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New Cambridge Analytica Leaks

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Re: New Cambridge Analytica Leaks

#81

Post by JackFr »

pier25 wrote: post #50
shadowgovt wrote: post #8

Probably the most useful takeaway from CA's approach is that it's useful to realize how malleable opinions are of large swaths of "independent" voters. Ad experts and entertainment companies have known this for decades, but I get the sense the average American citizen still thinks of themselves as a free and independent thinker and not a product of their environment. Problem is, even if they are a free and independen…

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.

Re: New Cambridge Analytica Leaks

#82

Post by jfengel »

pier25 wrote: post #50
shadowgovt wrote: post #8

Probably the most useful takeaway from CA's approach is that it's useful to realize how malleable opinions are of large swaths of "independent" voters. Ad experts and entertainment companies have known this for decades, but I get the sense the average American citizen still thinks of themselves as a free and independent thinker and not a product of their environment. Problem is, even if they are a free and independen…

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.

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-formalized way of acknowledging those long-term bargains. They are sets of people with overlapping concerns -- sometimes distantly overlapping, where A and B have things in common, as do B and C, but A and C barely recognize each other. But if you can't get A, B, and C all to work together, none of them get what they want.

And in the worst case for them, X, Y, and Z achieve what they want instead -- positions that A, B, and C all agree are bad. The party that behaves with unity will get things that some of its members want and all members can live with. The party that has people opt out every time they disagree will achieve less-than-nothing.

The point is that a party can be a rational long-term decision even if it seems in conflict with short-term interests.

Re: New Cambridge Analytica Leaks

#83

Post by takeda »

malvosenior wrote: post #46
Balero wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But people were coerced by the media they saw into hating whichever candidate and, many, into loving one of them.

Only if you discount people's ability to think for themselves. Both these candidates had been in the public eye for decades. People decided based on what they've witnessed with their own eyes.

You work in advertising in >20 years, you really think you would have job if it didn't work?

Everyone who you will ask will absolutely say they aren't influenced by advertising, yet the branded products are still successful despite being more expensive.

For example medication, people still are buying Tylenol, Mortin, Aleve despite there being cheaper alternatives that are essentially the same thing: Acetaminophen, Ibuprofen, Naproxen. They will start buying these generics only after they are educated that these things are the same thing.

If you're looking for an insurance company (for a car, life etc) you will tend to chose companies that you heard the name of. You might pick up one that's not familiar (to you) only after you do research or someone else will recommend it to you.

It's same with politics, if you would do research I don't think those campaigns would influence you much, but most people won't have time to do a research.

Re: New Cambridge Analytica Leaks

#84

Post by takeda »

malvosenior wrote: post #80
takeda wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What makes you think that people are malleable? This article doesn't say anything about the effectiveness of what CA did. It's impossible to say if people voted the way they did because of a FB ad. My >20 years of experience in the consumer technology (ad) industry tells me that ads had little to no impact. The difference here and ordinary ad is, that unlike ads which target people based on where they live, interes…

What you're basically saying is that if a candidate tailors a message to an individual, then that individual will support them. Yes! That's how it should work. The candidates have to earn the support of the voters. They should be trying to craft messages that resonate with them. If people can flip voters with ads alone, then where does it end? Who has the better ads? What we say was a constituency that was upset with…

That was traditional way, Trump during his campaign sad many things that contradicted itself. Nobody really knew what his actual policy would be in the end.

The messages were more in the tune: "Trump maybe is not the greatest, but Hilary will be a catastrophe."

Re: New Cambridge Analytica Leaks

#85

Post by nkassis »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #29
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…

> 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. Well, CA seems to have understood that what matters is opinions across enough states to win the Electoral College vote. As you said, it's a system. They optimised for the system that exists. Even if a majority…

Looking a just the total of electoral votes ignores the razor thin margins a lot of those states were won by. I wouldn't call that decisive.

Re: New Cambridge Analytica Leaks

#86

Post by larnmar »

cm2012 wrote: post #69
3fe9a03ccd14ca5 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All CA data so released so far has been useless, untargeted stuff. It’s well known that the data is crap, and much crappier than what both the DNC and RNC were using going into 2016. So the question remains about why CA generates so much headlines? And is associated so strongly with something magical, nefarious... something that potentially transformed 2016? The answer is simple, to fit a narrative that 2016 was so…

The CA data is a BS story. But its also more or less definitive that Russia's slow leaking of otherwise innocuous emails really hurt Clinton's campaign. Its easy to get confused because there's so much going on.

