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New Cambridge Analytica Leaks

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Re: New Cambridge Analytica Leaks

#131

Post by extra88 »

3fe9a03ccd14ca5 wrote: post #89
larnmar wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still remain unconvinced that was really “Russia” (as opposed to, say, some bored Russian teens). The reason for my skepticism is the crappy podunk nature of the leaked material. The FSB spends billions every year spying on US politicians, surely they’ve managed to find stuff a lot more embarrassing than the boring emails of some dude whose password was “passw0rd”?

I'm extremely interested in learning more about the crowdstrike arrangment. As someone who is interested in both politics and cybersecurity, it leaves a lot of open questions. Here's some dangling questions brought out from the Mueller report: * Mueller’s decision not to interview Assange – a central figure who claims Russia was not behind the hack – suggests an unwillingness to explore avenues of evidence on fundame…

CrowdStrike is not a Ukrainian company, it is a U.S. company! Its founders are U.S. citizens and none are of Ukrainian descent.

When you get basic facts like this wrong, it makes me wonder what your interest really is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CrowdStrike

Re: New Cambridge Analytica Leaks

#133

Post by Kye »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #66
Mikeb85 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anti-establishment sentiment has been brewing for awhile. Some candidates simply tapped into that (Bernie, Trump) whereas the losing candidates either pretended everything was fine (Clinton) or relied on older political ideas (Cruz). I don't think CA was responsible for forming opinions so much as knowing exactly how to exploit existing opinions. And anti-establishment opinions are still popular (Warren and Sanders a…

re: “ And anti-establishment opinions are still popular (Warren and Sanders are 2 of the 3 Democrat front-runners) despite media messaging.” I really find it shocking how extremely biased outlets like MSNBC are in favor of pro-corporations candidates like Clinton, Biden, etc. I very rudely mock my friends who are Democrats and who swear by what the paid shills on MSNBC do to negatively cover any candidate who does no…

All the cable networks are owned by major corporations that use them to serve their interests. This shouldn't be shocking.

Re: New Cambridge Analytica Leaks

#134

Post by chillacy »

Zigurd wrote: post #76
Moodles wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree the electoral college is not as good as a general public vote, however one counterargument to "side A won more votes than side B!" is that, both sides knew the rules ahead of time so if the rules were a general vote, then the campaigns would have been different so side B may still have won in that case. We will never know.

[flagged]

That’s a known (unfortunate) side effect of the electoral college, but both players went in knowing these rules, why didn’t Clinton campaign more in the Midwest? Obama did fine there.

Re: New Cambridge Analytica Leaks

#135

Post by bduerst »

JackFr wrote: post #81
pier25 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest issue in democracy is that the majority of people vote irrationally. For example a lot of people will vote the same party no matter what or will vote for a candidate because they like him/her regardless of the program.

> The biggest issue in democracy is that the majority of people vote irrationally. That is to say, they don't vote in a manner consistent with how you perceive their interests.

Voting irrationally is sequitur from "having interests", just not rational self-interests.

Having interests is not mutually exclusive to acting irrationally.

Re: New Cambridge Analytica Leaks

#136

Post by Bartweiss »

wayoutthere wrote: post #72
cm2012 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure people claim you can find the best voters using their special astrology method also. The FB algorithm already takes in 1000s of black box factors that are going to work better than some unproven personality score hogwash.

It takes surprisingly few data points to draw small and detailed psychographic categories of people. This has been known in the advertising world since the 50s, we just didn't have the tools to make microtargeting practical at scale until recently.

We can and do draw detailed psychographic categories with a few data points, but it's far from clear whether the results (and especially the details) are actually correct.

I think "since the 50s" should be taken as evidence against these models. Myers-Briggs first came into vogue in the late 1950s, and has been used for career counseling and hiring since despite being utterly unfit for purpose. Priming work dates to the 70s, and now it appears that many of the long-term uses advertising relies on don't replicate. The 'decoy effect' that drives many product strategies was formalized in the 1980s, and recent work suggests it exists only under very narrow conditions. Modern industry leaders like the Food and Brand Lab have apparently spent the last 20 years publishing absolute nonsense. Even results 'validated' with A/B testing are in many cases just noise from misusing statistics.

