
What Netflix’s ‘Great Hack’ Gets Wrong About Cambridge Analytica - bookofjoe
https://www.thenation.com/article/cambridge-analytica-facebook-hack/
======
bertil
I talked to the Data scientists at Cambridge Analytica before and after the
scandal, including in-depth on the technical details. Couple of things that
they told me that change a bit the interpretation you can have of the scandal:

\- There was a moat between the operations/sales team (Alex Nix, Brittany
Kaiser, etc.), the people you see on most documentaries and the technical team
(Alex Taylor, etc.): Sales would say anything to convince buyers (campaigns)
and had no idea how the technology works. You can take _any_ sentences uttered
by them and quote it to the data scientists, their reaction would be… bow,
shake their head, “Yeah, not, that’s… not it.” Probably the worst case of
over-selling I’ve heard of.

\- The company kept Kogan’s data in archives (breaching their agreement with
Facebook) but overall, data scientists considered it useless because it was
ageing, not helpful for models. They never used it in production.

\- Instead (and you can see that at the 1:00:00 mark in _The Big Hack_) they
used election data (participation, name, demographic, address), which magazine
people are subscribed to (name, address and the title) and credit information,
notably what car they are paying back (name, address, make and model of the
car). How are magazines and car helpful? Well, in their words: “guess who the
driver of a Ford-150, reader of _Guns & Ammos_ vote for?” Both are a well-
documented source of political insight, so much that there’s an open-source
model for parsing Google Street View, classifying the car parked and making
precinct-level predictions.

\- Kogan data could not be used on Facebook (it was blacklisted) but they
didn’t know that.

~~~
amrrs
Michael Lewis' Podcast `Against the rules` did a good job in bringing a
different perspective of the entire thing Kogan did with data was not
significant yet he was made a scapegoat by journalists
[https://atrpodcast.com/episodes/the-alex-kogan-
experience-s1...](https://atrpodcast.com/episodes/the-alex-kogan-
experience-s1!d20f3)

~~~
bertil
Ignoring the unrelated 30-min digression about grammar (sic), I’m not tempted
to excuse him: he shared personal-level data, including names, with a company
that was openly Orwellian. They didn’t hide what they were doing. People
started paying attention when they went from sowing division and crafting
racist campaign in South-East Asia and Africa to Western countries, but they
did not hide their methods before or after. I guess the podcast is making a
good case that he’s awkward and naive but that shouldn’t prevent him from
seeing the consequence of his sharing his research data.

The biased story seems to ignore that Facebook did ask CA to delete the data
as soon as they knew about the sale. I can’t imagine that Kogan didn’t hear
about that. On that, I wouldn’t be able to say anything more relevant than the
last sentence of the podcast on “creating your own reality”.

Kogan’s avoiding public opinion and his self-excuses are blocking the entire
research on social networks. Now, Facebook PR expects that any similar
academic collaboration will end badly — and I’m not surprised that those are
stalled.

------
rfc
I took up issue with "Great Hack" as well. At some of my previous companies,
we evaluated purchasing data from a lot of these vendors for a data hydration
purposes, Cambridge Analytica included. They didn't offer to sell but we did
have conversations around leveraging their platform to create insights.

What was funny to me in the whole process was that CA was the LEAST of what
worried me. We were talking to Acxiom as well in which I could buy 500-1500
data points on 300M Americans for $250k-$500k. This included info like types
of bank accounts, types of CC rewards, mortgages left, restaurant chain
preferences, etc. They also had their own methods for creating data (the ML
sauce) which created psychographic profiles.

The other thing the general public doesn't realize about profile data is that
it suffers from sporadic and episodic contributions, making accurate high-
resolution profiles difficult to obtain. There's lots of deduplication,
profile merging, etc. that needs to be there.

Sure, CA had some shady shit going on. But from my perspective, they were tame
relative to some of the other big players.

~~~
neffy
Exactly. For example, there are also persistent rumours that somebody is
selling about 1% of total credit card transactions to hedge funds, for stock
trading purposes - which seems like a major issue on all sorts of levels.

~~~
Maxious
1%? Deidentified transaction data from banks is routinely sold
[https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-03-05/sportsbet-
documents-r...](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-03-05/sportsbet-documents-
reveal-millions-spent-on-marketing/10833196)

------
adrianmonk
This brings up a broader subject (not specific to this particular
documentary): it's getting where I just don't like watching documentaries
anymore because a lot of them are wrong.

