16 ms·

My prediction after the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke is that it would lead to an explosion in wealthy people who want to play at noopolitics. I suspect th

My prediction after the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke is that it would lead to an explosion in wealthy people who want to play at noopolitics. I suspect they have dozens of CA's on their hands currently. At the very least, if not hundreds. The key takeaway that some people will have had from Cambridge Analytica, is not 'they got caught, don't do this', but rather 'they were largely successful and incredibly cheap'. The upshot from having lots of players in this space however, is not one of greater control by insidious power addicts, but rather a loss of control as the players compete for attention and influence. So, chaos in the news and the elimination of any kind of consistent narrative from on high. I think we have been experiencing this for a while now. In some ways it is almost an improvement.

return1 7y ago
This assumes that targeted ads are truly effective for changing politics. This remains to be studied through rigorous science rather than in trial-by-journalists.
- inflatableDodo 7y ago
  >This remains to be studied I think it is fair for me to assume that propaganda does influence politics without having to commission a study on it.
  - brycesbeard 7y ago
    the relevant question is whether it influences on a scale we want to stop. Treating it as a binary isn’t very useful.
  - lmm 7y ago
    Why? Because propagandists try really hard? Because they spend a lot of money on it?
    - Spooky23 7y ago
      The US 2016 election is pretty damn conclusive. Push a simple message to the swing states of the Midwest, and boom.
      - JetSpiegel 7y ago
        If Hillary had not pulled strings on the DCCC, or she actually campaigned on those states, no amount of ads could have swinged them.
      - lmm 7y ago
        That's the election in which one candidate massively out-spent the other but nevertheless lost, right?
    - inflatableDodo 7y ago
      History books mostly.
- GreeniFi 7y ago
  You’re right of course, but until we get the double-blind randomized trial, we have Occam’s Razor: if people didn’t think it worked they wouldn’t pay so much for it.
  - brycesbeard 7y ago
    Which is a very different question than whether or not it worked. After all, people pay billions every year on useless nutritional supplements which have a lot of evidence to suggest they don’t work as people think. Yet they still pay. People are irrational.
    - baddox 7y ago
      Wouldn’t the better analogy here be money spent on marketing supplements, which does in fact seem to work?
      - GreeniFi 7y ago
        Good point. I know I should not extrapolate from one data point, and by way of example after a friend joined FB about 2 years ago, I have noticed a progressive change in their viewpoints. Although a trained scientist, they now talk frequently about (1) anti-vaccination, (2) chemtrails, (3) climate change hoax,(4) Soros, (5) Brexit. My hypothesis is that hawkers of nonsense use FB to identify people interested in one of the above and then bombard them with recommends. After all, we behave according to our lived experience - and if social media platforms are used to alter the perception of lived experience, then logic dictates that they can sway behaviour. Should I be smug? Absolutely not! I have little idea where my opinions come from.
  - return1 7y ago
    Ad spending as percentage of gdp has not changed in at least a century. So i m not sure if these new media are any more effective than any other media. I honestly am baffled at the lack of scientific research of the effectiveness of advertising in the digital age, to the point of being suspicious. https://static.seekingalpha.com/uploads/2018/3/20/607954-15215770607489548.png https://static.seekingalpha.com/uploads/2018/3/20/607954-152...
- save_ferris 7y ago
  The New Knowledge whitepaper[0] on the Russian social media interference operation noted several times that Facebook could've provided a lot more data than it chose to release (i.e. relevant FB comments, the number of users who interacted with fake content who also went to the polls, etc.) A lot of important context was intentionally left out of their release that could've helped researchers better understand the tactics and effectiveness of the operation. We're never going to get a comprehensive answer to the questions underlying these operations as long as companies like Facebook get to pick and choose what data gets released to research these issues. [0]: https://www.newknowledge.com/articles/the-disinformation-report/ https://www.newknowledge.com/articles/the-disinformation-rep...
  - Amezarak 7y ago
    New Knowledge was caught manufacturing Russian social media interference. I don’t recommend using them as a source. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/19/us/alabama-senate-roy-jones-russia.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/19/us/alabama-senate-roy-jon... The CEO is part of several other unsavory propaganda campaigns, such as Hamilton 68, which Greenwald et al have pretty effectively torn apart.
    - itronitron 7y ago
      Thanks for posting this
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- marstomorrow 7y ago
  > This assumes that targeted ads are truly effective for changing politics No it doesn't. "Targeted ads" had very little to do with the CA/Facebook scandal and I see them as largely irrelevant in what happened. So I don't see that assumption present in the top comment at all. A significant amount of the "noopolitics" done with this kind of data is done through peer-based evidence - "regular" accounts posting political things, with "regular" accounts responding, but where both accounts are false personas, spies if you will. The 'targeted ads' line is a misleading spin. Very little was done with targeted ads and a lot more was done with impersonating Americans and posing as GOP officials, etc.
- nullwasamistake 7y ago
