> The more interesting question to me is why is CA being called out for it?
I mentioned this in another thread and got immediately downvoted, which I predicted would happen. I will add more context here to perhaps avoid that. What I said was:
"What changed is that an attack vector has been found to take out Cambridge Analytica. The Democrats are in full political warfare with the Trump regime, and this is just another salvo."
To be clear, I am not a Trump supporter, and identify as a far-left progressive, so I'm only stating what I see to be happening, and not attacking the Democrats. Secondly, I used to work at a gaming company that was the largest 3rd party integration with Facebook, and saw that this type of data leakage has been the norm and not the exception for at least 8 years.
Trump has been under a (mostly deserved) multi-pronged attack by various left-wing media, political, corporate, and voter organizations since he got into office. What is happening is that many, if not most, upwellings of public sentiment against his presidency are actually engineered through the very same sorts of PR firms as Cambridge Analytical, even though most people think the that it's organic. There is obviously organic disgust for Trump, but it's being fed and amplified and warped and guided using the same social media techniques that Cambridge Analytica uses, which is ironic.
I believe that many organizations are actively working in opposition to Trump using these kinds of psychographic tools, but I'm not really convinced that the upswellings of public sentiment are mostly, or even largely, the result of their efforts. Just reporting factual information about what his administration is doing works fairly well to alienate large parts of the nation which aren't part of his political base, and their opposition seems like a natural consequence of his administration's decision to govern from the far right. I think you should give people some credit for having good-faith opinions of their own.
There's just a ton more money on the right - the Koch network and GOP billionaire donors dwarf the spending by progressives.
So it's a lot easier for right-wing purchased media and social media and purchased think tanks (Cato/Koch) and foundations (Bradley, DeVos) and right-wing news outlets to spread propaganda. Because they have more money to spend.
So I think rightfully, people feel that the bigger threat is from the right. It's not a coincidence that CA was heavily funded by a GOP billionaire who wants to damage gov't services to cut his own taxes (Mercer is in an $8B dispute with the IRS).
I think the real problem is what Zeynep Tufeksi has been writing about: informed consent. Even if some tiny print says it's ok in a click-contract where they have a majority of the negotiating power, Facebook is releasing data on its uses without their informed consent. That's what we as a society need to re-evaluate.
> There's just a ton more money on the right - the Koch network and GOP billionaire donors dwarf the spending by progressives.
Clinton heavily outspent Trump in the last election.
"Clinton's unsuccessful campaign ($768 million in spending) outspent Trump's successful one ($398 million) by nearly 2 to 1. The Democratic National Committee and left-leaning outside groups also outspent their Republican counterparts by considerable margins."
Comparing the campaign spending does not capture the (vast) amounts of money spent by PACs. Indeed, one would expect Democrats to have more small-money, campaign donors, as opposed to large-dollar PAC donors.
I'm not satisfied with the off-hand dismissal of outside spending from the linked article. Since 2010, this has (arguably) been the more interesting area to scrutinize, and deserves more than a sentence.
I also recall the heavy domination of social media like Reddit by Clinton supporters. CNN was solidly in the Clinton advocacy camp, too. Despite all that, she still had to manipulate the DNC party rules to get the nomination. Trump was nominated despite the rather intense opposition from the GOP establishment.
The polls all predicted an easy coast to victory for Clinton. Even Trump on election night appeared shocked that he won, and seemed to have made no plans in case he won.
How do you reconcile that with the claim that the Trump supporters vastly outspent the Clinton supporters? Do you have any figures?
I tried not to discuss my political views in my comment - I'm sorry if you feel that I lent support to one candidate or the other.
> Despite all that, she still had to manipulate the DNC party rules to get the nomination
I don't think this is true. Irrespective of whether there was impropriety at any particular election, there was no way Clinton would have lost the nomination by the time that Sanders was in his stride. The superdelegates all but assured this.
Incidentally, the Sanders campaign went from decrying the presence of superdelegates to courting them - they may be an unreasonable mechanism for elections, but both groups tried to use them to their advantage.
> claim that the Trump supporters vastly outspent the Clinton supporters
I made no such claim. I suspect that it's true, but my point is that looking at campaign donations (and Reddit activity) highlights the activity of low-dollar donors.
Finally, to put into perspective the numbers from the article you cited, it seems that PACs spent 4 billion USD (across all races) in 2016[1] - around four times the spending of the two presidential campaigns.
It seems complicated to total super-PAC spending. Many websites state that there was more money supporting Clinton/Democrats, but this may ignore Republican PACs that do not declare a party preference[2].
And not just PACs - there is 'deep spending', on propaganda media: Breitbart, IJR, NY Post, WSJ, and on foundations: Jud Watch (has spent $500M in last decade to attack Bill and Hillary), ALEC, SPN, Cit U (that Supreme Court decision was planned by billionaires).
There is a huge incentive for billionaires to spend money on propaganda, because they need votes for their pro-wealthy policies, which almost no voter would support without propaganda.
Ironically, that was CNN, etc., giving Trump airtime in the mistaken belief that he'd hang himself on his own words. It wasn't due to media billionaires trying to get Trump elected.
That is the money spent in normal campaigning. If Trump spent money on CA, or if he received help from Putin's troll farms, do you really think those contributions would be accounted for in the official contributions/spending reports?
By the way, the same thing would be valid if H. Clinton used them. But for now we only have proof he did.
It's not just about money, but the appropriate application of money. Sure the Dems may have bought some likes and upvotes, while CA applied information warfare technique normally reserved for military activity.
From the Guardian:
>He had recently been exposed to a new discipline: “information operations”, which ranks alongside land, sea, air and space in the US military’s doctrine of the “five-dimensional battle space”.
This is a fatal vulnerability to the ideal of democracy. The only way to beat this game is to play it, and whoever can play it faster, smarter, and harder wins.
The only limitation is when these actions cross the line and cost you support by alienating your base, but I don't think that line exists for Trump.
Did the gaming company you work for represent themselves in inaccurate ways? This seems to be what CA did - fraudulent identities, putting out news that they knew was not truthful, and not identifying their ads and output as part of a political campaign.
That's one of the problems for me in all of this; a group that is lying, or perhaps breaking campaign disclosure laws, is acting wildly different than a gaming company.
I mentioned this in another thread and got immediately downvoted, which I predicted would happen. I will add more context here to perhaps avoid that. What I said was:
"What changed is that an attack vector has been found to take out Cambridge Analytica. The Democrats are in full political warfare with the Trump regime, and this is just another salvo."
To be clear, I am not a Trump supporter, and identify as a far-left progressive, so I'm only stating what I see to be happening, and not attacking the Democrats. Secondly, I used to work at a gaming company that was the largest 3rd party integration with Facebook, and saw that this type of data leakage has been the norm and not the exception for at least 8 years.
Trump has been under a (mostly deserved) multi-pronged attack by various left-wing media, political, corporate, and voter organizations since he got into office. What is happening is that many, if not most, upwellings of public sentiment against his presidency are actually engineered through the very same sorts of PR firms as Cambridge Analytical, even though most people think the that it's organic. There is obviously organic disgust for Trump, but it's being fed and amplified and warped and guided using the same social media techniques that Cambridge Analytica uses, which is ironic.