Is it really that different from the 2012 campaign?
"But the Obama team had a solution in place: a Facebook application that will transform the way campaigns are conducted in the future. For supporters, the app appeared to be just another way to digitally connect to the campaign....
That’s because the more than 1 million Obama backers who signed up for the app gave the campaign permission to look at their Facebook friend lists. In an instant, the campaign had a way to see the hidden young voters. Roughly 85% of those without a listed phone number could be found in the uploaded friend lists....in those final weeks of the campaign, the team blitzed the supporters who had signed up for the app with requests to share specific online content with specific friends simply by clicking a button."
This is completely different. Cambridge Analytica deliberately lied and deceived users about the intention of the application they created to harvest information about users:
> Like all app developers, Kogan requested and gained access to information from people after they chose to download his app. His app, “thisisyourdigitallife,” offered a personality prediction, and billed itself on Facebook as “a research app used by psychologists.” [0]
Cambridge Analytica is also in the business of using manipulation and psychological techniques to convince users of an outcome. And this isn't something I'm making up, the CEO of Cambridge Analytica peddles this as the potential of his platform: https://youtu.be/n8Dd5aVXLCc
The most damning aspect is his naked promotion of misinformation under the newspeak of "Behavioral Communication" where he suggests comparing the effectiveness of using "Private Beach" vs "Sharks Sighted" as a deterrent.[1]
He also continued to revel in his company's ability to manipulate after the election.[2]
The application is different, but not 'completely different". The use of friend lists harvested from an application to target ads was not known by users. Much of political campaigning, and advertising in general, is exactly as you describe, "using manipulation and psychological techniques to convince".
I would agree with you that the purpose of the application was deceptive, but don't most applications that use Facebook logins attempt to monetize this data?
This is political weaponization of data and information for the purpose of putting an individual in power. It's not me trying to sell you a pug plushie or get you to use my accounting software.
It's deliberately lying to seed fear, distrust, division, and hate between citizens. It's deliberate manipulation to create distrust of government institutions. It's the destruction of civil society and civil discourse for the purpose of winning an election.
This should not be tolerated of anyone, particularly of our own head of state.
My point was not that it was good. My point was that it was very similar, but still a little different in terms of the app, to what the Obama campaign, and to a lesser effective extent, the Romney campaign did in 2012.
My second point is that advertising, to include political advertising tends to be manipulative. So many ads are deceptive, so many play on fear. I do agree that populist messages around the world tend to be simplistic, but that is more of a criticism of political advertising in general than anything specific to this campaign.
I am not convinced this use of Facebook was more effective than a typical ad targeting operation. While the people involved may have had other aspects of the operation that were more sinister, the surprise at how Facebook and ad targeting works has been widely reported in the last election. The extreme response to these events seems to be more about who was elected than how.
> It's deliberately lying to seed fear, distrust, division, and hate between citizens. It's deliberate manipulation to create distrust of government institutions. It's the destruction of civil society and civil discourse for the purpose of winning an election.
The problem here, as is the root of almost all the problems we face in society isn't Cambridge Analytica. The problem is people lack basic critical thinking skills and the capacity to make good decisions.
> It's deliberate manipulation to create distrust of government institutions.
Nobody with any knowledge of history or good sense trusts any government institution.
>It's the destruction of civil society and civil discourse for the purpose of winning an election.
This would require having a civil society filled with civil discourse to start out with, which we didn't (and don't) have.
The simple, irrefutable truth is that governments and those in other centers of power have been using propaganda to control feeble minds and society at large since Woodrow Wilson founded the first official state-run propaganda machine (the CPI) over a hundred years ago.
Everyone is trying to find a "reason" that people rejected "traditional American institutions" and the establishment candidate (Hillary Clinton) in favor of a classless, boorish carnival barker in Donald Trump. They point to the evil Russians, or the dastardly villains at Cambridge Analytics, because they don't want to accept that "traditional American institutions" have been utter garbage for decades. They don't want to accept that many, many Americans are simply rejecting the status quo. Americans may not be smart or informed enough to know exactly what is wrong with "the system", but they know its horribly broken, it doesn't work in their interests, and many of them are reflexively rejecting that system. They aren't rejecting it because of the Russians, or because of some Twitter trolls, or some facebook ads - they are rejecting it because they have seen their standards of living plummet over the last few decades while those at the upper echelon of society have gotten fabulously wealthy. They are rejecting it because so many people are one illness or accident or lost job away from being homeless. They are rejecting it because they have seen (and continue to see) a race to the bottom for working people while the "elites" push for open borders and a massive influx of cheap labor that will make their lives even more difficult.
