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Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower

Bernie Gunther said:
Hard to measure though. How do you decide for example whether Jo Cox's murder was more or less likely in a context where right wing zillionaires were allegedly spending money to stir up people identifiable via psychographics as prone to getting emotional about immigration and EU membership?

Intuitively, you may very well want to say "obviously more likely", but what do we use as a control?
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It is tricky. When something is hard or impossible to measure, there can be a tendency to dismiss the idea entirely. But 'not proven' isn't at all the same as 'not likely'.
 
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Bernie Gunther said:
Hard to measure these side effects though. How do you determine for example whether Jo Cox's murder was more or less likely in a context where right wing zillionaires were allegedly spending money on Facebook 'dark ads' to stir up people identifiable as prone to getting emotional about immigration and EU membership?

Intuitively, you may very well want to say "obviously more likely", but what do we use as a control?
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I am not sure it is something that can be measured in and of itself, especially when there are so many other sources like the normal output of newspapers (though obviously they will be linked to a degree) that are putting out the same sort of message. I suppose all you could do is identify that they exist.
 
There are already plenty of experiments that show behaviour being modified by all kinds of surrounding context. There's also lots of good quality qualitative research that provides examples of the mechanisms involved in, for example desensitisation to violence and propensity to extremism. So it's not like we're in a position where we just have to throw our hands up and say we're never going to understand this stuff. At this point, you have to be pretty willful to suggest it has no effect.
 
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Zuckerberg has been summoned to appear before the MP's Select Committee to give evidence of Facebook's involvement in all this.

Good luck with that one.

This is just another reason why giving up Facebook and deleting your account is now the way to go. One of the best things I did, for sure. Apparently two million young people under the age of 25 are predicted to stop using it this year and teenagers especially think it's already become naff and rather crappy. And they're right.

They should just rename it Facespy.
 
Bernie Gunther said:
Having said that, I think a focus on that particular part of the ecosystem, however novel, isn't really the measure of effectiveness that's most interesting here.

Enough people with the contacts and money to act on their intentions obviously *think* this stuff works to keep people like SCL/CA, AggregateIQ, Palantir and all the others in business.

Psychological warfare / information operations or whatever it's called this week, has been around a long time. Certainly it's been an explicit field of study in some circles since WW2 and it's been a very active field of study in most of the major military powers in the last few decades. The Blair / Bush propaganda operations that got us into the Iraq war made significant use of it. The 'Colour Revolutions' that took place after the fall of the Soviet Bloc made extensive use of it (and apparently scared the crap out of the Russians in the process). As is the way of things, the claimed effectiveness of this multidisciplinary approach, of which effective market research and profiling is small part, has apparently, on the evidence of this story and others, led to the adoption of many aspects of this body of technique to domestic politics, both here and the US.

It was quite interesting to see this demonstrated so vividly in the C4 sting, where Nix and his colleagues were making it clear that SCL was able to provide, through British and Israeli ex-spook partners, far more than just a bit of psychographic profiling or bot-herding, but could offer a wide range of complementary dirty tricks from the psychological warfare playbook as an integrated package.

Now if we're going to talk about effectiveness of the body of technique as a whole, I think we have to distinguish between effectiveness in producing intended effects and in producing side effects. Using these techniques may be an utter failure in terms of promoting conservative cultural change and/or getting a wanna-be dictator elected or whatever, but may still have extremely noxious side-effects. For example, one side-effect that seems to be at least somewhat correlated with these methods is the promotion of various forms of extreme right political (and even paramilitary) activity.
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Don't forget the body of work developed by this guy:
How to start a revolution - remembering Gene Sharp

A very effective way to attack a society, authoritarian ones sure, but non-authoritarian societies also, where the result can lead to the same place, collapsing a state, regime change as merely a side-effect of the general 'creative destruction' to borrow the neo-con term.
 
Thing is that at some point, blaming individuals for signing up to Facebook, rather than Facebook itself and the groups that actively make use of the data that Facebook gathers, effectively lets the latter parties off the hook.

I mean, if I were to send out a bunch of obviously scam emails to enough people, it is inevitable that a certain proportion of those people who received said emails will respond, giving me an opportunity to scan them. Facebook likes to present itself as a social website, but it actually makes money by selling data to advertisers.

For much the same reasons that even people who think they are savvy can fall for email scams, plenty of people will still sign up to and use Facebook despite the kind of news that inspired threads such as these.
 
NoXion said:
Thing is that at some point, blaming individuals for signing up to Facebook, rather than Facebook itself and the groups that actively make use of the data that Facebook gathers, effectively lets the latter parties off the hook.

I mean, if I were to send out a bunch of obviously scam emails to enough people, it is inevitable that a certain proportion of those people who received said emails will respond, giving me an opportunity to scan them. Facebook likes to present itself as a social website, but it actually makes money by selling data to advertisers.

For much the same reasons that even people who think they are savvy can fall for email scams, plenty of people will still sign up to and use Facebook despite the kind of news that inspired threads such as these.
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Even if large numbers of people opted out, the damage being done would remain. Enough people are giving up their data, that this type of manipulation will continue. That's still going to affect you, even if you aren't on Facebook.
 
Has anyone seen a link to the sort of 'raw data' that was compiled?
I mean like how in the Guardian interview with Wylie it mentions that people who 'like' posts saying they hate Israel also tend to like nike trainers and kit-kats? I'd enjoy more stuff like that.
 
Last one was a bit of a mixed bag. On the one had, they had Etonboy admitting to a bunch of dodgy, very likely illegal, stuff about the US election and calling Trump a 'puppet'

On the other hand, the second half turned into a platform for Hillary, who tried to tie it to the Russian stuff her people have been pushing without providing any supporting evidence for a link between Mercer / Bannon / SCL and actual Russian interventions.

For me that seriously weakened their credibility. Why not just stick with what they can actually provide evidence for and let Clinton et al pay for their own media slots?
 
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