The experience I want is to enjoy spending some time watching an interesting
documentary and walk away with my mind enriched with some new facts and
analysis. Instead, a lot of the time, it's interesting, but I walk away
believing something that isn't true because whoever made the documentary was
too lazy to fact-check, was unconsciously biased, or was even intentionally
leaving out part of the story because they have an agenda.

Not all documentaries are this way, of course. Some are accurate and
objective. The problem is I can't easily tell before watching. As a
workaround, I can do a bunch of my own research after watching, but that's a
bit of a pain, and maybe I'm better off just skipping the documentary and
going straight to the research.

Unfortunately, for a documentary to succeed commercially as entertainment,
it's not necessary for the audience to actually learn. They just have to _feel
like_ they learned something.

~~~
csours
What do you think of Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room[0]? It's one of my
favorite documentaries. I've watched it about a dozen times probably. Dirty
Money[1] shares a creator (Alex Gibney) [2] with Smartest Guys, and I also
really like that.

Over the weekend I watched American Factory[3]. It may be my new favorite. I
don't know if I will watch it as much as Smartest Guys, just because of the
storytelling in that.

I like these because they clearly represent different viewpoints. Most
documentaries feel like propaganda, and these don't feel that way to me.

0:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron:_The_Smartest_Guys_in_th...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron:_The_Smartest_Guys_in_the_Room)

1:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirty_Money_(2018_TV_series)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirty_Money_\(2018_TV_series\))

2:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Gibney](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Gibney)

3:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Factory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Factory)

~~~
cwkoss
I watched American Factory last week and was pleasantly surprised with how
unopinionated it was.

~~~
aaron695
It didn't have a narrator, which pleasantly surprised me, but was it
unopinionated?

IMO I don't know.

Almost all docos are at face value garbage, David Attenborough for instance
never turns the camera around to the human rubbish or half a town behind them
and never shows the true brutality of animals. When you get to docos on humans
things really fall apart.

American Factory pushes the divide between Chinese and Americans, but humour
and brashness gets lost translation, not sure it existed as much as it
implied.

What was interesting was American Unions which was eye opening how illegal
behaviour in most of the West was so normalised.

But to be honest the biggest morsel was the 3 broken microwaves in the break
room. WTF. One, understandable, but to get to three means a systematic break
down in the supply chain looking after your workers.

~~~
cwkoss
There is certainly opinion whenever you choose to point a camera at something
instead of something else, but I think in this instance the choice of no
narration left the viewer with a bit more space to make their own
interpretation than many documentaries do, which was refreshing.

------
imiric
> When it comes to voters’ decisions about their choice of candidate, most
> forms of paid political persuasion, including TV ads, online ads, mailers,
> phone calls, and door knocking, have no discernible effect in terms of
> changing people’s minds.

So the billions spent on campaign advertising essentially has no effect? I
don't buy that for a second, otherwise it wouldn't be a billion dollar
industry.

We know that advertising has a psychological effect on people, and advertisers
know how to exploit this in susceptible individuals to sell their product.

We also know that the winning margin of the 2016 election was only 79,316
votes[1]. So Cambridge Analytica didn't need to influence millions of people
to succeed, as long as they managed to sway some who were already on the fence
to not vote for Clinton.

This article attempts to discredit the documentary by focusing on whether CA
succeeded or not, when the real issue is private data collection, user
profiling and tracking, and the usual evils of advertising, which they
conveniently choose to ignore.

[1]: [https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/12/hillary-clinton-
marg...](https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/12/hillary-clinton-margin-loss-
votes)

~~~
aylmao
> We also know that the winning margin of the 2016 election was only 79,316
> votes[1].

The smaller the number, the less clearly one can point at a single cause
though, right? I mean, to an extreme, say it had been a 1 vote difference.
There's millions of factors that can make a vote happen or not (that one voter
could've slept in because their alarm broke, that one voter could've gotten
sick that day, etc). One vote is an extreme case, but for 80k I can think of a
lot of factors that would normally be "small" but suddenly play a sizable
amount of importance.

\- That's 80k Democrats who didn't go to vote. \- That's well within the
territory of gerrymandering. \- That's a tiny fraction of the African American
population, where Hillary was notoriously weak. \- That's well within the
viewership of many Fox News shows and segments. \- As the article stated, you
could fit these people in a mid-sized football stadium. That's within the
territory of having a weak last month of campaign touring, or aggressively
getting more rallies done.

Just to mention a few. And yes, also means it COULD have been CA— perhaps they
weren't as influential as they claimed but 80k is not a large number, they
perhaps could've influenced that many people.

I'm just wondering if there's a lot of attention being put on this factor, vs
other factors that at this scale could've feasibly swayed in the election.

