means, convincing people not to vote is a perfectly reasonable persuasion technique== I took your own generic statement and asked you to further qualify it. I did this by posing a question (opposite of a straw man) and applying it to a hypothetical scenario (to make it realistic). I never accused anyone of doing it or claimed it was something you cited. I was trying to understand if there should be some type of qualifier on the phrase "convincing people not to vote is a perfectly reasonable persuasion technique" because it seems to me that it isn't a universal truth.
trhway 8y ago
>In the recordings, Nix describes one of his major clients, Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz, as a "fascist".
hirundo 8y ago
> Nix ... engineered a highly successful grassroots campaign to "increase apathy" so that young Afro-Caribbeans would not vote. 1. He did this via speech. Free speech is a good thing even when the speech is bad, even when spoken by foreigners, even when it's illegal. 2. To the extent that this campaign succeeds it will tend to remove voters that are a) more suggestive, b) more prone to apathy. That would seem to improve the overall quality of the voting pool. The drive to get everyone to vote seems to be more about justifying the result than improving it.
- pianoben 8y ago
  I'm astonished to hear this said so openly. Whom is a representative democracy supposed to represent - only educated, upper-class, "quality" folks? We rightly consigned that idea to the dust bin, along with poll taxes, literacy tests, etc. If you want to improve the _citizenry_, a better approach would be to support civic education. edit: s/What/Whom/
  - kanox 8y ago
    > I'm astonished to hear this said so openly. Increasing "voter apathy" is a 100% legitimate democratic tactic, even for foreign powers.
    - moorhosj 8y ago
      Can you further explain what you mean by "legitimate" in this sentence? In it's context, it could be taken a number of different ways.
    - TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
      No, it isn't. The whole point of democracy is to canvas opinion. If you influence opinion on an industrial scale using significant sums of cash that aren't available to most citizens, that's not true democracy - that's you buying power with money.
    - drugme 8y ago
      even for foreign powers. Not in the view of U.S. campaign law.
cazum 8y ago
Wow, look at this evidence of an undemocratic election! Looks like its time for regime change in the US. I think it's only fair that I declare myself the new president. Who else is with me?
- kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
  Give me a dramatic helicopter coup and I'm in.
- dang 8y ago
  Would you please stop posting political flamebait to HN?
  - tropo 8y ago
    The entire article is political flamebait, so on-topic comments would also be political flamebait.
    - dang 8y ago
      There are degrees of this. Many comments manage to remain civil and substantive despite the divisive topic. This is exactly what the site guidelines call for: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
tick_tock_tick 8y ago
Sounds like they ran negative campaign ads? Hardly voter suppression and trivializes it by trying to equate the two.
- byproxy 8y ago
  Well, I wish I was able to fit the entire title in the submission. If anything, I feel that the bribery aspect is more damning. >"You can spend $10 million on an election. Or we can send one of our guys in to go offer the leader of the opposition a bribe, you know, three weeks before polling. It's a very good way to win an election.”
  - unityByFreedom 8y ago
    IANAL, is this enough to prosecute? It seems like enough to get a warrant.
  - m0zg 8y ago
    I wonder if that's what happened to Bernie Sanders. Immediately after his defeat in the primary he bought yet another house, his third. The timing is just too suspicious to be coincidental. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/08/bernie-sanders-summer-house https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/08/bernie-sanders-summe...
    - dsmithn 8y ago
      From the article: "Jane told Seven Days that they had recently sold a house in Maine that had belonged to her family since the 1900s, and used the proceeds to purchase the new property, which is located in North Hero (population 803, as of the 2010 census)." Why would he have bought a house when he was planning on moving to the White House?
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
    - solarkraft 8y ago
rdiddly 8y ago
"SCL/CA has never undertaken voter suppression and there is no evidence to the contrary." Hilarious - like the guilty parties in 50 years of cop/detective/courtroom/true-crime shows, he doesn't just stop with "we didn't do it" but feels compelled to tack on the part about "...and you don't have any evidence we did it!"
- unityByFreedom 8y ago
  Apparently in Kaiser's recording, Nix (then CEO), described CA's capabilities as voter suppression. Does the article link the recording? I wasn't able to find it while browsing by phone.
  - rdiddly 8y ago
    Not that I found. There's a link to the older ones at Channel4.com. And they refer to the newer recordings ("In explosive recordings that Kaiser made in the summer of 2016, excerpts from which are published exclusively by openDemocracy today...") but no link.
    - unityByFreedom 8y ago
      Weird. Thanks for confirming.
creaghpatr 8y ago
> They talked about ‘honey traps’ that used Ukrainian prostitutes and boasted of secret teams who “ghosted in, did the work, ghosted out” of countries, and “put information into the bloodstream of the internet… with no branding, so it’s unattributable, untrackable” You really think someone would do that? Just go on the internet and write lies? https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/just-go-on-the-internet-and-tell-lies https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/just-go-on-the-internet-and-t...
g8oz 8y ago
Also worthy of note is Cambridge Analytica's trolling of Nigeria's 2015 presidential election: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/apr/04/cambridge-analytica-used-violent-video-to-try-to-influence-nigerian-election https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/apr/04/cambridge-an... Amoral doesn't begin to describe these people.
- g8oz 8y ago
  Oh and they were busy in Kenya as well. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/global-opinions/wp/2018/03/20/how-cambridge-analytica-poisoned-kenyas-democracy/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/global-opinions/wp/2018/...
GoodJokes 8y ago
All the pedants in here claiming that, yea its bad, but its legal, is what makes me fear the utter stupidity of privileged techies. Seeing the forest through the trees isn't a skill that is valued with coders it seems.
dwd 8y ago
This was a bit of an eye opener on how much information Robert Mueller's team has and could be an indication of what is in the many sealed indictments in the DC citcuit given he flipped Sam Patton. On the Brexit side it's probably time to stop and step back to investigate whether the vote was unduly influenced with foreign cash or interferance.

