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New Cambridge Analytica Leaks

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Re: New Cambridge Analytica Leaks

#141

Post by keiferski »

dragonwriter wrote: post #139
keiferski wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mi…

As far as I know, the consequences of any “propaganda campaign” were minor. Assuming they did happen and considering that the election was very close, then sure, an argument could be made that they ultimately determined the election.

But that isn’t your argument, or at least what I’m interpreting to be your argument (your last paragraph is a single run-on sentence and it’s quite hard to understand.)

If the media weren’t completely wrong, they would have predicted a close race. Instead, they overwhelmingly showed Trump losing by a significant margin. Hence my point: the mainstream media messed up, big time, and instead of acknowledging it, they’ve embarked on a campaign to find a nefarious reason for the entirety of the events, when in reality the cause of election results are far more mundane and have more to do with economics.

Re: New Cambridge Analytica Leaks

#142

Post by 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 »

extra88 wrote: post #131
3fe9a03ccd14ca5 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I stand corrected! I was just confused why they would have possession of the DNC servers?? So many interesting questions still to answer!

Re: New Cambridge Analytica Leaks

#143

Post by dragonwriter »

makomk wrote: post #71
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.

This is a particularly important counterargument when talking about the 2016 presidential election, since Clinton seems to have been the only candidate who was actually trying to win the popular vote. She put a bunch of campaigning resources into places like California which would increase her popular vote share but wouldn't affect the result. Trump's campaign, on the other hand, was by all accounts focused on simply…

> Clinton seems to have been the only candidate who was actually trying to win the popular vote. She put a bunch of campaigning resources into places like California which would increase her popular vote share but wouldn't affect the result.

What Clinton was trying to do was not so much “win the popular vote” but “maximize down-ballot coattails associated with an expected electoral victory” (and, thereby, assure that members of Congress of her party felt thet owed her.)

It's perhaps worth remembering that inability to marshal support from Congressional reps of his own party, particularly it's liberal wing, is what handed her husband two stinging early embarrassments (one of which was defeat on an issue she was the face of): the lesser being NAFTA passing with strong Republican support but widespread and strong Democratic opposition, and the greater being the humiliating defeat of Clinton's signature campaign initiative, health care reform.

Re: New Cambridge Analytica Leaks

#144

Post by jfengel »

pier25 wrote: post #119
jfengel wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Single-party voting is not necessarily irrational. A vote is a compromise. In a democracy, you need a majority to achieve anything, and with many options available, it's going to be rare for any single option to pass 50%. You get things done by making bargains with other voters. And those bargains have to be durable over time: I'll vote for your thing today if you'll vote for my thing tomorrow. A party is a semi-form…

> a party can be a rational long-term decision Only assuming that there is something like a constant ideology that party members adhere to over the decades.

Decades is too much to ask, but one decade isn't. It isn't a single ideology, but a set of overlapping ideologies. Those do shift, as circumstances and priorities change, but generally not radically within the scale of a single Presidential term.

I'd say it's not unreasonable to commit to a party and re-evaluate that commitment every decade (or perhaps 8 years is a better figure in the US). That's not to say that you won't be constantly looking out for new information, like a technological change that makes you reconsider your ideas or the discovery that some candidate is very untrustworthy. But if you want anything nontrivial done, it's not going to happen on a time frame shorter than a half-decade -- and your allies are going to want to believe that you'll still be with them once they've achieved your top priority.

Re: New Cambridge Analytica Leaks

#145

Post by n4r9 »

linusnext wrote: post #128
n4r9 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Wired article says the rest went to "Oczkowski and his team". Oczkowski is CA's former head of product and worked there until April 2017. Either way, I'm not sure the distinction you're making is very significant?

The statement that the stolen data was used for the campaign is contradicted by the interview link provided.

Ah, I see what you mean, yes: it's denied by the campaign manager.

Re: New Cambridge Analytica Leaks

#146

Post by 0xADEADBEE »

One thing I notice often gets glossed over when Cambridge Analytica comes up is that they didn't really shut down at all. While CA ceased trading, a company called Emerdata was created around that time by the same directors [0]. Their Company's House filing documents can be seen here: [1].

I'm not yelling 'conspiracy!' or anything, but it's notable that this isn't more widely reported. I'll be watching them with interest.

[0] - https://www.newsweek.com/what-emerdata-scl-group-executives-...

