Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower

[emanymton]

The technology is pretty good at sifting though those millions of pissed off people, selecting the ones likely to be moved to action by proto fascist propaganda and bombarding them with such though.

But the most they will do is nudge things very slightly one way. Their acrual impact is minimal. They are not the reason Trump won and people voted for brexit. No matter how much the Guardian want that to be the case .

 

[Bernie Gunther]

But the most they will do is nudge things very slightly one way. Their acrual impact is minimal. They are not the reason Trump won and people voted for brexit. No matter how much the Guardian want that to be the case .

I take your point about the Guardian wanting that to be the case and I think it's an important one.

I do think the impact in normalising quasi-fascist ideology on a mass scale is more than a 'slight nudge' more effective than conventional methods though, for reasons I explained above.

The professional literature of psychological warfare going back to WW2 emphasises what amounts to precise and careful market research as an indispensable foundation.

If you are trying to create a sort of narcissistic tunnel vision which directs those alienated millions along profitable lines, it works a hell of a lot better with tight feedback loops.

 

[killer b]

I think the stuff CA do is just what FB is built to do: that's one of the reasons they're panicking atm - it exposes their entire business model.

Someone sent me this article last night - worth half an hour of your time I reckon. Google as a Fortune Teller: The Secrets of Surveillance Capitalism

 

[strung out]

Anyone remember this from 4 years ago? Facebook Manipulated 689,003 Users' Emotions For Science

 

[TruXta]

Anyone remember this from 4 years ago? Facebook Manipulated 689,003 Users' Emotions For Science

What no one remembers are the actual findings - which were minimal. As the research paper itself says

Although these data provide, to our knowledge, some of the first experimental evidence to support the controversial claims that emotions can spread throughout a network, the effect sizes from the manipulations are small (as small as d = 0.001).

Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks

 

[kabbes]

The problem with micro-advertising is this:

When politicians advertise broadly, everybody is able to see the message they are putting out and can react to it. People can dispute the claims, they can respond to the arguments.

When politicians advertise to individuals only with tailored messages, nobody else gets to see this message. Nobody can dispute the claims, nobody can respond to the arguments. Aside from anything else, this means the politician can make completely contradictory claims to persons A and B with no concerns of being found out. This kills off any idea that politicians should have integrity or principles -- the one who is best at pretending to as many people as possible in as many different ways as they can has the distinct edge.

In terms of changing behaviour: you don't necessarily need to persuade die-hard voters for X to vote for Y instead. You can achieve an awful lot just by persuading certain groups to stay at home and not vote at all. That can take a lot less of a push; all you need to do is muddy the waters enough by throwing enough cynicism and doubt at the process.

 

[Reiabuzz]

Pretty funny that this thing seems to only have got more widespread media coverage after the salacious revelations last night about Ukrainian hookers. Most people simply dont give a fuck about the other stuff. It's hardly news that our data's being harvested. And I highly doubt it influenced Trump's run for the white house very much but let's see what C4 has tonight.

 

[TruXta]

The problem with micro-advertising is this:

When politicians advertise broadly, everybody is able to see the message they are putting out and can react to it. People can dispute the claims, they can respond to the arguments.

When politicians advertise to individuals only with tailored messages, nobody else gets to see this message. Nobody can dispute the claims, nobody can respond to the arguments. Aside from anything else, this means the politician can make completely contradictory claims to persons A and B with no concerns of being found out. This kills off any idea that politicians should have integrity or principles -- the one who is best at pretending to as many people as possible in as many different ways as they can has the distinct edge.

In terms of changing behaviour: you don't necessarily need to persuade die-hard voters for X to vote for Y instead. You can achieve an awful lot just by persuading certain groups to stay at home and not vote at all. That can take a lot less of a push; all you need to do is muddy the waters enough by throwing enough cynicism and doubt at the process.