~~~
javagram
“That's 80k Democrats who didn't go to vote. - That's well within the
territory of gerrymandering”

FYI gerrymandering doesn’t directly affect presidential or senatorial races
except for two minor exceptions, Maine and Nebraska, which allocate electoral
votes based on CD winners.

Every other state including the decisive Midwest “blue wall” states has a
winner take all allocation method which means Gerrymandering has no effect
(unless you consider 19th century state borders to be gerrymandering!)

~~~
selectodude
Gerrymandering is far more useful as a form of voter disenfranchisement.
Voting districts can be messed with in subtle ways like having far more voting
booths per capita in whiter areas, they can make people not show up to vote
for president since their vote is legitimately not worth anything for
everything downballot, etc.

The best gerrymandering nowadays is to make people not bother to vote anymore.

------
lordnacho
I watched the documentary and had two major issues:

\- CA was said to be able to identify swing voters, and then swing them. I
thought about this a bit. How would you even collect data about this? Do you
just assume that people who have voted both ways are swing voters for this
election? Ok, so suppose that's what a swing voter is and you somehow have a
dataset of people who've done this. You have the labels, what are the
features? Postcode? Age? Race? Gender? Income? (scary shit that you have this
btw). But aren't those things going to tend towards well known facts already?
As in old white male in the countryside, like Rep? What are you really getting
that isn't already well documented? Anyway supposed you then write a nice RF
or similar model that is good at finding swing voters. What do you even show
them to make them swing your way? How will you ever know if that actually
worked? It simply seems like a stretch to think CA provided anything useful.

\- What is it about CA's methods that were so effective? Would there not be
some team on the other side of both the presidential and Brexit campaigns
using exactly the same methods to the same end? Wouldn't there be Hilary and
Remainer people who could buy/collect the same data, identify the same voters,
and then send them something to push the other way? Why didn't the journalist
look for someone like that? After all someone had to do something similar for
Obama.

~~~
throwawaywego
> How would you even collect data about this?

You gather the data required to make a good probability prediction for voter
preference ((soft) labels for this easier to find than swing voter labels).
Then when the model is uncertain, those are your swing voters / on the fence
voters.

> Postcode? Age? Race? Gender? Income?

When it is found to be cost-effective: All and everything that is allowed by
law and then some. In its pitch deck, Facebook boasted about its advertisers
being able to target and identify: university, degree, concentration, course
history, class year, housing/dormitory, age, gender, sexual orientation, zip
(home and university/work), relationship status, dating interests, personal
interests, club membership, jobs, political bent, friend graph, site
usage/addiction level.

Likes make this very easy (with a little luck, you can deduce all of zip, age,
race, gender, income from a list of Likes).

> What is it about CA's methods that were so effective?

Hillary Clinton: “The real question is how did the Russians know how to target
their messages so precisely to undecided voters in Wisconsin or Michigan or
Pennsylvania – that is really the nub of the question. So if they were getting
advice from say Cambridge Analytica, or someone else, about ‘OK here are the
12 voters in this town in Wisconsin – that’s whose Facebook pages you need to
be on to send these messages’ that indeed would be very disturbing.”

FBI: Using those techniques in June 2016, “the GRU compromised the computer
network of the Illinois State Board of Elections by exploiting a vulnerability
in the SBOE's website,” the report said. “The GRU then gained access to a
database containing information on millions of registered Illinois voters, and
extracted data related to thousands of U.S. voters before the malicious
activity was identified. Similarly, in November 2016, the GRU sent
spearphishing emails to over 120 email accounts used by Florida county
officials responsible for administering the 2016 U.S. election,” the report
said. “The spearphishing emails contained an attached Word document coded with
malicious software (commonly referred to as a Trojan) that permitted the GRU
to access the infected computer.”

> After all someone had to do something similar for Obama.

Obama's digital campaign was very successful, but the above seems to indicate
that Kushner's campaign was way more aggressive and less scrupulous (and may
have had connections with - or help from foreign adversaries).