  Targeted ads are extremely effective, in general. You'll never see a scientific study because nobody in ad space wants targets to realize this. I used to run a campaign so well targeted that we had an 8% buy rate. That is, 8% of the people that saw the ad not only clicked, they actually bought the product. Google charged us $35 for every click but the product was so expensive we still made a killing. Targeted advertising needs to be banned for the good of society. It's evil, inisidious. All about trying your best to manipulate the worst traits of human nature for profit. I can pretty easily find out if you're an addict, ex con, a gambler, in debt, illegal immigrant, bad English, maybe a minority. I'll find something you're probably insecure about and use that to sell you shit. Also, I don't wanna waste money showing my ads to poor people. Can't do that directly, but there's plenty of proxies. Just add a bunch of "interests" to your audience. Things Like horse racing, wine collecting, yachts, expensive rugs. I wish I was kidding, but everyone does this on targeted advertising platforms. It's a discrimination minefield, but since you use proxy characteristics for everything and everyone covers their eyes it's totally fine.
  - return1 7y ago
    Advertising a painkiller in a hospital is also targeted advertising. The question is whether digital is somehow dangerously more effective than other forms (which are ostensibly considered "safe"). I m not surprised by your data point, you are obviously selling something to very specific to people who really need it, but this says nothing about the ability to change people's opinion on something. And as counterpoint, if it was really so effective as you claim, why haven't we seen huge increases in ad spending lately?
    - coldtea 7y ago
      >Advertising a painkiller in a hospital is also targeted advertising And should also be banned. A painkiller being promoted and bought more by customers just because it has more money to spend in advertising is morally worse than the mere creepiness of regular (buy BS stuff you don't need) targeted advertisement. Who needs ads? Level the playing field with an online catalog where patients can discover (in, say, random order for each viewing, to avoid even sorting bias) all available painkillers. You can then add voting to the catalog, so patients and doctors can weight in for how good they think the painkiller is -- but with huge fines and prison for any company trying to manipulate buy those votes.
- netcan 7y ago
  This is the sort of question that tends to be settled in a market (of one kind or another) rather than rigorous science.
  - return1 7y ago
    the market shows that ad spending overall has not increased during the transition to the digital age. It has shifted from traditional to digital, but overall businesses spend the same amounts on advertising as in the past.
    - akiselev 7y ago
      Political ad spending has been growing nonstop, outpacing inflation significantly.
      - return1 7y ago
        Interesting. However this article claims that the reason for the jump is the 2010 decision to allow unlimited political spending. And lets remember that in the US the biggest spenders ddid not win. https://www.google.gr/amp/s/www.marketwatch.com/amp/story/guid/156BEC18-44EF-11E5-BDE8-97803EE98AFC https://www.google.gr/amp/s/www.marketwatch.com/amp/story/gu...
- coldtea 7y ago
  >This remains to be studied through rigorous science rather than in trial-by-journalists. If politicians get results when they spend their money on it, they wont care to wait for "rigorous science" to prove anything. And they wont be foolish to pay for non-results for long... Empirical results beat "rigorous science" every time...
  - return1 7y ago
    still in this case the candidate who spent the most lost the election
  - michaelt 7y ago
    And they wont be foolish to pay for non-results for long... Imagine Joe gets re-elected after delivering 30,000 pre-election leaflets, knocking on 3,000 doors, delivering 10,000 reminders on the day of the poll, getting 13,000 views of facebook adverts, employing 2 people to do casework for constituents, calling 7,000 people with a human-operated phone-bank, robocalling 20,000 people, attending 40 community events, getting 300 people rides to polling stations, getting 5 celebrity endorsements, getting 1 visit from a really high profile colleague, and so on... It's far from obvious to me that you could tell apart the effects of different efforts - especially as you don't know who each voter voted for.
    - coldtea 7y ago
      >It's far from obvious to me that you could tell apart the effects of different efforts - especially as you don't know who each voter voted for. Companies that do those short of campaigns stagger them at different times, do polls before and after, test a new method in this or that area or demographic and check again and so on through election year. It's not just "apply a bunch of methods at once" -> "check the final election result" as the only feedback.
anbop 7y ago
What is “noopolitics”?
- joelg 7y ago
  I don't think it's a standard term but you can extrapolate from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noosphere https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noosphere. Maybe "the sport of influencing opinion at mass scale"
  - inflatableDodo 7y ago
    Has been a standard term for policy wonks and polscis for a while now.
  - dominotw 7y ago
    seems to have a wiki too https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noopolitik https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noopolitik
- inflatableDodo 7y ago
  Is a fancy-pants neologism from political theorists about how the world supposedly works these days. From 'noos', meaning knowledge. One thing I find funny, given the construction, is that nobody outside of political theory seemingly knows about it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noopolitik https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noopolitik
  - kartan 7y ago
    Now we know. Thanks for sharing.
    - pg_is_a_butt 7y ago
      It's a globalist way to say "noose" and imply slavery of the masses, and still have an "excoos"
