Big Tech Government & Technology

Cambridge Analytica and Facebook

silicon valley story

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What took so long? This isn’t hidden info. I found Cambridge Analytica and its methods over a year ago. I tweeted. I told friends in the hopes they would stop announcing Trump was a narcissist and repeating it as news.  The Facebook echo chamber is so extraordinarily boring.  I begged them to stop complaining and devise strategy and tactics and begin with Cambridge Analytica and the Mercer Family.

Surely, surely, FB had to know.  If I did, didn’t they?

January 2017  I sent this email:

Subject: How Facebook shows the news that people like

It’s Robert Mercer’s company – Cambridge Analytica
 This article is on big data and its role in politics  – Rebekah Mercer is trying to get this page supressed
The entire article is  Orwellian   And right now there is turf war: Kushner wants his data people but Rebekah wants their company – the one described here – and all the data collected is enormous – a data base of great wealth – literally

How to keep Clinton voters away from the ballot box

Trump’s striking inconsistencies, his much-criticized fickleness, and the resulting array of contradictory messages, suddenly turned out to be his great asset: a different message for every voter. The notion that Trump acted like a perfectly opportunistic algorithm following audience reactions is something the mathematician Cathy O’Neil observed in August 2016.

These “dark posts”—sponsored Facebook posts that can only be seen by users with specific profiles—included videos aimed at African-Americans in which Hillary Clinton refers to black men as predators, for example.

“Pretty much every message that Trump put out was data-driven,” Alexander Nix remembers. On the day of the third presidential debate between Trump and Clinton, Trump’s team tested 175,000 different ad variations for his arguments, in order to find the right versions above all via Facebook. The messages differed for the most part only in microscopic details, in order to target the recipients in the optimal psychological way: different headings, colors, captions, with a photo or video. This fine-tuning reaches all the way down to the smallest groups, Nix explained in an interview with us. “We can address villages or apartment blocks in a targeted way. Even individuals.”

In the Miami district of Little Haiti, for instance, Trump’s campaign provided inhabitants with news about the failure of the Clinton Foundation following the earthquake in Haiti, in order to keep them from voting for Hillary Clinton. This was one of the goals: to keep potential Clinton voters (which include wavering left-wingers, African-Americans, and young women) away from the ballot box, to “suppress” their vote, as one senior campaign official told Bloomberg in the weeks before the election. These “dark posts”—sponsored news-feed-style ads in Facebook timelines that can only be seen by users with specific profiles—included videos aimed at African-Americans in which Hillary Clinton refers to black men as predators, for example.

Nix finishes his lecture at the Concordia Summit by stating that traditional blanket advertising is dead. “My children will certainly never, ever understand this concept of mass communication.” And before leaving the stage, he announced that since Cruz had left the race, the company was helping one of the remaining presidential candidates.

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