Nothing Organizing for America didn’t do, at least.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3923685&forum_id=2#35645040)

http://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=3775165&mc=18&forum_id=2

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3923685&forum_id=2#35646220)

Marginal Revoluton posted:

"I still find the Cambridge Analytica story confusing. This article is useful, but it heightens my confusion too. Who exactly did what wrong? And I don’t think I agree with the framing of this Michael Dougherty piece, but it does pose some useful questions. Here is the Bershidsky take."

The National Review piece is a little conspiratorial, but it's good on how the left used data techniques and was praised for it. Moving forward, the deep media-state alliance will allow this behavior only for the center left. Or taht's the theory anyway.

==

The Social-Media Panic

By MICHAEL BRENDAN DOUGHERTY

March 19, 2018 3:57 PM

CEO of Cambridge Analytica, Alexander Nix, speaks during the Web Summit, Europe’s biggest tech conference, in Lisbon, Portugal on November 9, 2017. (Pedro Nunes/Reuters)

All that matters to the center-Left is whether Silicon Valley will keep them in power.

‘Make no mistake: 2016 will never happen again.” Historians are not always reliable predictors of the future, but Niall Ferguson’s analysis of how Silicon Valley and the center-Left would react to the successive and surprise victories of Brexit and Donald Trump is proving correct. Conservatives and populists will not be allowed to use the same tools as Democrats and liberals again, or at least not use them effectively.

Silicon Valley is working with its media and governmental critics to limit the damage to the center-Left going forward. You can see the dynamic in the way that the media generates a moral panic out of stories about how Brexit and the Trump election happened, and the way Silicon Valley responds. Fake news becomes a problem, and Silicon Valley responds by hiring progressive journalists as censors. I mean “fact-checkers.” You can see it in the demonetization of YouTube videos. Or in the new sets of regulation being imposed in European countries that deputize the social-media networks themselves as an all seeing social censor.

The latest moral panic is about Cambridge Analytica, a data and media consultancy run by the Mercer family that did a little work with the Trump campaign, after it had done work with the Ted Cruz campaign. A former employee came forward to reveal what the Guardian called “Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare tool.” The article explains that “Facebook was hijacked, repurposed to become a theatre of war,” that “it became a launchpad for what seems to be an extraordinary attack on the U.S.’s democratic process.” Chris Wylie, the whistleblower, said he “broke” Facebook.

Cambridge Analytica has been accused of misrepresenting the purpose of some of its data mining, which yielded something like 30 million Facebook profiles it could comb for data. It is alleged not to have deleted data on Facebook’s request. It was promptly kicked off Facebook after the Guardian and New York Times stories.

Mashable ran an editorial arguing that it was time to protect yourself and your friends, who were made vulnerable to manipulation. In a think piece for The Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal writes, “If Cambridge Analytica’s targeted advertising works, people worry they could be manipulated with information — or even thoughts — that they did not consent to giving anyone.”

Where were these worries four years ago for the much larger and arguably more manipulative effort by the Obama campaign?

Instead of using a personality quiz, the Obama campaign merely got a portion of its core supporters to use their Facebook profiles to log into a campaign site. Then they used well-tested techniques of gaining consent from that user to harvest all their friends’ data. Sasha Issenberg gushed about how the Obama campaign used the same permissions structure of Facebook to extract the data of scores of millions of Facebook users who were unaware of what was happening to them. Combining Facebook data with other sources such as voter-registration rolls, Issenberg wrote, generated “a new political currency that predicted the behavior of individual humans. The campaign didn’t just know who you were; it knew exactly how it could turn you into the type of person it wanted you to be.”

The level of data sophistication was so intense that Issenberg could describe it this way:

Obama’s campaign began the election year confident it knew the name of every one of the 69,456,897 Americans whose votes had put him in the White House. They may have cast those votes by secret ballot, but Obama’s analysts could look at the Democrats’ vote totals in each precinct and identify the people most likely to have backed him. Pundits talked in the abstract about reassembling Obama’s 2008 coalition. But within the campaign, the goal was literal. They would reassemble the coalition, one by one, through personal contacts.

Today’s Cambridge Analytica scandal causes our tech chin-strokers to worry about “information” you did not consent to share, but the Obama team created social interactions you wouldn’t have had. They didn’t just build a psychological profile of persuadable voters, and algorithmically determine ways of persuading them, but actually encouraged particular friends — ones the campaign had profiled as influencers — to reach out to them personally. In a post-election interview, the campaign’s digital director Teddy Goff explained the strategy: “People don’t trust campaigns. They don’t even trust media organizations,” he told Time’s Michael Sherer, “Who do they trust? Their friends?” This level of manipulation was celebrated in the press.

How did Facebook react to the much larger data harvesting of the Obama campaign? The New York Times reported it out, in a feature hailing Obama’s digital masterminds:

The campaign’s exhaustive use of Facebook triggered the site’s internal safeguards. “It was more like we blew through an alarm that their engineers hadn’t planned for or knew about,” said [Will] St. Clair, who had been working at a small firm in Chicago and joined the campaign at the suggestion of a friend. “They’d sigh and say, ‘You can do this as long as you stop doing it on Nov. 7.’ ”

In other words, Silicon Valley is just making up the rules as they go along. Some large-scale data harvesting and social manipulation is okay until the election. Some of it becomes not okay in retrospect. They sigh and say okay so long as Obama wins. When Clinton loses, they effectively call a code red.