So keep on crying about the evil Trump and the dastardly Russians, and whatever other phantoms you invent to explain away the growing national discontent while keeping your head in the sand about the real problems we have.
I personally think the news on this is rather "noisy" right now (we'll see what emerges later). But from what I see of the Channel 4 expose (https://www.channel4.com/news/cambridge-analytica-revealed-t...), this story potentially involves far more than the United States election... and may actually involve flat out illegal activity.
Either way, I agree with you that the election of Donald Trump was more than just "the Russians". However, just because some of the elements were home-grown doesn't IMHO mean that we dismiss the degeneration of social media that has come about of late. Both from Facebook (and others, but they are the big offender)'s tendency to over-spy into your personal life (of which Cambridge Analytica is a symptom of this). And the extremely poor safeguards on API abuse on too many social media platforms (Russian and other Twitter political propaganda bots are but a symbol of the bot problem on Twitter and elsewhere in general).
I don't disagree with you about at all about the ground truth of American polity. (I have a lot of family that voted for Trump.) From my perspective, the election sent the right message but through a profoundly dangerous messenger.
For me, Russia and Cambridge Analytica are not scapegoats: they are other problems that need to be addressed which are not orthogonal to addressing the economic inequalities aggravated by the current system.
It worth remembering though, that this messenger was deliberately picked from the crowd of 16 (!) people during primaries. Voters spoke when they abandoned Kasich, Jeb and the rest. It's not like they had no choice. They had.
There was an interval of about 3 months where if Cruz, Rubio, and Kasich had agreed to draw straws and support the winner, Trump could have been stopped relatively easily. But instead they all assumed Trump could never win, and thus spent a lot of resources attacking each other and splitting the traditional Republican vote.
And that was due to two insane factors: first, that we use primaries rather than caucuses; second, that many of them define the winner as the one with the most votes.
On the first point, a representative democratic republic really shouldn't be choosing its candidates by popular vote. A caucus system empowers parties to moderate & modulate the voices of their voters. As horrifically corrupt as Clinton, Inc. were in the 2016 election, in general it's a good thing for party insiders to seek a more electable candidate.
On the second point, it simply makes no sense at all for a 40-30-30 split to go to the fellow with 40% of the vote. Instant runoff voting or a similar method would be far preferable to the current way we count votes.
What's most damning is that the money involved in our political process gave us those 16 candidates.
They were all establishment candidates who've historically played the game that's lead us to the discontent we face today. They never really cared about the people either. Trump at least talked the talk in ways from an economic perspective (in unfortunately misogynistic and racist terms...) But I still believed that maybe he actually gave a damn at some level about the working class and genuine creation of opportunity and happiness.
Now I'm thinking he just really wanted to win an election at any cost and has turned the executive branch into a complete swamp... I mean... if this was supposed to be a referendum on corporate hegemony and cronyism, what the hell are all these millionaires, billionaires, and family members doing in government?
You’ve thumbnailed elements of the problem, and left out the heart of the matter: The cabalistic forces of uber-rich conservatives (reactionaries) marshaled these propaganda tools to convince justifiably agreived voters to vote for a candidate who is letting them “run wild in the candy store.”
The interests and ideology of the Mercers and the Koch are diametrically opposed to any practical solution to the problem of growing inequality in the US.
They, most of the Republicans, practice a “take no prisoners” form of politics, in which they care little how either the ends or the means of their campaign affect lower class people.
The deceptive elements, and the use of sleazy propaganda, by these neo-reactionary King makers, is of a piece, whether they use modern data mining techniques or not.
If it wasn’t so sad, it would be hilarious. The joke is on all of us.
> The cabalistic forces of uber-rich conservatives (reactionaries) marshaled these propaganda tools to convince justifiably agreived voters to vote for a candidate
Most of the über rich conservatives were anti-Trump.
> are diametrically opposed to any practical solution to the problem of growing inequality in the US.
Trumps policies are incredibly practical and if implemented will go a long way towards solving inequality in the US.
Again, it's why most of the über rich conservatives are anti-Trump.
> Much of political campaigning, and advertising in general, is exactly as you describe, "using manipulation and psychological techniques to convince".
Please, just call it what it is: propaganda.
Whether you're selling a product, a service or an idea, you're still doing your best to manipulate your target audience. The techniques are the same.
And I use the term in a purely clinical sense: manipulation at scale, the subtler the better.
