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You don't have any evidence that "data" is the reason why Trump or Brexit won. Recall: - Trump was not an experienced campaigner, had no real campaign databas

You don't have any evidence that "data" is the reason why Trump or Brexit won. Recall: - Trump was not an experienced campaigner, had no real campaign database and spent half as much as Clinton. - Leaving the EU was represented by two different campaigns which hated each other, none of which had any meaningful amounts of data, and were up against a vastly well funded and organised campaign by the government, literally, the organisation that has the most data on everyone. Trump won because Clinton was a terrible candidate who had a policy of starting a war with Russia (her no-fly zone over Syria) and Leave won because Remain ran a terrible campaign that boiled down to "we can't leave because the EU will punish us severely if we do and we are weak". You don't have to be a campaigning genius to understand that people don't like these things - vague allusions to 'data' aren't necessary.

CodiePetersen 7y ago
Actually you have plenty of evidence. AggregateIQ through data was able to automatically fashion ads tailored at capturing audience members susceptible to certain messages. Leave used that data to campaign and attract voters who otherwise would have not voted. Cambridge Analytica employed similar methods with similar data to help secure president Trumps election. Both companies belonged to Robert Mercer who worked on AI and data analytics in its earlier years. You can read plenty on how both those companies were used to secure those votes. It's all in the public domain. Sure it wasn't all data but data was a pivotal weapon in winning their respective battles.
- CodiePetersen 7y ago
  I might also add that Robert Mercer donated to both Trumps campaign and to prominent Brexit proponents. I forget exactly who but like I said it's all public knowledge.
- repolfx 7y ago
  Sure it wasn't all data but data was a pivotal weapon in winning their respective battles. You actually don't know that. In fact nobody, including those making the claims, can prove it made any difference. Both AggregateIQ and Cambridge Analytica could well have had no impact whatsoever: this stuff is pure faith based spending. It's like spending on campaign advertising. Some people take it as an article of faith that whoever spends more wins, but that has been repeatedly proven false in the real world. Apparently political ad spending isn't such a big deal after all. And again, you must remember that in both those cases their opponents spent far more, on all kinds of things including data based voter targeting. If generic "data" were so valuable they'd surely have achieved massive victories, but they lost
  - CodiePetersen 7y ago
    I never said generic data was the sole item that acheived them their victories. I claimed data was helpful and lead to victories and then clarified data helpful in targeting certain individuals. You claim there is no evidence that data was useful and go so far as to say Trump didn't even have a real voter database. Even though running as a republican he had access to the RNCs and Cambridge Analytica did indeed provide support. Targeted advertising can and does work. Google has shown this with an experiment called the redirect method in which they used ads to target and deradicalized potential isis members. Another individual used the same method to target suicidal individuals and was able to run a campaign to get them to call a hotline. He had I believe a 38% conversion rate where as a standard ad conversion rate is around 2% to 4%. Again this is in the public domain. Data, targeted or otherwise, is like any other tool. It is not going to be some magical device that gives victory. In the end you have to use it wisely and correctly infer a pattern that can be exploited. Any relevant information is better than having no information. And based on the many papers and efforts to use data to influence the population there is more than enough evidence to suggest such data gives you an edge. It may no be a large margin but it could be enough to make a difference. If we consider amazon for example, they don't need 40% conversion rate. If they can just gain even a 1% extra conversion rate, that represents 100s of millions of extra revenue. Especially at scale, data is indeed useful.
    - repolfx 7y ago
      Yes, I agree targeted ads work for some things, like people who are wanting to find the thing the advert is for. But the claims being made here are very different - that ads can "capture" people politically even if they didn't set out to be converted and this was "pivotal". I'm very skeptical of this claim and the only studies I'm aware of refute it. To be clear, I'm not arguing that voter databases are useless: they're useful to get your own base out to vote and not to waste time canvassing hard-core supporters of the opposing party. This isn't the sort of data people are hyperventilating about when they talk about Trump, Brexit or Cambridge Analytica, is it? But even if data was useful in this way, why would that be bad? If data is used to most effectively focus effort on convincing people, they're still convinced by the arguments at the end of the day, and feel they made the correct decision. What's wrong with that? Google has shown this with an experiment called the redirect method in which they used ads to target and deradicalized potential isis members. I recall this claim. It's implausible on its face. The problem is they have no idea if the people who saw the ads were actually potential ISIS members. This isn't a precisely defined term and they can't test that theory against reality - it's not like normal AdWords where you can measure against sales to figure out if the ad viewer was really interested in making the purchase. The assumption that they targeted "potential ISIS members" was based on using (some admittedly clever) keyword choices and then assuming the only people who search for those things are people who want to become a jihadi - a massive and untested leap of logic. They say over 320,000 people clicked the ads in only 8 weeks. That's a staggering number of supposedly potential terrorists. In 2014, when ISIS was growing in strength, they had only about 14,000 fighters according to US intelligence. So they're claiming they "redirected" a population 20x the size of all of ISIS in only eight weeks. If there were really so many people trying to join ISIS at that time their army would have been vastly bigger. Much more likely, the vast majority of people who clicked the ads had no intention of ever becoming a jihadi and their campaign achieved nothing. The suicide ad is much more believable - it's well known that many people who attempt suicide don't really want to die, they just want help.

