51–60 of 68 posts
What’s fascinating is that prior to CA helping targeting in the previous election cycle, this capability was kind of embraced by politicians and industry as the next evolution in political campaigning... but few recognized an issue with that kind of data usage at the time...
It's very silly to imagine that CA was the only player on the market. They are just the one that worked for the incorrect candidate.
I've changed the title to be that of the book under review. Actually we've started doing that for most book review posts (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24474073). It seems to make for better discussion.
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I think only allowing the advert to be targeted at the level that the campaign is being run in is reasonable. i.e. if you are campaigning for Governor of NY, you can target New York state, but you can't target Manhattan, or Long Island, or men over 50, or people who liked the NRA.
that would kill list building and fundraising which are large digital expenditures. non-presidentials barely spend on digital persuasion but they will spend on fundraising if it raises
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The Obama administration was praised for gathering the same information about users without their consent. Obama's campaign manager said that Facebook told them that if it was anyone else gathering that much information, they would have blocked it, but that Facebook was "on their side". There's absolutely a double standard.
Do you have a source for that? Your comment is the top Google result when I search for that "on their side" quote with various nouns about Obama and Facebook data collection. EDIT: This was a few spots down in the search results and explains how Obama's data collection was different than CA. https://washingtonmonthly.com/2018/03/21/no-obama-didnt-empl...
The issue was never that CA did this with "false pretences" (they didn't sign up users directly, that was done by an academic who then sold the data) or that by signing users up on your own website, you were doing some above board. The issue was that Facebook allowed access to not only your account but your friend network. That was what Obama used, that is what CA used, that is why both tried to get the Facebook login, and, btw, the end goal was exactly the same: microtargeting of ads.
Btw, there are probably hundreds of other companies who are doing the same thing. A lot of the "data science" startups are using this data in their products, there was an Israeli startup (mentioned here recently) that somehow had click data from Google, individual search data from Google...this isn't just politics, this personalised, identifying data that is somehow everywhere.
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that would kill list building and fundraising which are large digital expenditures. non-presidentials barely spend on digital persuasion but they will spend on fundraising if it raises
Killing those things might not be a negative...
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Killing those things might not be a negative...
Doing so would destroy the ability of non-establishment candidates representing salient issues, e.g. police violence in particular communities, from effectively running grassroots campaigns.
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Thanks, I somehow missed this, will read shortly. Meanwhile, one aspect of the 2016 presidential coverage that drives me nuts is the omission that HRC's voter file was stolen and likely used by GOP, Trump, Russia. Meaning they knew exactly who to target. A campaign's voter file is it's Crown Jewels, it's secret sauce. It is the campaign. HRC knew they had a problem in MN, WI, PA. They just couldn't figure out what wa…
> HRC knew they had a problem in MN, WI, PA. They just couldn't figure out what was going on in time. Yeah, the problem is that they took those states (and it’s MI not MN) for granted as safe blue states (which they had been for decades) and bought into the “Hillary is so far ahead in the polls she doesn’t even think about Trump anymore”[0] hype that they didn’t see the need to campaign there. 0: https://www.telegrap…
One unintuitive thing I wish was more easily explained:
Any given move to gain votes will lose other votes. It's a wicked hard optimization problem.
Her podcast, The Last Archive is good. I enjoyed the following episodes. I have not listed to the entire season, so the list below is not comprehensive. https://www.thelastarchive.com/season-1/episode-5-project-x https://www.thelastarchive.com/season-1/episode-7-the-comput... https://www.thelastarchive.com/season-1/episode-10-tomorrowl...
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Doing so would destroy the ability of non-establishment candidates representing salient issues, e.g. police violence in particular communities, from effectively running grassroots campaigns.
Only if money remained the engine of political campaigns. But if others can't raise money either, then I think that helps the grass-roots candidates.