
Cambridge Analytica Files ‘I created Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare tool’ - throwawaybbqed
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/data-war-whistleblower-christopher-wylie-faceook-nix-bannon-trump?CMP=fb_gu
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merricksb
Active discussion on different Guardian article about same topic:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16606924](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16606924)

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r3bl
What's fascinating to me about The Cambridge Analytica Files is the reaction
from within Facebook. They seem to be panicking. I've never noticed Facebook
reacting so defensively before, regardless of what they were accused of.

The writer even claims that Facebook threatened to sue the Guardian before
publication:
[https://twitter.com/carolecadwalla/status/974995682124804099](https://twitter.com/carolecadwalla/status/974995682124804099)

Really makes me wonder if there were any other big stories that got redacted
pre-publication because Facebook threatened to sue the publisher.

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sAbakumoff
Maybe Mr. Mueller should open the investigation on Facebook role in the 2016
elections instead of looking into Russian trolls actions.

~~~
WJW
It seems worthwhile to keep the investigation into Russian activity open,
since it has turned up a lot of interesting things already. There are many
other capable prosecutors besides mr Mueller who could look into the role of
Facebook during the elections. The justice system is concurrent; it can
investigate more than one thing at a time :)

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verylittlemeat
Why do we keep getting these breathless articles about how secret geniuses
used social media to "hack" elections? Do we really need a mass conspiracy to
explain why large chunks of the population find populist/nationalistic leaders
appealing? Motivating voters with this kind of rhetoric predates the internet,
in fact it predates the United States.

As mentioned in the comments on the other hacker news post about facebook
profiles being scraped by Cambridge Analytica:

1\. Obama's 2008 election absolutely bragged about their use of social media
to win. I vividly remember multiple long articles in the NYTimes talking about
how they exploited new tech to reach voters.

2\. During the 2016 election Clinton raised and spent nearly double trump. On
top of that most of the money Trump got was towards the end of the election
whereas Clinton had huge coffers from day one.

3\. I read the guardian article linked and this is one of the few parts that
seem to mention what exactly this "hacker" strategy was at Cambridge Analytica

>“And then I came across a paper about how personality traits could be a
precursor to political behaviour, and it suddenly made sense. Liberalism is
correlated with high openness and low conscientiousness, and when you think of
Lib Dems they’re absent-minded professors and hippies. They’re the early
adopters… they’re highly open to new ideas. And it just clicked all of a
sudden.”

This is the insight that that apparently is being called a "psychological
warfare tool?" You're telling me that Clinton's campaign didn't have
sociologists and psychologists who were absolutely obsessed with exactly the
same advertising criteria? This kind of psychological profiling is the kind of
stuff you learn about in 101 classes at university. For the past 80 years
(that I as a lay person know of, probably longer) people have spent their
entire careers analyzing and applying propaganda and marketing to political
campaigns. Why should anyone believe based on what's being presented in this
article that not only was none of this stuff done before but that it somehow
handed Trump one of the greatest election upsets in American history? The
mental gymnastics people are going through to deny the fact that yes, many
voters have conservative values, is getting out of hand.

~~~
mirimir
Sure, the Obama and Clinton campaigns used social media and astroturfing. And
they developed and targeted their stuff based on psychological profiling.
However, as I understand it, their stuff was targeted only in traditional
ways. Based on lists from various sources. Some of those lists were based on
website signups, and even posting history and so on. But they generally
weren't very granular.

Basically, Cambridge Analytica took the behaviorally targeted ad approach
that's taken over the Internet, and applied it to political campaigns. So
they're doing psychological profiling at the individual level. They targeted
likely Clinton and Sanders voters with messages that discouraged voting. They
targeted likely Trump voters with messages that bolstered support and
encouraged voting. Messages in ads. In Facebook and Twitter posts by agents
and bots. Telephone calls. Physical visits by canvassers, who carried phones
with apps that provided real time access to individual user profiles.

That _was_ new tech!

But of course, now everyone will be using it. If they can afford it, anyway.
And what does that portend for democracy? Nothing good, I'd argue.