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”?

Re: New Cambridge Analytica Leaks

#87

Post by mbesto »

cm2012 wrote: post #67
SeanAppleby wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that the most significant nonconventional heuristic that Cambridge Analytica got from FB data and exploited was by using FB like data to approximate OCEAN personality scores for almost all voting Americans using this technique [1], and then targeting correlations between people's big five ratings and their succeptibility to differnet types of marketing, such as targetingpeople high in neuroticism…

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.

> And the FB algorithm already takes in 1000s of black box factors that are going to work better than some unproven personality score hogwash.

1. My understanding is that CA wasn't just executing FB ads. Is your assumption that this was their only technique?

2. Are you aware of the specific techniques CA used?

3. What would be the purpose of CA obtaining the data then?

Re: New Cambridge Analytica Leaks

#88

Post by dfxm12 »

malvosenior wrote: post #51
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.

Probably not. In fact Obama did more or less exactly what Cambridge Analytica did: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/feb/17/obama-digital-... > "Consciously or otherwise, the individual volunteer will be injecting all the information they store publicly on their Facebook page – home location, date of birth, interests and, crucially, network of friends – directly into the central Obama database. The only differen…

I'm not sure if you're arguing in bad faith or you misunderstand how either the Obama app or how Cambridge Analytical got their data.

Obama's app was advertised as an app for the Obama campaign. People who used the app consented that the Obama campaign would get access to data about them and their friends. For better or worse (better for marketers, worse for the friends of these app users), this was all within how Facebook was expected to work.

Cambridge Analytica obtained similar data, but in a different way by breaking Facebook's TOS. A developer made an app, advertised as some kind of quiz, never saying that the data would be handed over to CA. Not only was the app developer not being up front about what the data would be used for, but they also broke FB's TOS [0] with its usage.

Plainly, there are key differences here beyond how it was heralded at the time (and it should be noted that even the article your provided shows Obama's data collection in both a positive and negative light).

0 - https://www.vox.com/2018/3/17/17134072/facebook-cambridge-an...

Re: New Cambridge Analytica Leaks

#89

Post by 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 »

larnmar wrote: post #86
cm2012 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The CA data is a BS story. But its also more or less definitive that Russia's slow leaking of otherwise innocuous emails really hurt Clinton's campaign. Its easy to get confused because there's so much going on.

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 fundamental questions.

* U.S. intelligence officials cannot make definitive conclusions about the hacking of the Democratic National Committee computer servers because they did not analyze those servers themselves. Instead, they relied on the forensics of CrowdStrike, a private contractor for the DNC that was not a neutral party, much as “Russian dossier” compiler Christopher Steele, also a DNC contractor, was not a neutral party. This puts two Democrat-hired contractors squarely behind underlying allegations in the affair – a key circumstance that Mueller ignores.

* Lawyers for Stone discovered that CrowdStrike submitted three forensic reports to the FBI that were redacted and in draft form. When Stone asked to see CrowdStrike's un-redacted versions, prosecutors made the explosive admission that the U.S. government does not have them.

They never even turned over the servers to the FBI? They only submitted a draft report?

Also, why use a Ukrainian company for something so important, do we not have the expertise here in the US to do this? If there's anything we've learned about Ukraine in the last few months, it's that many politician children were making a lot of money there through... let's just say questionable arrangements.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2019/07/05/...

Re: New Cambridge Analytica Leaks

#90

Post by mbesto »

rossdavidh wrote: post #9
shadowgovt wrote: post #8

Probably the most useful takeaway from CA's approach is that it's useful to realize how malleable opinions are of large swaths of "independent" voters. Ad experts and entertainment companies have known this for decades, but I get the sense the average American citizen still thinks of themselves as a free and independent thinker and not a product of their environment. Problem is, even if they are a free and independen…

While I agree with "how malleable opinions are...", the actual answer is, "not very malleable". Every well-designed study of political advertising I've ever seen has shown that it's impact is very small, in some cases unmeasurably small. Thus, for example, the 2016 Clinton campaign raised a lot more $$ than the Trump campaign, whereas the Sanders primary campaign out-fundraised the Clinton one. Now, the impact on the…

> Thus, for example, the 2016 Clinton campaign raised a lot more $$ than the Trump campaign, whereas the Sanders primary campaign out-fundraised the Clinton one.

The amount of dollars directly contributed by the campaign is a red herring. Trump had WAY more earned media than Clinton, to the tune of billions of dollars.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/16/upshot/measuring-donald-t...

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