  - barbecue_sauce 7y ago
jchanimal 7y ago
I ran this playbook in ‘15 in the off year between local elections. Before mainstream awareness of the leverage, I found it easy to get electeds to adopt my talking points. I’m not sure it would be as effective today.
nooron 7y ago
Hey, this prediction is interesting, but not resonant with my experience as someone who works in this. Cambridge Analytica's impact on 2016 is significantly overstated. In fact, I would feel confident saying their impact was zero. The really interesting story about Trump and his digital operation is not CA, but the organizational innovations that Brad Parscale brought to the campaign. Historically, political campaigns haven't designed their paid digital strategies around the iterative, test-driven tactics seen in other industries. The answer why is complicated but Parscale, as far as I can tell, was able to avoid all this organizational cruft because the campaign was so haphazardly put together. Happy to share more if this interesting to you, my startup is in this space.
- inflatableDodo 7y ago
  >Cambridge Analytica's impact on 2016 is significantly overstated. What about the other 100 elections in the other 30 countries that were claimed to be won by SCL Elections, CA's parent company? edit - and what do you think of CA's effect on Brexit? Am in the UK, so have been thinking about CA in light of that, more than any involvement they had with Trump.
  - nooron 7y ago
    Big talk, no walk. They didn't succeed in building a piece of software that would allow more economical targeting than Facebook already has with its custom audience system. If they helped win, which I would be intensely skeptical of, it's because they ran digital ads at all in places that weren't accustomed to doing so, but their supposed tool for targeting didn't help.
    - inflatableDodo 7y ago
      Do you think they have buried having been working on 100 other elections that they failed in? As it would seem to be unlikely to get a good track record on this by accident.
      - nooron 7y ago
netcan 7y ago
Don't underestimate influence's ability to scale. Google and FB have grown at a serious pace for a long time. There is some element of "good old days gone by" at any given time, but for the most part, the stuff that advertisers are after scaled. There's more of it.
caprese 7y ago
> The key takeaway that some people will have had from Cambridge Analytica, is not 'they got caught, don't do this', but rather 'they were largely successful and incredibly cheap'. When you file things in court between private individuals, or for a government indictment, it becomes an instruction manual. Scrap whatever internet marketing handbook you ordered, disregard whatever guru you are following and hoping to trust, these court filings are the canonical source on what successful people are doing online.
arendtio 7y ago
My key takeaway of Cambridge Analytica was that the advertising industry is a lot more harmful than I thought. I always thought, that there is no real problem when some people influence/manipulate other people on what they spend their money on. But now we see that those same instruments can be used to not only change shopping decisions but also democratic decisions, which is not okay in my opinion and should be prosecuted and be punished with severe penalties. Otherwise, the whole point of democracy (one human, one vote) is useless, as the rich can simply buy ads to influence enough people to follow their goals.
- dqybh 7y ago
  >Otherwise, the whole point of democracy (one human, one vote) is useless, as the rich can simply buy ads to influence enough people to follow their goals. As they've always done through the media? The hardest thing to swallow, for some people, is that democracy is deeply flawed, and these things openly show it. Until now they've been free to ignore it.
  - edejong 7y ago
    The traditional media had to operate in the open. You could figure out what your neighbor was reading by buying his/her newspaper for a day. Also, newspapers could report on each other’s reporting. This has become increasingly opaque.
    - hrktb 7y ago
      I feel the traditional media operated in the open as much as you can still get whatever message is broadcasted to half of the population by clicking on a few links. Even in the days anything more insidious would happen over direct mailing, or direct spam through the mailbox. Even knowing what magazines someone subscribes to is not obvious if you don’t catch the mail staff or check the garbage, which would be roughly equivalent to stalking someone online and checking their accounts followings and network. I think as long as people are trying to build communities, there will be channels to get what other people are thinking/reading/discussing. It will be more tricky with true direct one direction messaging sending “orders” to an army of followers of an ideology.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
RaceWon 7y ago
> So, chaos in the news and the elimination of any kind of consistent narrative from on high. Isn't this just an offshoot of The CIA's "alleged" control of the news, which dates back to the 1950's? IMO it is. Unless [1] Operation Mockingbird never happened, and [2] Carl Bernstein was writing fiction. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird [2] http://www.carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php http://www.carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php
- inflatableDodo 7y ago
  We had the foundation already, now we get the foundation with n players. I think it will look closer to Gibson than Orwell.
succleaf 7y ago
US elections 2012 Obama, Facebook and the power of friendship: the 2012 data election A unified computer database that gathers and refines information on millions of potential voters is at the forefront of campaign technology – and could be the key to an Obama win Ed Pilkington and Amanda Michel in New York Fri 17 Feb 2012 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/feb/17/obama-digital-data-machine-facebook-election https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/feb/17/obama-digital-...

