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Cambridge Analytica Used Fashion Tastes to Identify Right-Wing Voters

nytimes.com

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Re: Cambridge Analytica Used Fashion Tastes to Identify Right-Wing Voters

#101

Post by elliekelly »

axaxs wrote: post #41
SlowRobotAhead wrote: post #2

People who buy Wrangler and LL Bean might vote conservative. Hard hitting stuff right there. I suppose as per the article we could make a guess about the people that buy green hair dye?

Not sure why downvoted, I agree. A 'western' and 'outdoorsy' company tends to have conservative customers, I think any 12 year old could tell you that. I'd rather see unexpected/unexplained trends, things the average person wouldn't already assume.

I think it actually goes a bit deeper than using certain brands to identify political leanings. That was step one, but they also rated users' openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism, depression, anger and vulnerability.[1] Then they showed targeted messages to people they decided were right leaning and vulnerable to their messaging.

[1] https://www.cnn.com/style/article/christopher-wylie-fashion-...

Re: Cambridge Analytica Used Fashion Tastes to Identify Right-Wing Voters

#102

Post by icebraining »

elliekelly wrote: post #100
wolfgke wrote: post #81

I just ask myself how I, a person who satisfies quite some nerd stereotypes would be classified by these algorithm (in particular for political advertising). So for example the small number of categories that Google Ads assigns to me ( https://google.com/ads/preferences ) are correct - but featureless and quite hard for marketers to target.

It's very likely that you just think they're "featureless and quite hard for marketers to target." For example, this story (from 2012) about Target's ability to predict a woman's pregnancy: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...

Or they got lucky in that case, and we only heard of it because of such luck.

Re: Cambridge Analytica Used Fashion Tastes to Identify Right-Wing Voters

#103

Post by theoh »

tobr wrote: post #95
tlow wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not necessarily the case and makes light of an entire field. Often times personas are developed by ethnographers, human centered designers, design researchers and are based upon actual users or prospective users. Furthermore, data analytics can be used to generate personas. Personas can be representative of key forks in behavior patterns or beliefs and are a useful tool when making design and product decision…

I’m aware that personas are often based upon insights from real people, but I question the value of repackaging the insights as a new, made up person. It introduces distractions and invites stereotypes. Just use real quotes and observations, statistics if it makes sense, and focus on describing typical or recurring situations or behaviors that are relevant to what you’re using the research for. A hair color or favori…

What about a disability, though?

Re: Cambridge Analytica Used Fashion Tastes to Identify Right-Wing Voters

#104

Post by 1337biz »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #76
chrisco255 wrote: post #65

Are you telling me that people who buy camo clothes are more likely to be conservative? That's crazy talk. Next thing you'll tell me is people who dye their hair pink or blue are more likely to be liberal.

Next thing you'll tell me is people who dye their hair pink or blue are more likely to be liberal. I have been curious about this particular recent feature. Does brightly colored/neon hair indicate the person is part of some particular group? My exposure to this trend has been primarily with people on the internet, specifically Twitter and it seems to be predominantly women, and predominantly associated with being ou…

>modern civil rights issues

That is the most positive way I have seen somebody frame them. I guess they would even call themselves social activists...

Re: Cambridge Analytica Used Fashion Tastes to Identify Right-Wing Voters

#105

Post by ben_w »

sosborn wrote: post #19
inetknght wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stereotyping someone by something that you assume they chose is also a gateway to prejudice. @NeedMoreTea said it right by mentioning cases where someone might not have chosen their particular attire.

It works on a macro level though. You have to be ok with idea that the stereotype isn’t 100% perfect, it’s just used to get a majority of your target market.

Over the last two years, I have witnessed many demonstrations of normal people totally failing to understand “group x tends to be more y” — “but”, I have seen many retort, “I’m x and not y!”, as if the statement had instead been “all x are y”.

Re: Cambridge Analytica Used Fashion Tastes to Identify Right-Wing Voters

#106

Post by andrewflnr »

tobr wrote: post #94
IgorPartola wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look, if you take a group of 100 people who are into Warhammer 40k, chances are that at least 80% of them will have played StarCraft too. Collapsing that group into a single person and calling her Wendy helps some people reason about them. If you prefer to think of them a Venn diagrams and that helps you sleep at night, no crime in that.

But you’re not learning that from a persona, you’re learning it from talking to 100 real people. You can put that into a persona if you like, but it won’t give you any new knowledge.

It's very common for a new perspective on knowledge you already have to enable breakthroughs in deriving new knowledge from it. In particular, imagining a person rather than a statistical abstraction will tend to activate useful neural wetware that simulates other humans.

Re: Cambridge Analytica Used Fashion Tastes to Identify Right-Wing Voters

#108

Post by walshemj »

Jedi72 wrote: post #9
everdev wrote: post #4

Unfortunately, stereotypes have utility. No one likes being caught up as a false positive in a stereotype, but when you look at mass market politics / advertising / marketing they cater to charactures of their intended audience because for the most part it seems to work. Every once in a while someone takes it too far and a group gets offended, but let's not pretend that Cambridge is the only one doing this.

It was hilarious as an engineer who needed to learn marketing 101 for a startup, its pretty much just stereotyping your customers. "Wendy is a 24-30 yr old professional, slightly insecure, straight, likes wine and dogs."

It's all ok in marketing until you have "the time" :-) Btw this is what the "marketing gels" at Burberry still refer to the time when chavs got into Burberry check baseball caps.

And this is a direct quote from a mate who works for a big 4 consultancy "gels" being the upper class young women who will be working there.

I suspect that Mr Bannon wearing Barbour isn't exactly taken well by their marketing team.

Re: Cambridge Analytica Used Fashion Tastes to Identify Right-Wing Voters

#109

Post by crooked-v »

coldtea wrote: post #32
everdev wrote: post #4

Unfortunately, stereotypes have utility. No one likes being caught up as a false positive in a stereotype, but when you look at mass market politics / advertising / marketing they cater to charactures of their intended audience because for the most part it seems to work. Every once in a while someone takes it too far and a group gets offended, but let's not pretend that Cambridge is the only one doing this.

Stereotypes is just another name for abstractions and categorizing, which is how science works all the time. It's just that there are reality (statistics) based stereotypes and bad stereotypes (e.g. jewish conspiracy and such). Still, "all people are unique" is BS, more people within certain groups are more alike than different. X DOES Y because X belongs to group G is always a bad use of stereotyping (except if Y an…

It's also important to keep in mind that the history of "bad" stereotypes usually has somebody intentionally signal-boosting them for their own gain, often financial, like medieval kings cultivating negative public opinion about Jews so they could exile them and take their stuff, but sometimes more indirectly social, like the elites in pre-slavery American colonies portraying blacks as inferior to keep the indentured mistreated lower classes from joining together in rebellions.

Less malicious stereotyping doesn't have that history of being intentionally used to oppress or "other" groups of people in an organized way, and so doesn't have nearly as much offense to it. For example: "white men can't jump", or associating action movie stars or bodybuilders with Austrian accents.

Re: Cambridge Analytica Used Fashion Tastes to Identify Right-Wing Voters

#110

Post by yourbandsucks »

drdeadringer wrote: post #50
mymythisisthis wrote: post #10

So it is a cultural war.

... how? How is an identification methodology a war let alone a culture war?

Because people's fashion choices, food they like, beer they drink.. that's culture. Two opposed cultures fighting over everything? Culture war.

It's another point in evidence of something we can all see.

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