
New Cambridge Analytica Leaks - mindgam3
https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/06/facebook-data-misuse-and-voter-manipulation-back-in-the-frame-with-latest-cambridge-analytica-leaks/
======
shadowgovt
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 independent thinker, voting
populations are large enough that the "average is the outcome" phenomenon
comes into play, and voters are on average demonstrably vulnerable to
coercion. Not enough to flip people's opinions 180 degrees, but enough to,
say, get a reality TV star elected over a politician with a checkered history
(that has itself been subject to decades of effort and millions spent to make
said history checkered).

~~~
cm2012
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 came from. People in 2015 downloaded an
app, and the app scraped their friends lists. You know what's better than
targeting 87 mil loosely connected people? Using the FB algorithm, which
targets 330m much, much more accurately and with more connections!

~~~
SeanAppleby
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 with emotionally charged ads, generally
meant to instill fear. Am I off base?

[1]
[https://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ICWSM13/paper/view/...](https://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ICWSM13/paper/view/6179/6311)

~~~
cm2012
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.

~~~
wayoutthere
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.

~~~
hdrujvw-4579
> This has been known in the advertising world since the 50s

Any reference from the 50s?

Also, anyone care to recommend modern references that go into these topics?
(David Ogilvy comes to mind but that's from the 60s).

~~~
hdrujvw-4579
this is a little dense, but the preface has a nice statement on neurobiology,
and wikipedia has some interesting articles on neuroscience and cognitive
psychology. I suppose I'm looking for a popsci book on how computer science,
psychology, neuroscience, etc all came together in the last decade to become
so effective in hacking our brains and influencing our decisions. Or perhaps
it's been there all along just now it's getting more attention.

~~~
wayoutthere
> Or perhaps it's been there all along just now it's getting more attention.

It's been a slow build to add layers of targeting on as the media machine
grows. It started out with time-based targeting by showing ads for home goods
during the daytime (e.g. soap operas were used to sell soap to housewives).
Cable TV was a big step forward -- you could craft shows that appealed to
narrower demographics like 8-14 year old boys and then sell ads targeting
those demographics.

Psychographic segmentation became prevalent along with cable TV and direct
mail, but it was limited to a few dozen "personas" until Google came along and
allowed keyword targeting, which then gave way to social targeting. It got
exponentially more effective with each step, which is why it seemed to come
out of nowhere.

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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-...](https://www.newsweek.com/what-emerdata-scl-group-executives-
flee-new-firm-and-its-registered-office-909334)

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

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fmakunbound
After having seen The Great Hack
[https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9358204/](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9358204/)
over the weekend, it's hard to imagine how the scope expanded again. They used
the developing countries all over the world as practice for UK brexit and US's
2016 elections.

~~~
growlist
> UK brexit

Is there any rock solid evidence around this yet? As far as I'm aware it's
still in the realm of conspiracy theory. Given how far she's spun hearsay,
circumstantial evidence and speculation, I'm betting if Carole Cadwalladr etc.
did have anything concrete we'd never hear the end of it.

~~~
dfxm12
The head of biz dev for CA says they worked with Leave.EU and UKIP during the
Brexit campaign.

[https://www.politico.eu/article/cambridge-analytica-leave-
eu...](https://www.politico.eu/article/cambridge-analytica-leave-eu-ukip-
brexit-facebook/)

~~~
Chestofdraw
To add to that, Vote Leave used AggregateIQ which is essentially the same
company as CA.

------
sschueller
"used stolen Facebook data"

Is that factually correct? I was under the impression that facebook gave them
API access.

~~~
thomasmarcelis
They had API access but extracting and using the data in the way they did was
against the terms of use IIRC

~~~
shadowgovt
Essentially. The root failure mode of FB's API solution is that it's an API
for accessing private data and their only protection against clients abusing
that access was a terms of service.

Back in the mid-'00s, we started implementing something against FB's API and I
was more than a bit shocked to discover that their solution for preventing
someone from building a parallel network of friend relationships out of the
available dataset was "Please don't do that, and anyway if you try to do it at
scale we'll probably detect the bandwidth consumption and shut you down." Not
great.