[1] - https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/10911848/officers

Re: New Cambridge Analytica Leaks

#147

Post by dragonwriter »

wayoutthere wrote: post #39
groundlessly wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s absolutely wild to me that, with the benefit of 2020 hindsight, we’re still drawing conclusions about the public based on the fact that the person who earned by far the most votes of any candidate in the race still technically lost the election. For people who pride ourselves so much on understanding how systems work, we’re consistently really bad at understanding this one. Maybe public opinion in the US is fick…

Among left-leaning circles there is an overwhelming feeling that the "Overton window" has shifted way too far right -- especially on things like regulation of business. Bernie Sanders is popular specifically because he shifts that window back to the left. From a deregulatory standpoint, I'm not sure Trump is significantly worse than Clinton. He's definitely worse, but the difference is smaller than Clinton vs Sanders…

> The far-left wing of the Democratic party felt that 4 years of chaos under Trump was an acceptable tradeoff in the long-term for moving the party (and the country) to the left on the economy.

No, all the polling and other research I've seen showed that non-Clinton supporters on the left (particularly Sanders supporters) supported Clinton more strongly on 2016 than Clinton 2008 supporters supported Obama. What people (largely because it conflicts with the simplistic linear left-right model where people vote for whoever is nearer their position on that line that so many people have internalized as how US elections work) is that Sanders polled substantially better among the disaffected independents, rural working class whites, and other demographics outside of the Democratic liberal base (and even outside of the Democratic Party at all) than Clinton did. Those are the people that, whether by voting the other way or just not turning up to vote at all the way they might have for a candidate that offered them something to turn out for, that made the difference.

> In the current climate, moderates are going to find themselves left out in the cold in national races -- exactly because moderates are relatively easy to pull to one side or the other via targeted campaign advertising.

Moderates aren't easier to pull, people whose variation from the political center isn't along the main axis of variation between the parties are easier to pull. That's not the same thing as moderates.

Re: New Cambridge Analytica Leaks

#148

Post by JoeAltmaier »

pier25 wrote: post #114
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard to say what's 'rational' when voting. Lots of metrics; lots of theories. Vote for the person (character etc) vs their promises? Vote for the organization that will guide them (party) instead of the person? I'd say its entirely irrational to vote for the program as outlined by the candidate speeches. Because they rarely happen. It's not a problem with democracy. Its a problem with people and power.

> Hard to say what's 'rational' when voting First step you examine all the available options objectively, like any other decision. Do you think the majority of voters do that? > I'd say its entirely irrational to vote for the program as outlined by the candidate speeches. Because they rarely happen. Right, but this another problem altogether. I'm getting some cynic vibes from your comment. Are you against voting?

I'm admitting I don't know what a rational voter looks like. I've been fooled too often by the campaigning so believe there's enough information there to make an 'informed' decision.

Re: New Cambridge Analytica Leaks

#149

Post by n4r9 »

freewizard wrote: post #47

Yes, FB & CA should be hold accountable for abusing user privacy, but real elephant in the room is about the legislation of political campaigns, specifically: - amount of $ campaign may collect and spend - granularity of users segment campaign may target

Agreed, although the first point is kind of questionable because as technology improves, the cost of voter manipulation could plummet.

Re: New Cambridge Analytica Leaks

#150

Post by dragonwriter »

keiferski wrote: post #141
dragonwriter wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 mi…

As far as I know, the consequences of any “propaganda campaign” were minor. Assuming they did happen and considering that the election was very close, then sure, an argument could be made that they ultimately determined the election. But that isn’t your argument, or at least what I’m interpreting to be your argument (your last paragraph is a single run-on sentence and it’s quite hard to understand.) If the media were…

> As far as I know, the consequences of any “propaganda campaign” were minor

Tracing causality in a single election is basically impossible for phenomena which aren't very similar to those in previous elections for which there is a solid base across many examples with many variations in alternative factors that themselves are well understood to provide controls. But the effects of the campaign aren't what drove the narrative of the post-truth era, it's existence which was a major media story starting fairly early in the campaign, and the absence of any disavowal of it was.

> If the media weren’t completely wrong, they would have predicted a close race

They predicted a race about as close as it was. They also (in many but not all cases) predicted a near certainty of a Clinton victory, because, as 538 pointed out before the election in explaining why their predictions were different and showed a much lower probability of Clinton winning than other media models, many models assumed that any poll-vs-vote differences would be independent between the states, while historically polling error is strongly correlated between the states.

> Hence my point: the mainstream media messed up, big time, and instead of acknowledging it, they’ve embarked on a campaign to find a nefarious reason for the entirety of the events

But, again, this claim doesn't work because (1) the media found the “explanation” before the events, and (2) no one except those trying to discredit the story describes it as explaining “the entirety of events”.

> in reality the cause of election results are far more mundane and have more to do with economics.

This is just as much of a self-serving and fact-ignoring explanation of the “entirety of events” as the propaganda as the narrative you are complaining about would be if anyone offered it for that purpose, the difference between yours and the other one is that no one—not even the center-right Democratic establishment, who has the most to gain from getting people to believe that story—offers the other narrative for that purpose.

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