return1 7y ago

This assumes that targeted ads are truly effective for changing politics. This remains to be studied through rigorous science rather than in trial-by-journalists.

inflatableDodo 7y ago
>This remains to be studied I think it is fair for me to assume that propaganda does influence politics without having to commission a study on it.
- brycesbeard 7y ago
  the relevant question is whether it influences on a scale we want to stop. Treating it as a binary isn’t very useful.
- lmm 7y ago
  Why? Because propagandists try really hard? Because they spend a lot of money on it?
  - Spooky23 7y ago
    The US 2016 election is pretty damn conclusive. Push a simple message to the swing states of the Midwest, and boom.
    - JetSpiegel 7y ago
      If Hillary had not pulled strings on the DCCC, or she actually campaigned on those states, no amount of ads could have swinged them.
    - lmm 7y ago
      That's the election in which one candidate massively out-spent the other but nevertheless lost, right?
  - inflatableDodo 7y ago
    History books mostly.
GreeniFi 7y ago
You’re right of course, but until we get the double-blind randomized trial, we have Occam’s Razor: if people didn’t think it worked they wouldn’t pay so much for it.
- brycesbeard 7y ago
  Which is a very different question than whether or not it worked. After all, people pay billions every year on useless nutritional supplements which have a lot of evidence to suggest they don’t work as people think. Yet they still pay. People are irrational.
  - baddox 7y ago
    Wouldn’t the better analogy here be money spent on marketing supplements, which does in fact seem to work?
    - GreeniFi 7y ago
      Good point. I know I should not extrapolate from one data point, and by way of example after a friend joined FB about 2 years ago, I have noticed a progressive change in their viewpoints. Although a trained scientist, they now talk frequently about (1) anti-vaccination, (2) chemtrails, (3) climate change hoax,(4) Soros, (5) Brexit. My hypothesis is that hawkers of nonsense use FB to identify people interested in one of the above and then bombard them with recommends. After all, we behave according to our lived experience - and if social media platforms are used to alter the perception of lived experience, then logic dictates that they can sway behaviour. Should I be smug? Absolutely not! I have little idea where my opinions come from.
- return1 7y ago
  Ad spending as percentage of gdp has not changed in at least a century. So i m not sure if these new media are any more effective than any other media. I honestly am baffled at the lack of scientific research of the effectiveness of advertising in the digital age, to the point of being suspicious. https://static.seekingalpha.com/uploads/2018/3/20/607954-15215770607489548.png https://static.seekingalpha.com/uploads/2018/3/20/607954-152...
save_ferris 7y ago
The New Knowledge whitepaper[0] on the Russian social media interference operation noted several times that Facebook could've provided a lot more data than it chose to release (i.e. relevant FB comments, the number of users who interacted with fake content who also went to the polls, etc.) A lot of important context was intentionally left out of their release that could've helped researchers better understand the tactics and effectiveness of the operation. We're never going to get a comprehensive answer to the questions underlying these operations as long as companies like Facebook get to pick and choose what data gets released to research these issues. [0]: https://www.newknowledge.com/articles/the-disinformation-report/ https://www.newknowledge.com/articles/the-disinformation-rep...
- Amezarak 7y ago
  New Knowledge was caught manufacturing Russian social media interference. I don’t recommend using them as a source. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/19/us/alabama-senate-roy-jones-russia.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/19/us/alabama-senate-roy-jon... The CEO is part of several other unsavory propaganda campaigns, such as Hamilton 68, which Greenwald et al have pretty effectively torn apart.
  - itronitron 7y ago
    Thanks for posting this
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
marstomorrow 7y ago
> This assumes that targeted ads are truly effective for changing politics No it doesn't. "Targeted ads" had very little to do with the CA/Facebook scandal and I see them as largely irrelevant in what happened. So I don't see that assumption present in the top comment at all. A significant amount of the "noopolitics" done with this kind of data is done through peer-based evidence - "regular" accounts posting political things, with "regular" accounts responding, but where both accounts are false personas, spies if you will. The 'targeted ads' line is a misleading spin. Very little was done with targeted ads and a lot more was done with impersonating Americans and posing as GOP officials, etc.
nullwasamistake 7y ago