It may also be that propaganda and smears works better depending on your
political preference and level of education and neurosis: Even if Hillary had
spent the same amount of money and energy (some reports indicate that
Hillary's digital campaign was a waste of money and displayed poor
management), efficiently, it may be easier to sway a voter to vote Republican,
if you can target their fears of immigrants, religious beliefs, distrust in
gun regulation from the government, and conspiracy theories. Surely, the many
wolf cries about fake news, and retweeting of conspiracy theories, has set up
the Trump base for easier manipulation (you can simply create a meme to
counter a story in a respected journal or keep them guessing on the
alternative truth of it).

~~~
tptacek
How successful was Obama's digital campaign? From what sources are we deriving
that conclusion?

Two countervailing arguments:

First, the narrative about Obama's digital success is itself extraordinarily
powerful and was used throughout the marketing industry to sell marketing
services and products to commercial organizations; many of the obvious Google
searches about Obama's campaign effectiveness will turn up a first SERP filled
mostly with appeals to social media programs.

Second, people have written that the impact of digital marketing on Obama's
campaign might be overblown. Here's an example:
[https://harvardpolitics.com/united-states/just-good-obama-
ca...](https://harvardpolitics.com/united-states/just-good-obama-campaign/)

~~~
throwawaywego
> How successful was Obama's digital campaign? From what sources are we
> deriving that conclusion?

I'd agree that it may have been overblown (just like the Russian interference
may have been overblown). Also, of course the marketeers ran with it and
turned it into a sales pitch.

But that detracts just a little from the effectiveness of Obama's digital
campaign. As it was the first of its kind, relative to other campaigns that
lacked a modern digital strategy, it gave a significant edge. Your argument
seems of the form: "Hercules is strong. Some say he is really really strong.
Ergo, Hercules was not strong".

2008: > The key technological innovation that brought Barack Obama to the
White House wasn’t his tweets or a smartphone app. It was the Obama campaign’s
novel integration of e-mail, cell phones, and websites. The young, technology-
savvy staffers didn’t just use the web to convey the candidate’s message; they
also enabled supporters to connect and self-organize, pioneering the ways
grassroots movements would adapt and adopt platforms in the campaign cycles to
come.

> but a network of supporters who used a distributed model of phone banking to
> organize and get out the vote, helped raise a record-breaking $600 million,
> and created all manner of media clips that were viewed millions of times. It
> was an online movement that begot offline behavior, including producing
> youth voter turnout that may have supplied the margin of victory.

> All of the Obama supporters who traded their personal information for a
> ticket to a rally or an e-mail alert about the vice presidential choice, or
> opted in on Facebook or MyBarackObama can now be mass e-mailed at a cost of
> close to zero.

2012: > Once again, the Obama campaign built a dream team of nerds to create
the software that drove many aspects of the campaign. From messaging to
fund-­raising to canvassing to organizing to targeting resources to key
districts and media buys, the reelection effort took the political application
of data science to unprecedented heights. The Obama team created sophisticated
analytic models that personalized social and e-mail messaging using data
generated by social-media activity.

> The Republican side, too, tried to create smarter tools, but it botched
> them. The Romney campaign’s “Orca,” a platform for marshaling volunteers to
> get out the vote on election day, suffered severe technical problems,
> becoming a cautionary tale of how not to manage a large IT project. For the
> moment, the technology gap between Democrats and Republicans remained wide.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/10/business/media/10carr.htm...](https://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/10/business/media/10carr.html)

[https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611823/us-election-
campai...](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611823/us-election-campaign-
technology-from-2008-to-2018-and-beyond/)

~~~
tptacek
Neither of these sources cite any social science up to back their conclusions.
I guess I'm interested in the fact that David Carr believed Obama's digital
campaign was important, because I sort of generally liked David Carr. But this
is color commentary, not analysis.

~~~
throwawaywego
It is difficult to provide a counterfactual here (would Obama have won if his
campaign hadn't put any effort in digital?), so I am not sure if you are
requiring that.

For factual analysis of the effects and strategies employed by Obama (on a
casual glance, most of which support the statement that Obama's campaign was
highly successful), do a search on Google Scholar. Here are a few highly cited
political science sources I was able to pull (need to get back to work now).

> Digital media in the Obama campaigns of 2008 and 2012: Adaptation to the
> personalized political communication environment

> This essay provides a descriptive interpretation of the role of digital
> media in the campaigns of Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 with a focus on two
> themes: personalized political communication and the commodification of
> digital media as tools. The essay covers campaign finance strategy, voter
> mobilization on the ground, innovation in social media, and data analytics,
> and _why the Obama organizations were more innovative than those of his
> opponents_. The essay provides a point of contrast for the other articles in
> this special issue, which describe sometimes quite different campaign
> practices in recent elections across Europe.