> This is completely different. Cambridge Analytica deliberately lied and deceived users about the intention of the application they created to harvest information about users:
Yes, but lots of apps are deceptive about what they do with data.
> Cambridge Analytica is also in the business of using manipulation and psychological techniques to convince users of an outcome. And this isn't something I'm making up, the CEO of Cambridge Analytica peddles this as the potential of his platform: https://youtu.be/n8Dd5aVXLCc
That's called advertising. Obama's campaign did the same thing (and so did every other modern political campaign).
> The most damning aspect is his naked promotion of misinformation under the newspeak of "Behavioral Communication" where he suggests comparing the effectiveness of using "Private Beach" vs "Sharks Sighted" as a deterrent.
That one is actually somewhat significant, although it's not clear that lying is exactly a novelty in politics.
A former Obama campaign official is claiming that Facebook knowingly allowed them to mine massive amounts of Facebook data — more than they would’ve allowed someone else to do — because they were supportive of the campaign.
In a Sunday tweet thread, Carol Davidsen, former director of integration and media analytics for Obama for America, said the 2012 campaign led Facebook to “suck out the whole social graph” and target potential voters. They would then use that data to do things like append their email lists.
When Facebook found out what they were doing, they were “surprised,” she said. But she also claimed they didn’t stop them once they found out:
"claiming that Facebook knowingly allowed them to mine massive amounts of Facebook data — more than they would’ve allowed someone else to do — because they were supportive of the campaign."
Right. That’s what this boils down to. Facebook was backing Hillary, and their candidate lost. Now they need a scapegoat to deflect the blame for failing to deliver.
Yes, because the Obama backers signed up for an app that was clearly affiliated with the Obama campaign. Were these backers assholes for knowingly wanting to spam their friends with Obama propaganda? Sure, because everyone hates spamming.
Cambridge Analytics is accused of using data that was harvested from a quiz app that was purportedly the creation of a Cambridge professor. I think that CA is being accused of something different than just spamming, but part of the overall problem is the subterfuge involved, which is generally a frowned upon thing in U.S. election regulations.
For example, it's not shady if Clinton buys up all the ad space during your favorite shows to spread her liberal indoctrination. It is problematic if those commercials run without a "This ad funded by the Hillary Clinton for President campaign" disclaimer.
It sounds like they are being alleged of lying and not identifying themselves as having been affiliated with either a PAC or a campaign. By doing that, that's breaking the law.
Additionally, the CEO has basically admitted - under hidden camera - that they are fine with blackmail and lying. Is blackmail and lying technically illegal? I'm not sure. But if you lie and blackmail as part of a political campaign, but do not let people know you are a political campaign, you have broken the law.
I haven’t been reading all the latest CA coverage, but from what I’ve seen from the Guardian’s and Observer’s latest deep dive, there’s an issue of violating UK data privacy laws, since CA is alleged to have been involved in Brexit related campaigns. In these stories, it’s not alleged that Trump’s campaign did anything illegal.
> Yes, because the Obama backers signed up for an app that was clearly affiliated with the Obama campaign
The Obama app was misleading - it was not at all clear about how the users Facebook data would be used - the key difference is at least they knew the app was political in nature and they likely supported Obama.
I would argue the difference there was that was an explicitly political app where from what I understand the app that leaked this data wasn't political in any way.
Either way it's great to see some light shined on FB, this is exactly the reason I don't use their services.
Facebook sure was political, though. From Davidsen:
> They came to office in the days following election recruiting & were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side.
That the app's purpose was disguised is definitely true. I would suggest that there a large number of applications that use Facebook logins are primarily designed to monetize the information gathered from the access that provides. I would also suggest that the users of the Obama campaign application were not aware that the purpose was to gather information on from their friend lists in order to support targeting advertisements at people they couldn't get phone numbers for.
The Cambridge Analytica users also signed up for the app, and also gave up their friend lists. You are correct though in that the nature of the application Cambridge Analytica used was more deceptive as it was not identified as having a political purpose.
"But the Obama team had a solution in place: a Facebook application that will transform the way campaigns are conducted in the future. For supporters, the app appeared to be just another way to digitally connect to the campaign.... That’s because the more than 1 million Obama backers who signed up for the app gave the campaign permission to look at their Facebook friend lists. In an instant, the campaign had a way to see the hidden young voters. Roughly 85% of those without a listed phone number could be found in the uploaded friend lists....in those final weeks of the campaign, the team blitzed the supporters who had signed up for the app with requests to share specific online content with specific friends simply by clicking a button."
http://swampland.time.com/2012/11/20/friended-how-the-obama-...