191 points by byproxy 8y ago

The story is written in long form, so it's difficult to figure out what methods of "voter suppression" were used. I hesitate to cry "fake news" here, but only barely. Typically, in my experience, "voter suppression" refers to techniques designed to prevent certain targeted groups from voting -- things like voter ID laws are often accused of having this motive, or closing polling stations, or limiting polling hours, or refusing to protect workers from discipline for taking the time to vote. These are almost always structural in nature; creating barriers that prevent people from voting. It appears that the voter suppression they are referring to is a completely different beast -- they reference this [1] Bloomberg article, which says: > “We have three major voter suppression operations under way,” says a senior official. They’re aimed at three groups Clinton needs to win overwhelmingly: idealistic white liberals, young women, and African Americans. Trump’s invocation at the debate of Clinton’s WikiLeaks e-mails and support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership was designed to turn off Sanders supporters. The parade of women who say they were sexually assaulted by Bill Clinton and harassed or threatened by Hillary is meant to undermine her appeal to young women. And her 1996 suggestion that some African American males are “super predators” is the basis of a below-the-radar effort to discourage infrequent black voters from showing up at the polls—particularly in Florida. These are not "voter suppression" in the sense used above; this is just dirty campaigning; or arguably even just campaigning. For a long time the fact of the matter is that a campaign, especially a presidential campaign, is trying to increase the turnout of your supporters, and decrease the turnout of your opponent's supporters -- nobody is convincing anybody to change sides; everyone is just trying to convince people to not vote. As long as it is done through non-structural means, convincing people not to vote is a perfectly reasonable persuasion technique, and it pains me to see the marketing hacks at Cambridge Analytica elevated to some sort of gurus that can magically hypnotize people. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-27/inside-the-trump-bunker-with-12-days-to-go https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-27/inside-th...

moorhosj 8y ago
>As long as it is done through non-structural means, convincing people not to vote is a perfectly reasonable persuasion technique What if it is done fraudulently? For example, lying to people about when/where to vote or lying about your opponent's positions. That doesn't seem like a reasonable technique to me.
- andrewla 8y ago
  That's a ridiculous straw man. None of the cases cited above or the referenced article refer to any techniques even bordering on that. I suspect those techniques are rarely used because when they are exposed as being fraudulent they are massively counterproductive to voter apathy.
  - metamet 8y ago
    Pretty sure they were an integral part of pushing purely fraudulent conspiracies like Pizzagate, bolstered by Bannon's very own media arm's ability to amplify. > Breitbart is known for its anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim and anti-feminist sentiments, as well as for promoting far-right conspiracy theories like Pizzagate. > “We were testing all kinds of messages and all kinds of imagery. That included images of walls, people scaling walls. We tested ‘drain the swamp.’ Testing ideas of the ‘deep state’ and the NSA watching you—the government is conspiring against you,” the former Cambridge Analytica employee, Christopher Wylie, told CNN late Monday. Wylie said his work for Bannon went back to 2014. https://www.newsweek.com/watch-did-cambridge-analytica-use-facebook-data-snatch-election-trump-853351 https://www.newsweek.com/watch-did-cambridge-analytica-use-f...
  - moorhosj 8y ago
    You made this comment: ==As long as it is done through non-structural means, convincing people not to vote is a perfectly reasonable persuasion technique== I took your own generic statement and asked you to further qualify it. I did this by posing a question (opposite of a straw man) and applying it to a hypothetical scenario (to make it realistic). I never accused anyone of doing it or claimed it was something you cited. I was trying to understand if there should be some type of qualifier on the phrase "convincing people not to vote is a perfectly reasonable persuasion technique" because it seems to me that it isn't a universal truth.

trhway 8y ago

>In the recordings, Nix describes one of his major clients, Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz, as a "fascist".

hirundo 8y ago

> Nix ... engineered a highly successful grassroots campaign to "increase apathy" so that young Afro-Caribbeans would not vote. 1. He did this via speech. Free speech is a good thing even when the speech is bad, even when spoken by foreigners, even when it's illegal. 2. To the extent that this campaign succeeds it will tend to remove voters that are a) more suggestive, b) more prone to apathy. That would seem to improve the overall quality of the voting pool. The drive to get everyone to vote seems to be more about justifying the result than improving it.