> From Networked Nominee to Networked Nation: Examining the Impact of Web 2.0
> and Social Media on Political Participation and Civic Engagement in the 2008
> Obama Campaign

> This article explores the uses of Web 2.0 and social media by the 2008 Obama
> presidential campaign and asks three primary questions: (1) What techniques
> allowed the Obama campaign to translate online activity to on-the-ground
> activism? (2) _What sociotechnical factors enabled the Obama campaign to
> generate so many campaign contributions?_ (3) Did the Obama campaign
> facilitate the development of an ongoing social movement that will influence
> his administration and governance? Qualitative data were collected from
> social media tools used by the Obama ‘08 campaign (e.g., Obama ‘08 Web site,
> Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, e-mails, iPhone application, and the Change.gov
> site created by the Obama-Biden Transition Team) and public information.
> _The authors find that the Obama ‘08 campaign created a nationwide virtual
> organization that motivated 3.1 million individual contributors and
> mobilized a grassroots movement of more than 5 million volunteers._ Clearly,
> the Obama campaign utilized these tools to go beyond educating the public
> and raising money to mobilizing the ground game, enhancing political
> participation, and getting out the vote. The use of these tools also raised
> significant national security and privacy considerations. Finally, the
> Obama-Biden transition and administration utilized many of the same
> strategies in their attempt to transform political participation and civic
> engagement.

> The Internet's Role in Campaign 2008

> _A majority of American adults went online in 2008 to keep informed about
> political developments and to get involved with the election._

------
dirtybird04
Michael Lewis (of the Moneyball and The Big Short fame) talks about Cambridge
Analytica in his podcast [https://atrpodcast.com/episodes/the-alex-kogan-
experience-s1...](https://atrpodcast.com/episodes/the-alex-kogan-
experience-s1!d20f3). Long story short: the CA scandal was way overblown. They
could barely identify 1% of the population with all that data.

~~~
Pfhreak
> They could barely identify 1% of the population with all that data.

1% of what population? 1% of Facebook users? 1% of the American population?
Both of those are pretty staggeringly large numbers of people...

~~~
weego
By their own admission in pitch decks the CA system was no better resolving an
individual accurately than existing ways. The main architect of the system's
only previous experience was trying (and apparently failing) to model fashion
forecasting.

To say then CA situation was overblown in terms of scope and insight is an
understatement imo. The irony is their sales pitch was so good it caused an
international incident.

~~~
antod
_> The irony is their sales pitch was so good it caused an international
incident. _

As a non American, I find the "it's not so bad, it wasn't very effective"
arguments I'm seeing in these comments a bit strange.

I personally don't really care about the effectiveness of their analysis
versus them (and others) having access to and collecting all that data in the
first place. Once all the data is out there and the lack of privacy is
normalised/accepted there will be all kinds of other attempts to use it in the
future.

Americans on the whole seem quite nonchalant about their privacy.

~~~
dirtybird04
>Americans on the whole seem quite nonchalant about their privacy

I disagree, and let me elaborate. The CA scandal started two different
conversations, which people get mixed up a lot.

The primary one was about how shit Facebook's privacy settings are, and how
all your data has been easily available for a few bucks. This stirred up a LOT
of privacy concerns in the US, causing a whole bunch of people to quit
Facebook. Zuckerberg was on the cover of magazines, for all the wrong reason.
That conversation is still going on.

The secondary conversation was ok now that we know the data was out there, how
effective was it? Did it help swing the election? This documentary wants you
to convince that it is true, that CA was the reason why Trump got elected. And
as the article and Michael Lewis' podcast lays out, that's just not the case.

tldr: We're talking about two different things. Talking about secondary
concerns does not negate the primary ones.

~~~
antod
Yeah fair point.

I suppose for non Americans like myself, we would naturally put far less
weight on the secondary discussion. Also I hadn't watched the documentary in
question, so wasn't referring to its arguments directly.

I do have some vague hopes that California's upcoming privacy regulations (the
ones that from the outside look a little GDPR like) will prod the tech giants
enough to take this shit seriously.

And I hope you're right about what this has stirred up in the US. I'm hoping
that my view (ie the apparent nonchalance) from the outside is inaccurate. For
the rest of the world, we rely on American sentiment to influence these
companies.

------
jefe_
Agree with the article's criticism of the heavy focus on Brittany Kaiser. It
felt like the filmmakers were trying to put her into Snowden or Assange type
circumstances, and then use those circumstances to manufacture credibility and
heighten suspense. I have difficulty with the scene about a news article
breaking that mentions her. Shes groaning about her career being over, but you
can tell shes really excited to be in the spotlight. Assange comes off equally
self-centered in the Poitras documentary, but in that case the magnitude of
circumstances had already been established, along with his central role in
those circumstances. The filmmakers behind 'Great Hack' never reached those
levels of clarity regarding involvement, and as a result their decision to use
Kaiser as primary subject felt misleading.