Sure, but it's proven a lot more effective (and likely cheaper) to simply deny the vote to those that threaten your interests, like they're doing now with voter ID laws. As for creating cynicism and doubt it's not like we need social media for that to happen.

 

[kabbes]

Sure, but it's proven a lot more effective (and likely cheaper) to simply deny the vote to those that threaten your interests, like they're doing now with voter ID laws. As for creating cynicism and doubt it's not like we need social media for that to happen.

These things are undoubtedly true, but it’s not either/or. The more manipulation you can throw at an election, the better your chances of success

 

[TruXta]

These things are undoubtedly true, but it’s not either/or. The more manipulation you can throw at an election, the better your chances of success

Again, show us the evidence that this is happening and working as intended. It's not really that easy to change behaviours. There's a reason for the old cliche about half of advertising not working, but we don't know which half.

 

[kabbes]

Again, show us the evidence that this is happening and working as intended. It's not really that easy to change behaviours. There's a reason for the old cliche about half of advertising not working, but we don't know which half.

Hard to gather evidence when it is being done in secret.

You've only told half the story about advertising spend. The point is that since Wanamaker didn't know which half was wasted, he needed to spend all of it to get his desired effect. He couldn't just pick and choose on the grounds of what was most effective because he didn't know what was most effective. You're actually suggesting Wanamaker was wrong, and that you do know where the spending is most effective, allowing you to halve the advertising budget.

 

[pk]

Great reporter Palast, his stuff on Bush-era shenanigans was what got me into politics. It's a damn tragedy he doesn't get the funding any more.

I worked with Palast on his “hanging chads” investigations.

 

[TruXta]

Hard to gather evidence when it is being done in secret.

You've only told half the story about advertising spend. The point is that since Wanamaker didn't know which half was wasted, he needed to spend all of it to get his desired effect. He couldn't just pick and choose on the grounds of what was most effective because he didn't know what was most effective. You're actually suggesting Wanamaker was wrong, and that you do know where the spending is most effective, allowing you to halve the advertising budget.

Eh? I'm suggesting advertising as a means to change behaviour is massively wasteful. I might be wrong about what Wanamaker meant, but that's a different story.

 

[kabbes]

The point of saying half of your advertising spend is wasted is to note that the other half is not wasted.

 

[TruXta]

The point of saying half of your advertising spend is wasted is to note that the other half is not wasted.

Yes, but not wasted in what way? I reckon the most immediate and forceful effect of most advertising is to make people aware of the existence of a product or service. Actual preference formation, attitude change or behaviour initiation is surely far less common and far less easy to actually target en masse.

 

[kabbes]

Yes, but not wasted in what way? I reckon the most immediate and forceful effect of most advertising is to make people aware of the existence of a product or service. Actual preference formation, attitude change or behaviour initiation is surely far less common and far less easy to actually target en masse.

This is a really fantastic paper, and well worth a read. Its focus is on social consumption rather than politics, but it demonstrates how advertising acts to fundamentally alter the nature of society's values and beliefs, and so the points it makes are readily translatable.

https://blogs.stockton.edu/amst5005/files/2013/01/Zukin-and-Maguire-Consumers-and-Consumption.pdf

Zukin and Maguire make a whole heap of points in that paper, but it is based around the idea that advertising creates connections between products and values (and overlays it with a common understanding of the need to consume, which is less relevant here) and so creates the nature of social discourse itself.

Just as an example of the kind of thing mentioned by Zukin and Maguire, to give a flavour of the relevance. They're talking about how marketing specifically acts to change attitudes and what is viewed as socially acceptable:

similar engagement underlies Frank's (1997) study of the rise of "hip" fashion for men in the United States in the late 1960s and Parr's (1999) work on the development of modern household appliances and furniture in Canada after World War II. Unlike economic sociologists, Frank and Parr do not frame their research according to an abstract model of the development of markets; instead, as cultural historians, they are concerned with step-by-step processes of changing consumers' attitudes toward obsolescence. How do consumers begin to desire new consumer goods or fashions? And when do they stop desiring them and replace them with others?