Targeted ads are extremely effective, in general. You'll never see a scientific study because nobody in ad space wants targets to realize this. I used to run a campaign so well targeted that we had an 8% buy rate. That is, 8% of the people that saw the ad not only clicked, they actually bought the product. Google charged us $35 for every click but the product was so expensive we still made a killing. Targeted advertising needs to be banned for the good of society. It's evil, inisidious. All about trying your best to manipulate the worst traits of human nature for profit. I can pretty easily find out if you're an addict, ex con, a gambler, in debt, illegal immigrant, bad English, maybe a minority. I'll find something you're probably insecure about and use that to sell you shit. Also, I don't wanna waste money showing my ads to poor people. Can't do that directly, but there's plenty of proxies. Just add a bunch of "interests" to your audience. Things Like horse racing, wine collecting, yachts, expensive rugs. I wish I was kidding, but everyone does this on targeted advertising platforms. It's a discrimination minefield, but since you use proxy characteristics for everything and everyone covers their eyes it's totally fine.
- return1 7y ago
  Advertising a painkiller in a hospital is also targeted advertising. The question is whether digital is somehow dangerously more effective than other forms (which are ostensibly considered "safe"). I m not surprised by your data point, you are obviously selling something to very specific to people who really need it, but this says nothing about the ability to change people's opinion on something. And as counterpoint, if it was really so effective as you claim, why haven't we seen huge increases in ad spending lately?
  - coldtea 7y ago
    >Advertising a painkiller in a hospital is also targeted advertising And should also be banned. A painkiller being promoted and bought more by customers just because it has more money to spend in advertising is morally worse than the mere creepiness of regular (buy BS stuff you don't need) targeted advertisement. Who needs ads? Level the playing field with an online catalog where patients can discover (in, say, random order for each viewing, to avoid even sorting bias) all available painkillers. You can then add voting to the catalog, so patients and doctors can weight in for how good they think the painkiller is -- but with huge fines and prison for any company trying to manipulate buy those votes.
netcan 7y ago
This is the sort of question that tends to be settled in a market (of one kind or another) rather than rigorous science.
- return1 7y ago
  the market shows that ad spending overall has not increased during the transition to the digital age. It has shifted from traditional to digital, but overall businesses spend the same amounts on advertising as in the past.
  - akiselev 7y ago
    Political ad spending has been growing nonstop, outpacing inflation significantly.
    - return1 7y ago
      Interesting. However this article claims that the reason for the jump is the 2010 decision to allow unlimited political spending. And lets remember that in the US the biggest spenders ddid not win. https://www.google.gr/amp/s/www.marketwatch.com/amp/story/guid/156BEC18-44EF-11E5-BDE8-97803EE98AFC https://www.google.gr/amp/s/www.marketwatch.com/amp/story/gu...
coldtea 7y ago
>This remains to be studied through rigorous science rather than in trial-by-journalists. If politicians get results when they spend their money on it, they wont care to wait for "rigorous science" to prove anything. And they wont be foolish to pay for non-results for long... Empirical results beat "rigorous science" every time...
- return1 7y ago
  still in this case the candidate who spent the most lost the election
- michaelt 7y ago
  And they wont be foolish to pay for non-results for long... Imagine Joe gets re-elected after delivering 30,000 pre-election leaflets, knocking on 3,000 doors, delivering 10,000 reminders on the day of the poll, getting 13,000 views of facebook adverts, employing 2 people to do casework for constituents, calling 7,000 people with a human-operated phone-bank, robocalling 20,000 people, attending 40 community events, getting 300 people rides to polling stations, getting 5 celebrity endorsements, getting 1 visit from a really high profile colleague, and so on... It's far from obvious to me that you could tell apart the effects of different efforts - especially as you don't know who each voter voted for.
  - coldtea 7y ago
    >It's far from obvious to me that you could tell apart the effects of different efforts - especially as you don't know who each voter voted for. Companies that do those short of campaigns stagger them at different times, do polls before and after, test a new method in this or that area or demographic and check again and so on through election year. It's not just "apply a bunch of methods at once" -> "check the final election result" as the only feedback.