~~~
Fnoord
I finished watching the documentary. It was on my list, and this thread here
got me to watch it during my commute.

> It felt like the filmmakers were trying to put her into Snowden or Assange
> type circumstances

Given they clearly showed the quote by the data analyst that she was not a
whistleblower and given they clearly showed her questionable morals, I
disagree. She seems to me like the classic spoiled narcissist American woman,
but then again Nix is also from an upper class family. She even admitted she
was in it for the money, with a sob story about her family (as if that
justifies it). No, this woman wasn't portrayed as a heroine. The documentary
quite explicitly described her flawed character.

A realization I had is that Trump becoming president is just a 4-year thing.
The UK leaving the EU is going to have a stronger effect on the long term.

I found it a good documentary which ultimately describes an example of where
it went wrong (in many elections). It also clearly describes the long-term
worries.

------
TheHypnotist
Very handy wavy editorial with almost no substance.

What exactly did they get wrong and why did they get it wrong, sources? Why do
they dismiss someone with a PhD and a ton of experience as a "young staffer"?

~~~
tptacek
It cites reviews of the documentary, goes into some depth about the background
of the primary source of the documentary, including the author's own firsthand
contact with that source, provides the alternate case study of Ted Cruz's poor
experience with CA, cites David Karpf, and culminates with a paragraph-long
citation to a well-known peer-reviewed study about the effectiveness of
political campaign marketing.

By the standards of these kinds of articles, it is the opposite of what you
said it is.

That doesn't make it right, but does refute the one criticism you managed to
marshal.

~~~
TheHypnotist
It's cites a single review and for no other purpose than quoting the reviewer.
The rest is hearsay, at best.

------
Legogris
There is no substantial argument here. It builds mostly on anecdata from the
author meeting Kaiser and being unimpressed as well as the Ted Cruz campaign
dropping CA.

Apart from that, we see a reference to a meta-study, where the only actual
underlying study[0] looking at online ads (as opposed to traditional campaign
methods) is from the same author as the meta-study in 2013, measuring " Recall
of the ads, candidate name recognition, and candidate evaluations" for direct
candidate ads. The kind of campaigns allegedly employed during the Brexit and
Trump campaigns are a lot more subtle than that and I don't think any of the
studies are actually relevant here. These campaigns rather work on breeding
anger and pushing the values and opinions of voters towards the intended
direction, rather than directly promoting parties and candidates.

I'd take this with a huge bag of salt and I am still leaning towards online
campaigns having had a role in recent elections and referendums.

All that said, I still haven't watched The Great Hack - wouldn't be surprised
if there are significant misrepresentations there. And I'm also sure there's
more to this than only CA.

[0]:
[https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2Fs11109-013-9...](https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2Fs11109-013-9239-z.pdf)

------
forinti
Tangentially, I thought that Alexander Nix did a terrible job of defending
himself.