CodiePetersen 7y ago

Actually you have plenty of evidence. AggregateIQ through data was able to automatically fashion ads tailored at capturing audience members susceptible to certain messages. Leave used that data to campaign and attract voters who otherwise would have not voted. Cambridge Analytica employed similar methods with similar data to help secure president Trumps election. Both companies belonged to Robert Mercer who worked on AI and data analytics in its earlier years. You can read plenty on how both those companies were used to secure those votes. It's all in the public domain. Sure it wasn't all data but data was a pivotal weapon in winning their respective battles.

CodiePetersen 7y ago
I might also add that Robert Mercer donated to both Trumps campaign and to prominent Brexit proponents. I forget exactly who but like I said it's all public knowledge.
repolfx 7y ago
Sure it wasn't all data but data was a pivotal weapon in winning their respective battles. You actually don't know that. In fact nobody, including those making the claims, can prove it made any difference. Both AggregateIQ and Cambridge Analytica could well have had no impact whatsoever: this stuff is pure faith based spending. It's like spending on campaign advertising. Some people take it as an article of faith that whoever spends more wins, but that has been repeatedly proven false in the real world. Apparently political ad spending isn't such a big deal after all. And again, you must remember that in both those cases their opponents spent far more, on all kinds of things including data based voter targeting. If generic "data" were so valuable they'd surely have achieved massive victories, but they lost
- CodiePetersen 7y ago
  I never said generic data was the sole item that acheived them their victories. I claimed data was helpful and lead to victories and then clarified data helpful in targeting certain individuals. You claim there is no evidence that data was useful and go so far as to say Trump didn't even have a real voter database. Even though running as a republican he had access to the RNCs and Cambridge Analytica did indeed provide support. Targeted advertising can and does work. Google has shown this with an experiment called the redirect method in which they used ads to target and deradicalized potential isis members. Another individual used the same method to target suicidal individuals and was able to run a campaign to get them to call a hotline. He had I believe a 38% conversion rate where as a standard ad conversion rate is around 2% to 4%. Again this is in the public domain. Data, targeted or otherwise, is like any other tool. It is not going to be some magical device that gives victory. In the end you have to use it wisely and correctly infer a pattern that can be exploited. Any relevant information is better than having no information. And based on the many papers and efforts to use data to influence the population there is more than enough evidence to suggest such data gives you an edge. It may no be a large margin but it could be enough to make a difference. If we consider amazon for example, they don't need 40% conversion rate. If they can just gain even a 1% extra conversion rate, that represents 100s of millions of extra revenue. Especially at scale, data is indeed useful.
  - repolfx 7y ago
    Yes, I agree targeted ads work for some things, like people who are wanting to find the thing the advert is for. But the claims being made here are very different - that ads can "capture" people politically even if they didn't set out to be converted and this was "pivotal". I'm very skeptical of this claim and the only studies I'm aware of refute it. To be clear, I'm not arguing that voter databases are useless: they're useful to get your own base out to vote and not to waste time canvassing hard-core supporters of the opposing party. This isn't the sort of data people are hyperventilating about when they talk about Trump, Brexit or Cambridge Analytica, is it? But even if data was useful in this way, why would that be bad? If data is used to most effectively focus effort on convincing people, they're still convinced by the arguments at the end of the day, and feel they made the correct decision. What's wrong with that? Google has shown this with an experiment called the redirect method in which they used ads to target and deradicalized potential isis members. I recall this claim. It's implausible on its face. The problem is they have no idea if the people who saw the ads were actually potential ISIS members. This isn't a precisely defined term and they can't test that theory against reality - it's not like normal AdWords where you can measure against sales to figure out if the ad viewer was really interested in making the purchase. The assumption that they targeted "potential ISIS members" was based on using (some admittedly clever) keyword choices and then assuming the only people who search for those things are people who want to become a jihadi - a massive and untested leap of logic. They say over 320,000 people clicked the ads in only 8 weeks. That's a staggering number of supposedly potential terrorists. In 2014, when ISIS was growing in strength, they had only about 14,000 fighters according to US intelligence. So they're claiming they "redirected" a population 20x the size of all of ISIS in only eight weeks. If there were really so many people trying to join ISIS at that time their army would have been vastly bigger. Much more likely, the vast majority of people who clicked the ads had no intention of ever becoming a jihadi and their campaign achieved nothing. The suicide ad is much more believable - it's well known that many people who attempt suicide don't really want to die, they just want help.