I wrote a paper on this last year, so I have a ready list of references. This is fascinating, if you can get hold of it (c&p from my reference list):

Davila, A. (2012) ‘Latinos, Inc: The Marketing and Making of a People,’ University of California Press. Available at http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/open/detail.action?docID=999937 (Accessed 28 March 2017)

Also this, which I didn't read in such depth but did dip into:

Pendergast, T. (2000) ‘Creating the Modern Man’, University of Missouri Press. Available at Sign IN - Open University (Accessed 16 March 2017)

 

[TruXta]

This is a really fantastic paper, and well worth a read. Its focus is on social consumption rather than politics, but it demonstrates how advertising acts to fundamentally alter the nature of society's values and beliefs, and so the points it makes are readily translatable.

https://blogs.stockton.edu/amst5005/files/2013/01/Zukin-and-Maguire-Consumers-and-Consumption.pdf

Zukin and Maguire make a whole heap of points in that paper, but it is based around the idea that advertising creates connections between products and values (and overlays it with a common understanding of the need to consume, which is less relevant here) and so creates the nature of social discourse itself.

I wrote a paper on this last year, so I have a ready list of references. This is fascinating, if you can get hold of it (c&p from my reference list):

Davila, A. (2012) ‘Latinos, Inc: The Marketing and Making of a People,’ University of California Press. Available at http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/open/detail.action?docID=999937 (Accessed 28 March 2017)

Also this, which I didn't read in such depth but did dip into:

Pendergast, T. (2000) ‘Creating the Modern Man’, University of Missouri Press. Available at Sign IN - Open University (Accessed 16 March 2017)

Fuck off with giving me your reading list!

Thanks, but I don't have the time for reading through all that now.

 

[killer b]

Can't you just post your paper kabbes ?

 

[kabbes]

Can't you just post your paper kabbes ?

I am reluctant for a few reasons:

a) It was one of the first papers I wrote and, frankly, looking at it in retrospect I am rather less pleased with it now than I was then!
b) The paper itself is about advertising making and remaking a consumer society, so it focuses on consumption and consumerism rather than political advertising, which makes it less relevant to this discussion
c) As a current student, I have to worry about plagiarism issues. Posting up an essay to a question I have every reason to believe the OU still asks could get me into trouble.

I still have the notes I made for the essay, though, which are more interesting and relevant here.

That Davila book, for example, specifically looks at how the image of Latino ethnicity in the US was actually created and reinforced by marketing, for the purpose of selling things. Referring to the behavioural stereotypes that were established by early advertisers regarding the Hispanic consumer, she writes, “these ideas have constituted a convincing and nearly insurmountable definition of Hispanic identity up to the present, and continue to be as dominant in contemporary advertising today as when it first began.”

Similarly, in his book, Pendergast looks at how contemporary images of masculinity were created by marketers. It is the citizen-consumer’s duty to consume – and consume in the “right” way (cf contemporary consumer boycotts). This makes it understandable that they should seek guidance through their array of choices, which is what creates the space for advertising. With choice comes the danger of making the wrong choice, which creates anxiety (e.g. see Zukin and Maguire, 2004, p8). Anxiety provides the space for advertising’s promotion of ideas. So Pendergast, according to my notes at least, gives an example of how this anxiety was tapped into by “corporate advertisers eager to construct avid consumers” to invent a whole new form of masculinity (Pendergast, 2000, p272).

 

[butchersapron]

When did an essay become a paper?

 

[Bernie Gunther]

<snip> https://blogs.stockton.edu/amst5005/files/2013/01/Zukin-and-Maguire-Consumers-and-Consumption.pdf

Zukin and Maguire make a whole heap of points in that paper, but it is based around the idea that advertising creates connections between products and values (and overlays it with a common understanding of the need to consume, which is less relevant here) and so creates the nature of social discourse itself.