I have no sympathy for him, but I don't understand why he didn't at least try
to argue that CA didn't really do anything new: political campaigns have used
polling and have adapted their discourses to their audiences for a long time.
It's just that now they have better tools.

~~~
steve19
I don't doubt we saw a very edited version of his defense.

------
zzzeek
I agree with the article's premise that CA itself was not actually that
consequential to the election, however I disagree with where this article
goes, with a blanket "paid political persuasion doesn't change people's
minds", that's very much out of context. If you are someone who is inclined to
be a bit thoughtful about issues, but unfortunately for you your whole down
has turned into a mob of "LOCK HER UP!" robots fueled by daily facebook posts
to this effect, that is going to have a neutralizing effect on the potential
pursuit of alternate narratives within these communities. The ready
availability, if not total immersion, of completely made up propaganda on the
internet made it very easy for people who leaned one way or the other to
ignore other perspectives that might have made them a little less likely to
show up and vote the way they did.

------
defertoreptar
I remember reading Politco's "Hillary Clinton’s ‘Invisible Guiding Hand’" [1]
back in mid 2016. I thought, "wow, the Democratic party is way ahead of the
game in data analytics", seeing as how successfully they've applied it in
Obama's campaign. Here are some choice excerpts:

> Kriegel’s anodyne title is Clinton’s director of analytics, but it’s a job
> that makes him, and his team of more than 60 mathematicians and analysts,
> something of the central nervous system for the campaign: charged with
> sensing, even predicting, the first tinglings of electoral trouble and then
> sending instructions to everyone on how to respond.

> When Clinton operatives talk about their “data-based” campaign, it’s
> invariably Kriegel’s data, and perhaps more importantly his models
> interpreting that data, they are talking about. It was an algorithm from
> Kriegel’s shop — unreported until now — that determined, after the opening
> states, where almost every dollar of Clinton’s more than $60 million in
> television ads was spent during the primary.

> Now, with Donald Trump investing virtually nothing in data analytics during
> the primary and little since, Kriegel’s work isn’t just powering Clinton’s
> campaign, it is providing her a crucial tactical advantage in the campaign’s
> final stretch. It’s one of the reasons her team is confident that, even if
> the race tightens as November approaches, they hold a distinctive edge. As
> millions of phone calls are made, doors knocked and ads aired in the next
> nine weeks, it is far likelier the Democratic voter contacts will reach the
> best and most receptive audiences than the Republican ones.

When this Cambridge Analytica stuff started coming out, I thought, "huh?
what's the big fuss?" It seemed like people were upset with the Republican
party for doing the same kind of targeted campaigning that the Democratic
party had spent more money on, had more mathematicians on the payroll, and had
more and higher quality data from the Obama presidency.

[1] [https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/hillary-
clin...](https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/hillary-clinton-data-
campaign-elan-kriegel-214215)

~~~
yters
Yes, I had the same question. I remember big hype stories gushing about the
brilliance of Obama's social media analytics that drove the youth vote his
way. But, when Republicans do the same thing, it's a huge scandal.

~~~
sct202
Obama and Romney both had GOTV platforms that used data to target GOTV efforts
(and had matching sea animal code names), so it's not a Republicans v Dem
thing. The CA scandal coincides with a lot of doubt about trusting large tech
companies, which is why it's a big deal now.

~~~
makomk
As far as I know, Romney's GOTV platform didn't scrape posts by people's
Facebook friends without those friends' knowledge or consent in order to
target their GOTV efforts, which is the part of Obama's 2012 campaign that is
comparable to what Cambridge Analytica got in hot water for. Publications like
the New York Times ran gushing articles about how brilliant Obama's team was
for coming up with this and how marketers needed to learn from them.

I think you're probably reversing cause and effect. The distrust of large tech
companies is the result of people being upset about Republicans being the ones
who're using them to win elections now, not the cause. (Of course, the
Cambridge Analytica data in question wasn't even used by Trump's campaign,
whereas the Obama campaign did use questionably scraped Facebook data, but
little details like that don't matter...)

------
thecleaner
No mention of AggregateIQ ? I think CA people just actually wanted to appear
shady and create some sort of mysticism around themselves. Atleast in the
Brexit campaign AggIQ had realtime targeting (source : really Brexit The
Uncivil War) which seems way more important than a FB data dump.

------
beardedman
Ironically that documentary made me question whether CA were the so-called bad
guys in the whole thing.

\- Brittany Kaiser _genuinely_ seemed conflicted a lot of the time

\- Nobody ever provided an inkling of proof for the alleged 5,000 data points
- all here-say

\- MUCH of what Alex Nix alleged in those hidden cams could easily have been
interpreted as "selling it" to land the deal (in my opinion)

Overall, people are way to easily baited into the circle-of-drama-vilification
process - that pink haired dude was shady as heck IMO (what was his history,
background, motives - etc). Nobody seemed to be questioning the guys making
the accusations.

------
sifar
Stepping back a bit - To everyone saying CA was not that effective, over
hyped, with poor data/algorithms; the documentary being the work of a bunch of
disgruntled people - it is completely irrelevant.

This shouldn't happen in a functioning democracy. Democracy becomes
meaningless and a sham in this scenario of mass data collection and individual
targeting. Shall we wait till the data is more accurate and the algorithms
become better (ironically by us).