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xibalba
I remain unconvinced that Cambridge Analytica had any material impact on the
election. Please give me some hard evidence to the contrary. This whole
scandal seems like a red herring onto which people project their a) anger
about their losing candidate or b) their personal and often unsubstantiated
beliefs about the "harm" they _could_ experience due to "big data".

~~~
nojvek
how would you prove the inverse of this? i.e cambridge analytics didn't have
any material impact.

I think most are basing it on the assumption that CA with the help of Facebook
could target millions of americans in a personalized way and display ads that
would nudge them to a certain political candidate.

No way to say it's a guaranteed method, but it's as effective as bill board
marketers proving their ads change people's opinions about a brand.

That's where most of the presential election fund raises go to anyway right?
to reach out to people and sway their opinion?

~~~
xibalba
> how would you prove the inverse of this?

I don't know, but that alone isn't a convincing argument.

> ...ads that would nudge them to a certain political candidate

> ...that's where most of the presential election fund raises go to...

Perhaps. The question is, what is the effect? I would wager it is very small
to nil.

~~~
nojvek
As nil as Coca-Cola’s billboard/tv marketing ? When I still had FB, their
ads/propaganda was super convincing about Hillary and her hacked email server
yada yada.

It was quite a genius marketing method to reach millions.

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freewizard
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

~~~
n4r9
Agreed, although the first point is kind of questionable because as technology
improves, the cost of voter manipulation could plummet.

------
buboard
In politics , the best manipulation campaign is to have a vision that moves
people. Why are american Dems stirring again the CA pot? It s frankly bad
publicity at this moment to blame everything to the evil bad actors. It may
appeal to a small part of their voter base, but conspiracies usually alienate
moderate/undecided ppl

~~~
SpaceManNabs
Conspiracies tend to have the connotation as stories believed by a small
segment of the population hoping to have access to secret knowledge that tends
to be wrong and based in narrative rather than facts.

Is this how you are using the word? Where are the lack of facts in how CA
melded elections?

~~~
buboard
> are the lack of facts in how CA melded elections

CA's job was to meddle in elections, the question is if it's effective. there
is very little evidence that it worked.

~~~
n4r9
What would constitute evidence that it worked?

~~~
buboard
I don't know

~~~
schmilk
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 more will spring up, and
we'll just throw our hands up saying, "meh, we can't prove they were
effective".

~~~
buboard
misdiagnosis usually ends in disaster

------
mzs
the actual files:
[https://twitter.com/HindsightFiles/status/121403951085982515...](https://twitter.com/HindsightFiles/status/1214039510859825153)

------
mark_l_watson
I think that people who are whistle blowers and release information like this
are hero’s and deserve as much protection as civil society can offer them.

Off topic, but I feel like saying it: here in the USA, the administrations of
presidents Obama and Trump have really tried to stomp out valid whistle
blowing efforts. I hope that history is very harsh on both presidents in this
issue in the future when people start to ask how democracies got so subverted
by corporate/elite interests.

------
linusnext
The story incorrectly reports the company was hired for the trump campaign to
do data work. As per
[https://youtu.be/yjn6wK01cqk?t=1878](https://youtu.be/yjn6wK01cqk?t=1878)
only staff were hired.

edit: provide link, and clarify.

~~~
Jakawao
Fine, I will bite.

[https://www.wired.com/story/what-did-cambridge-analytica-
rea...](https://www.wired.com/story/what-did-cambridge-analytica-really-do-
for-trumps-campaign/)

Cambridge worked both for the Trump campaign and a Trump-aligned Super PAC.

Cambridge Analytica was paid $5.9 million by the Trump campaign, according to
Federal Election Commission filings

If you have a source that shows otherwise, please share.

~~~
linusnext
5 Million was for ad buys on TV. The rest was just for support staff that
actually were not employees of CA.

~~~
n4r9
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?

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

~~~
n4r9
Ah, I see what you mean, yes: it's denied by the campaign manager.

~~~
rsynnott
In the immortal words of Mandy Rice-Davies, well, he would say that, wouldn’t
he?

~~~
linusnext
That's the evidence? Just because you want to believe it does not make it
true.

~~~
n4r9
I think the evidence is circumstantial but sufficient to warrant further
investigation. CA harvested illegal data, used it in the Cruz campaign, lied
about removing it and were then very involved in the presidential election,
all within the span of a couple of years.

Parscape's denial is not in itself evidence, but I do agree with rsynnott that
it's neither here nor there.