anbop 7y ago

What is “noopolitics”?

joelg 7y ago
I don't think it's a standard term but you can extrapolate from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noosphere https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noosphere. Maybe "the sport of influencing opinion at mass scale"
- inflatableDodo 7y ago
  Has been a standard term for policy wonks and polscis for a while now.
- dominotw 7y ago
  seems to have a wiki too https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noopolitik https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noopolitik
inflatableDodo 7y ago
Is a fancy-pants neologism from political theorists about how the world supposedly works these days. From 'noos', meaning knowledge. One thing I find funny, given the construction, is that nobody outside of political theory seemingly knows about it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noopolitik https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noopolitik
- kartan 7y ago
  Now we know. Thanks for sharing.
  - pg_is_a_butt 7y ago
    It's a globalist way to say "noose" and imply slavery of the masses, and still have an "excoos"
- barbecue_sauce 7y ago

jchanimal 7y ago

I ran this playbook in ‘15 in the off year between local elections. Before mainstream awareness of the leverage, I found it easy to get electeds to adopt my talking points. I’m not sure it would be as effective today.

nooron 7y ago

Hey, this prediction is interesting, but not resonant with my experience as someone who works in this. Cambridge Analytica's impact on 2016 is significantly overstated. In fact, I would feel confident saying their impact was zero. The really interesting story about Trump and his digital operation is not CA, but the organizational innovations that Brad Parscale brought to the campaign. Historically, political campaigns haven't designed their paid digital strategies around the iterative, test-driven tactics seen in other industries. The answer why is complicated but Parscale, as far as I can tell, was able to avoid all this organizational cruft because the campaign was so haphazardly put together. Happy to share more if this interesting to you, my startup is in this space.