CA may just be a lightening rod. How many companies continue to do this
effectively at scale. We know the answer to that and yet ...

~~~
ilaksh
This isn't new at all. Politics has always been a cesspit of lies and
manipulation. Goes back thousands of years.

------
sscott
The simple fact that most countries put tight spending regulations on election
campaigns should tell you they work and why this level of advertising focus is
something we should all be concerned about.

------
calvinbhai
My biggest issue with this documentary was how they glossed over CA's effect
on Indian elections, and it's catastrophic failure in 2014 Indian general
elections.

The documentary even has a poster of the Congress Party of India, (not sure of
the time stamp). The were known to have been working with CA when the hack was
publicized (probably only after Trump won).

If CA was so scary successful in altering the outcome of an election in the
US, why did it fail so badly in 2014 Indian general elections?

Also, how is it [politicians using a CA to convince the voters to vote for
their candidate] any different from misleading readers of newsprint or any
conventional/main stream media(MSM) with fake news and winning elections?

The "feeling" I got after watching this documentary was that the MSM envied
facebook's and it's ecosystem's[entities like CA] abilitiy to grab more and
more campaign spend, while MSM have no valuable tool to provide (hence reduced
revenues from campaign spends). So they made a documentary of it by grabbing a
few angry ex-employees (they were angry because they didn't rake in as many
$$$$ as the founders).

------
panarky
_" collecting thousands of data points on millions of individuals and then
building psychographic profiles linked to their inferred personality traits"_

The truth is this shit works.

It doesn't work on every individual, and it doesn't win every campaign, but
there should be no question that it can shape public opinion.

If it didn't work, how could Facebook charge $75 billion a year for it?

~~~
bertil
When did Facebook charge $75M? Genuine question, the claim is new to me, and
Google doesn’t know either.

~~~
jordanmoconnor
*$75 Billion. And that's what they generate in revenue from advertising on their platform.

~~~
the_watcher
Facebook advertising doesn't make billions of dollars due to psychographics.
It makes billions of dollars by knowing that you've looked at 7 pairs of shoes
in the past 10 days and then showing you more shoes.

------
mhh__
Saucy.

I know a few people who really swear by the "great hack" theory. I think the
observation that this indicates a lack of - in effect - empathy with the
"manipulated" lower classes is a very astute one. I'm also not surprised that
these magic data companies aren't what they're claimed to be - it's terrifying
but not in the way that's implied.

I think it's well meaning, but I see an awful lot of media-this media-that,
but I think it's a cop out for one's own failing to convince (At least
partly). I have literally been told (in passing) something along the lines of
_you seem too intelligent to disagree with me_

------
ilaksh
Probably no point in writing this but my takeaway from that movie is that
falsehoods were used by both sides to persuade people on the fence.

Somehow we should try to stop that.

Also I think that the left and right worldviews and news streams are so
divergent that effectively we have people living in parallel universes.

Obviously the answer is not to create a forced authoritarian "unity" of state-
prescribed reality, but the parameters that structure the extreme polarization
should be changed somehow. Less biased or completely false reporting and news
could help but seems unlikely at this point.

------
rubbingalcohol
Given Netflix's multi-year production deal with the Obamas and Susan Rice, I
would expect this is just more pro-DNC propaganda. What Cambridge Analytica
did was not unique or special. Facebook turned a blind eye and profited
greatly from this sort of "off the books" use of their data in many other
instances, including Barack Obama's 2012 campaign. It was only a problem for
the pink haired whistleblower once Trump started paying the bills in 2016.

I previously worked with an individual who had been employed by Obama's 2012
campaign and she gleefully described using the same sorts of tactics that were
suddenly so scandalous after Trump got elected. The problem here is the amount
of data being collected and the potential for and actual instances of abuse,
not who is abusing it. But apparently it's totally cool if "your side" is
doing it.

~~~
EnFinlay
I can't find the article right now, but I remember reading an article many
years ago on Wired about the Obama campaign and their use of targeting and
"big data". Really interesting stuff about how they were buying TV spots and
the Romney campaign couldn't figure out why, and how their use of technology
was a massive advantage.

~~~
rfc
The White House also evaluated personalization technology to use on
whitehouse.gov so that they could serve particular "stats" during major events
(election season, SOTU, etc.).

------
e_tm_
[https://www.allsides.com/news-source/nation](https://www.allsides.com/news-
source/nation)

------
PappaPatat
TL;DR

"The film gives an inordinate amount of attention to Brittany Kaiser"

True. But still I like the movie, since it gives a great platform to discuss
the issues at hand with people who are not 100% into the subject.