Precisely because we didn't have microtargeting or consumer-level feedback, all we've had since the 1950s is the belief that we can build and use these models. We know ads basically work, they improve brand recognition and reputation, but the Don Draper psychological rationales are essentially just-so stories written in the absence of data.

(As far as CA, no one seems to have dug up any seriously unusual patterns in 2016 voting. So unless they paired high-impact psychological targeting with an elaborate statistical coverup, what they actually did with the data wasn't exceptional.)

Re: New Cambridge Analytica Leaks

#137

Post by StuffedParrot »

dfxm12 wrote: post #7
sschueller wrote: post #2

"used stolen Facebook data" Is that factually correct? I was under the impression that facebook gave them API access.

The developer of the app "thisisyourdigitallife" handed over data collected from that app to Cambridge Analytica. Facebook claims this violates their TOS. Based on that, the data can be called stolen. https://www.vox.com/2018/3/17/17134072/facebook-cambridge-an...

> Facebook claims this violates their TOS. Based on that, the data can be called stolen.

They can call it that sure, but if they didn’t restrict access it’s hard to take this as anything but Facebook covering the entire point of their api—to get user data. Hell, if this is theft I should add “master burglar” to my resume—scraping in spite of being an obvious TOS violation is common in the industry. It’s certainly not a crime.

Re: New Cambridge Analytica Leaks

#138

Post by buboard »

schmilk wrote: post #130
buboard wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know

This really seems like a burden of proof situation. If a bad actor is demonstrably trying to be a bad actor, then they are a bad actor, and we should make a big deal out of it. Saying "yes, they are bad actors, but can you prove they actually accomplished their goal?" just enables more bad actors. Perhaps the burden of proof that a bad actor did not accomplish their goal should be on the bad actor. Otherwise more and…

misdiagnosis usually ends in disaster

Re: New Cambridge Analytica Leaks

#139

Post by dragonwriter »

keiferski wrote: post #48
paganel wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the Democrats don’t want to hear that they lost because they chose Hillary to run instead of almost anyone else. That “it’s her turn now” was complete BS that messed up things even for us people who have never set foot in the States. I can see the Democrats making the same mistake again with Michelle Obama in 4 years’ time if they don’t win this round, I only hope she’ll be smart enough to stay out of it. On…

I often wonder if any of this “age of post-truth” stuff would have become popular had the election gone the other way. It’s nothing new - philosophers and media theorists have been writing about media manipulation for the past century or more. But the media got the last election so completely wrong that they have to find a grand theory to explain what happened.

> I often wonder if any of this “age of post-truth” stuff would have become popular had the election gone the other way.

That probably depends how and why it went the other way, just like it probably wouldn't have the same degree of currency if Trump had won but there hadn't been a widely-reported on pro-Trump propaganda campaign apparently separate from the official campaign that was being compared to the Russian military propaganda technique referred to in a RAND analysis as the “firehose of falsehoods” even before any actual suggestion of Russian support for Trump or collusion between the campaign and Russia was publicly made.

> But the media got the last election so completely wrong that they have to find a grand theory to explain what happened.

Like many politically convenient narratives, yours only works of you ignore the facts, in this case specifically that the media narrative you suggest was constructed as a necessary explanation for the media’s missed prediction of the election results was prominent in the media in relation to the election as far back as the primary campaign (and actually had been a factor in US political coverage, though prior to the evidence of the propaganda campaign referred to earlier, one whose prominence had faded significantly since the end of the second Bush Administration, since Rove's derisive “reality-based community” comment in 2004.)

Re: New Cambridge Analytica Leaks

#140

Post by paulddraper »

mumblemumble wrote: post #33
cm2012 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a professional FB marketer and have managed both large budgets for private companies and also done political campaigns. I guarantee the trump campaign doesn't use the low quality Cambridge Analytica scraped data in their targeting. They either use voter file records or lookalikes (like everyone else does). All CA data so released so far has been useless, untargeted stuff. Think about where the data originally cam…

Is FB making their raw data public, though? There's a strategy/tactics divide to consider. Relying on FB's targeting algorithms is tactical - that'll give you great targeting once the time comes to execute your campaign. But CA data, even if noisy, has been exfiltrated out from under privacy controls, so that you can get a much more direct look at it. That allows an analyst to get a more detailed sense of what social…

I'm skeptical of the superior use of that in practice.
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