pianoben 8y ago
I'm astonished to hear this said so openly. Whom is a representative democracy supposed to represent - only educated, upper-class, "quality" folks? We rightly consigned that idea to the dust bin, along with poll taxes, literacy tests, etc. If you want to improve the _citizenry_, a better approach would be to support civic education. edit: s/What/Whom/
- kanox 8y ago
  > I'm astonished to hear this said so openly. Increasing "voter apathy" is a 100% legitimate democratic tactic, even for foreign powers.
  - moorhosj 8y ago
    Can you further explain what you mean by "legitimate" in this sentence? In it's context, it could be taken a number of different ways.
  - TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
    No, it isn't. The whole point of democracy is to canvas opinion. If you influence opinion on an industrial scale using significant sums of cash that aren't available to most citizens, that's not true democracy - that's you buying power with money.
  - drugme 8y ago
    even for foreign powers. Not in the view of U.S. campaign law.

cazum 8y ago

Wow, look at this evidence of an undemocratic election! Looks like its time for regime change in the US. I think it's only fair that I declare myself the new president. Who else is with me?

kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
Give me a dramatic helicopter coup and I'm in.
dang 8y ago
Would you please stop posting political flamebait to HN?
- tropo 8y ago
  The entire article is political flamebait, so on-topic comments would also be political flamebait.
  - dang 8y ago
    There are degrees of this. Many comments manage to remain civil and substantive despite the divisive topic. This is exactly what the site guidelines call for: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

tick_tock_tick 8y ago

Sounds like they ran negative campaign ads? Hardly voter suppression and trivializes it by trying to equate the two.

byproxy 8y ago
Well, I wish I was able to fit the entire title in the submission. If anything, I feel that the bribery aspect is more damning. >"You can spend $10 million on an election. Or we can send one of our guys in to go offer the leader of the opposition a bribe, you know, three weeks before polling. It's a very good way to win an election.”
- unityByFreedom 8y ago
  IANAL, is this enough to prosecute? It seems like enough to get a warrant.
- m0zg 8y ago
  I wonder if that's what happened to Bernie Sanders. Immediately after his defeat in the primary he bought yet another house, his third. The timing is just too suspicious to be coincidental. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/08/bernie-sanders-summer-house https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/08/bernie-sanders-summe...
  - dsmithn 8y ago
    From the article: "Jane told Seven Days that they had recently sold a house in Maine that had belonged to her family since the 1900s, and used the proceeds to purchase the new property, which is located in North Hero (population 803, as of the 2010 census)." Why would he have bought a house when he was planning on moving to the White House?
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - solarkraft 8y ago

rdiddly 8y ago

"SCL/CA has never undertaken voter suppression and there is no evidence to the contrary." Hilarious - like the guilty parties in 50 years of cop/detective/courtroom/true-crime shows, he doesn't just stop with "we didn't do it" but feels compelled to tack on the part about "...and you don't have any evidence we did it!"

unityByFreedom 8y ago
Apparently in Kaiser's recording, Nix (then CEO), described CA's capabilities as voter suppression. Does the article link the recording? I wasn't able to find it while browsing by phone.
- rdiddly 8y ago
  Not that I found. There's a link to the older ones at Channel4.com. And they refer to the newer recordings ("In explosive recordings that Kaiser made in the summer of 2016, excerpts from which are published exclusively by openDemocracy today...") but no link.
  - unityByFreedom 8y ago
    Weird. Thanks for confirming.

creaghpatr 8y ago

> They talked about ‘honey traps’ that used Ukrainian prostitutes and boasted of secret teams who “ghosted in, did the work, ghosted out” of countries, and “put information into the bloodstream of the internet… with no branding, so it’s unattributable, untrackable” You really think someone would do that? Just go on the internet and write lies? https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/just-go-on-the-internet-and-tell-lies https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/just-go-on-the-internet-and-t...

g8oz 8y ago

Also worthy of note is Cambridge Analytica's trolling of Nigeria's 2015 presidential election: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/apr/04/cambridge-analytica-used-violent-video-to-try-to-influence-nigerian-election https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/apr/04/cambridge-an... Amoral doesn't begin to describe these people.

g8oz 8y ago
Oh and they were busy in Kenya as well. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/global-opinions/wp/2018/03/20/how-cambridge-analytica-poisoned-kenyas-democracy/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/global-opinions/wp/2018/...

GoodJokes 8y ago

All the pedants in here claiming that, yea its bad, but its legal, is what makes me fear the utter stupidity of privileged techies. Seeing the forest through the trees isn't a skill that is valued with coders it seems.

dwd 8y ago

This was a bit of an eye opener on how much information Robert Mueller's team has and could be an indication of what is in the many sealed indictments in the DC citcuit given he flipped Sam Patton. On the Brexit side it's probably time to stop and step back to investigate whether the vote was unduly influenced with foreign cash or interferance.