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femidav
LOL, we do know from Podesta emails, that Clinton campaign colluded with
Google, Facebook, Twitter _directly_. Clinton got help from _inside_ of these
companies. Don't tell us your nonsense.

~~~
krapp
Your use of the word "collusion" and list of sites appears intended to imply
that the Clinton campaign was as criminal, or more criminal, than the Trump
campaign which itself is accused of "collusion" with Russia. You even use
italics to emphasize how much _worse_ the implied dirty connections must be
between the Clintons and these companies.

What laws, specifically, do you believe the Clinton campaign broke with their
"collusion" and in what way was the Clinton campaign's social media strategy
intended to deceive?

And for bonus points, why does this only, specifically, implicate Clinton, the
Democrats and the left in wrongdoing, but not Trump, the Republicans or the
right?

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_audakel
I was wondering how Breitbart and Trump did so well. It makes sense now that
it was not luck, but they had access to new "tech" in away. Fake news for them
is kinda like how Obama was the first to used Twitter and other SM platforms
to get connect with voters and get elected.

Reminds me of the quote ~ "it's artificial intelligence until you understand
how it works. Then it's just algorithms"

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imron
You think the DNC didn't have something similar given how close Facebook and
Google's leadership were with the Clinton campaign?

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make3
I may be wrong but I'm not sure I get why they put so much emphasis on the
getting of the data from Facebook, as I feel that that's really easy.

Can't you just 1. crawl public profiles 2. create convincing fake profiles by
mixing around the info in real profiles, and then add people, and
progressively crawl private profiles that way? 3. pay app owners to require
more permissions and sell you the info, or create your own apps

I guess it's such a big deal because they managed to do it in a way that was
legal, on first glance

~~~
redkev
"may be wrong but I'm not sure I get why they put so much emphasis on the
getting of the data from Facebook, as I feel that that's really easy."

That's exactly the point.

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andy_ppp
This kind of work combining propaganda and disinformation with AI models and
feedback into them to get a progressive change of belief is fascinating. I
think of this as the first of many wars democracy will fight against AI and we
are currently loosing.

~~~
raverbashing
Populists have been doing similar things for ages and most of the population
goes with it

~~~
B1FF_PSUVM
We just have to figure out a democracy without letting the peasants decide
things on their own.

~~~
raverbashing
That's the great irony of it

Or you can let them vote to ban Dihydrogen monoxide and see them shoot
themselves in the foot

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mirimir
Christopher Wylie is being utterly courageous. But even so, I'm reminded of
Robert Oppenheimer. We still have nukes. And we'll still have targeted PSYOP.
So it goes.

~~~
OrganicMSG
He is just being Canadian. It would be very impolite not to apologise, having
just screwed up your neighbour's entire political landscape.

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pieterk
What I don’t understand about this company is how it supposedly uses facebook
data that facebook itself doesn’t use for its ad platform. They seem to want
to point out that they are smarter than facebook, and therefore are a better
choice to do targeted ad publishing through. Why are they so relatively
unknown and underused then? Any company could use this data to do better
business, and it would be trivial for facebook to compile it. That it would
have caused the election to swing seems a little far fetched. If anything, it
would have provided the campaign with more than ever information about what
the American people really want, and how much they want it. That there is lots
of talk and no action is the fault of the campaigning party, not of the system
used to figure out what their fellow citizens really care about. Republican
president follows a Democratic double term, news at 11?

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d4nt
I think Facebook would be missing the correlations of likes to the Big Five
personality traits. But they could rebuild it if they wanted to, by promoting
a free personality test on their site. (I assume that correlations between
personality traits and political learnings has been researched before and
there’s various bits of data available?) Then you can go from targeting ads at
likes to targeting ads at political views.

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lhnz
If this really works and you can't do this legally it will be done by
governments covertly.

I find it difficult to believe it had a real impact though. I think they are
just enjoying notoriety.

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OrganicMSG
I think RAND have been doing this for quite a while.