Just as an example of the kind of thing mentioned by Zukin and Maguire, to give a flavour of the relevance. They're talking about how marketing specifically acts to change attitudes and what is viewed as socially acceptable:



I wrote a paper on this last year, so I have a ready list of references. This is fascinating, if you can get hold of it (c&p from my reference list):

Davila, A. (2012) ‘Latinos, Inc: The Marketing and Making of a People,’ University of California Press. Available at http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/open/detail.action?docID=999937 (Accessed 28 March 2017)

Also this, which I didn't read in such depth but did dip into:

Pendergast, T. (2000) ‘Creating the Modern Man’, University of Missouri Press. Available at Sign IN - Open University (Accessed 16 March 2017)

“[Bannon] got it immediately. He believes in the whole Andrew Breitbart doctrine that politics is downstream from culture, so to change politics you need to change culture. And fashion trends are a useful proxy for that. Trump is like a pair of Uggs, or Crocs, basically. So how do you get from people thinking ‘Ugh. Totally ugly’ to the moment when everyone is wearing them? That was the inflection point he was looking for.”

But Wylie wasn’t just talking about fashion. 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”. His brief ranged across the SCL Group – the British government has paid SCL to conduct counter-extremism operations in the Middle East, and the US Department of Defense has contracted it to work in Afghanistan.

Initial quote in the first post of the thread.

 

[kabbes]

When did an essay become a paper?

I've never been aware of there being a difference? Being told "write a paper on..." is common, although they really mean an essay.

 

[mwgdrwg]

When did an essay become a paper?

Doesn't it have to be published to be a paper?

 

[butchersapron]

I've never been aware of there being a difference? Being told "write a paper on..." is common, although they really mean an essay.

To me a paper means a piece of writing or research published in an academic journal.

 

[butchersapron]

I suppose a paper is just a posh essay.

 

[kabbes]

Doesn't it have to be published to be a paper?

To me a paper means a piece of writing or research published in an academic journal.

OK, this is a nuance that had totally passed me by to date. I will be more careful in my use of terminology in the future.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

Common mechanisms here whether we're talking about training shoes or white supremacist ideology, for example the co-production thing.

There's a feedback loop through which PR spending can be targeted precisely, but there's also a feedback loop that happens when that PR effort influences the target audience to start propagating those ideas independently of PR spend.

They start identifying emotionally as part of the group of people who believe that sort of stuff and propagandising accordingly.

 

[TruXta]

I suppose a paper is just a posh essay.

Vintage like cheese, in that it has gathered dust for years before seeing the light of day, ready for consumption. Takes fucking years for some journals to process a paper.

 

[kabbes]

Common mechanisms here whether we're talking about training shoes or white supremacist ideology, for example the co-production thing.

There's a feedback loop through which PR spending can be targeted precisely, but there's also a feedback loop that happens when that PR effort influences the target audience to start propagating those ideas independently of PR spend. To start identifying emotionally as part of the group of people who believe that sort of stuff and propagandising accordingly.

Yes, this and your earlier post are exactly what I was trying to get at regarding how advertising creates an effect. It's not easy to measure quantitatively (at least in isolation from other causes), but the processes by which the effects happen have been studied in many qualitative ways. It's what I was trying to get at in response to this:

Again, show us the evidence that this is happening and working as intended. It's not really that easy to change behaviours.

The evidence for how the mechanism works is in these papers (yes, proper papers, not my essay) that are being referred to in my post and Bernie's quotes. Is it "as intended"? Well, that's a deeper question. Does it have to be perfectly as intended to count as generically as intended?

 

[2hats]

Generally an essay is the shorter of the two and expresses the author’s opinion on a subject whilst a paper is (supposed to be) a much longer, thoroughly researched piece considering a subject from all/many angles. Though in some circles they are all considered ‘papers’ (=an academic work) and sub-classified variously as essay, research paper, dissertation, thesis.