inflatableDodo 7y ago
>Cambridge Analytica's impact on 2016 is significantly overstated. What about the other 100 elections in the other 30 countries that were claimed to be won by SCL Elections, CA's parent company? edit - and what do you think of CA's effect on Brexit? Am in the UK, so have been thinking about CA in light of that, more than any involvement they had with Trump.
- nooron 7y ago
  Big talk, no walk. They didn't succeed in building a piece of software that would allow more economical targeting than Facebook already has with its custom audience system. If they helped win, which I would be intensely skeptical of, it's because they ran digital ads at all in places that weren't accustomed to doing so, but their supposed tool for targeting didn't help.
  - inflatableDodo 7y ago
    Do you think they have buried having been working on 100 other elections that they failed in? As it would seem to be unlikely to get a good track record on this by accident.
    - nooron 7y ago

netcan 7y ago

Don't underestimate influence's ability to scale. Google and FB have grown at a serious pace for a long time. There is some element of "good old days gone by" at any given time, but for the most part, the stuff that advertisers are after scaled. There's more of it.

caprese 7y ago

> The key takeaway that some people will have had from Cambridge Analytica, is not 'they got caught, don't do this', but rather 'they were largely successful and incredibly cheap'. When you file things in court between private individuals, or for a government indictment, it becomes an instruction manual. Scrap whatever internet marketing handbook you ordered, disregard whatever guru you are following and hoping to trust, these court filings are the canonical source on what successful people are doing online.

arendtio 7y ago

My key takeaway of Cambridge Analytica was that the advertising industry is a lot more harmful than I thought. I always thought, that there is no real problem when some people influence/manipulate other people on what they spend their money on. But now we see that those same instruments can be used to not only change shopping decisions but also democratic decisions, which is not okay in my opinion and should be prosecuted and be punished with severe penalties. Otherwise, the whole point of democracy (one human, one vote) is useless, as the rich can simply buy ads to influence enough people to follow their goals.

dqybh 7y ago
>Otherwise, the whole point of democracy (one human, one vote) is useless, as the rich can simply buy ads to influence enough people to follow their goals. As they've always done through the media? The hardest thing to swallow, for some people, is that democracy is deeply flawed, and these things openly show it. Until now they've been free to ignore it.
- edejong 7y ago
  The traditional media had to operate in the open. You could figure out what your neighbor was reading by buying his/her newspaper for a day. Also, newspapers could report on each other’s reporting. This has become increasingly opaque.
  - hrktb 7y ago
    I feel the traditional media operated in the open as much as you can still get whatever message is broadcasted to half of the population by clicking on a few links. Even in the days anything more insidious would happen over direct mailing, or direct spam through the mailbox. Even knowing what magazines someone subscribes to is not obvious if you don’t catch the mail staff or check the garbage, which would be roughly equivalent to stalking someone online and checking their accounts followings and network. I think as long as people are trying to build communities, there will be channels to get what other people are thinking/reading/discussing. It will be more tricky with true direct one direction messaging sending “orders” to an army of followers of an ideology.

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RaceWon 7y ago

> So, chaos in the news and the elimination of any kind of consistent narrative from on high. Isn't this just an offshoot of The CIA's "alleged" control of the news, which dates back to the 1950's? IMO it is. Unless [1] Operation Mockingbird never happened, and [2] Carl Bernstein was writing fiction. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird [2] http://www.carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php http://www.carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php

inflatableDodo 7y ago
We had the foundation already, now we get the foundation with n players. I think it will look closer to Gibson than Orwell.

succleaf 7y ago

US elections 2012 Obama, Facebook and the power of friendship: the 2012 data election A unified computer database that gathers and refines information on millions of potential voters is at the forefront of campaign technology – and could be the key to an Obama win Ed Pilkington and Amanda Michel in New York Fri 17 Feb 2012 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/feb/17/obama-digital-data-machine-facebook-election https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/feb/17/obama-digital-...