The efforts to criminalize conservative groups who use social media are an attempt to put the new class filter back on.

At the macro level, mass broadcast media was a boon to the Left and center-Left. It allowed a new class of people to shape public opinion as never before. But the appearance of social media represented the return of the repressed. It allowed common conservatives and populists to broadcast their own views, and in some sense legitimate them within their social circle. The efforts to criminalize conservative groups who use social media, and legally suppress citizens’ openly sharing unapproved views, are an attempt to put the new class filter back on.

If I can add my own prediction to Ferguson’s it would be this. To the center-Left, it doesn’t matter how much Silicon Valley’s tools enable extremists in the Third World, or how much wealth they extract from the public treasuries through their tax-sheltering arrangements. All that matters is that the new tools continue to keep the center-Left in power, and make them look glamorous and smart. This is a deal that Silicon Valley will take.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3923685&forum_id=2#35645167)

https://www.channel4.com/news/cambridge-analytica-revealed-trumps-election-consultants-filmed-saying-they-use-bribes-and-sex-workers-to-entrap-politicians-investigation

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3923685&forum_id=2#35645319)

In 2014 a quiz on Facebook invited users to find out their personality type.

It was developed by University of Cambridge academic Aleksandr Kogan (the university has no connections with Cambridge Analytica).

As was common with apps and games at that time, it was designed to harvest not only the user data of the person taking part in the quiz, but also the data of their friends.

Facebook has since changed the amount of data developers can scrape in this way.

Christopher Wylie, who worked with Cambridge Analytica, alleges that because 270,000 people took the quiz, the data of some 50 million users, mainly in the US, was harvested without their explicit consent via their friend networks.

Mr Wylie claims the data was sold to Cambridge Analytica, which then used it to psychologically profile people and deliver pro-Trump material to them.

Cambridge Analytica denies any of it was used as part of the services it provided to the Trump campaign.

Is this against Facebook's terms?

The data was gathered using Facebook's infrastructure at that time, and many other developers had taken advantage of it - but the data was not authorised for them to share with others.

The other key point is that even the people directly taking part in the personality quiz would have had no idea that they were potentially sharing their data with Donald Trump's election campaign.

Facebook say when they learned their rules had been breached, they removed the app and demanded assurances that the information had been deleted.

Cambridge Analytica claims that it never used the data, and deleted it when Facebook told it to.

Both Facebook and the UK Information Commissioner want to find out whether it was properly destroyed, as Mr Wylie claims it was not.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3923685&forum_id=2#35645334)

Anyway, Facebook allowed people to scrape friend data from people who took a test, Kogan did something against Facebook policy (maybe the law?) by sharing that data, Cambridge Analytica bought that data (maybe or maybe not knowing they aren't supposed to get it according to Facebook), and CA maybe or maybe didn't use it in Trump campaign.

Is that about right?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3923685&forum_id=2#35645788)

the only wrinkle here i think is whether FB followed its consent decree in giving users enough visibiltiy that their "friend data" could be scraped by apps as well

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3923685&forum_id=2#35645968)

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/cambridge-academic-trawling-facebook-had-links-to-russian-university

Aleksandr Kogan, the Cambridge University academic who orchestrated the harvesting of Facebook data, had previously unreported ties to a Russian university, including a teaching position and grants for research into the social media network, the Observer has discovered.

Energy firm Lukoil, which is now on the US sanctions list and has been used as a vehicle of government influence, saw a presentation on the firm’s work in 2014. It began with a focus on voter suppression in Nigeria, and Cambridge Analytica also discussed “micro-targeting” individuals on social media during elections.

A slide presentation prepared for the Lukoil pitch focuses first on election disruption strategies used by Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, SCL, in Nigeria. They are presented under the heading “Election: Inoculation”, a military term used in “psychological operations” and disinformation campaigns. Other SCL documents show that the material shared with Lukoil included posters and videos apparently aimed at alarming or demoralising voters, including warnings of violence and fraud.

Discussion of services offered by Cambridge Analytica was apparently going right to the top of Lukoil, even though its retail operations in America are a very minor corner of the oil and gas giant’s empire. Asking for a detailed presentation of Cambridge Analyticas’s work in July 2014, Nix told his colleague the document would be “shared with the CEO of the business”.

The chief executive of Lukoil, Vagit Alekperov, is a former Soviet oil minister who has said the strategic aims of Lukoil are closely aligned with those of Russia. “I have only one task connected with politics, to help the country and the company. I’m not close to Mr Putin, but I treat him with great respect,” he told the New York Times.

Kogan, a lecturer who worked with Cambridge Analytica on building up the database of US voters then at the heart of the company’s plans, said he had not had any connection to the Lukoil pitch.

But while he was helping turn Facebook profiles into a political tool he was also an associate professor at St Petersburg State University, taking Russian government grants to fund other research into social media. “Stress, health, and psychological wellbeing in social networks: cross-cultural investigation” was the title of one piece of research. Online posts showed Kogan lecturing in Russian. One talk was called: “New methods of communication as an effective political instrument”.

Kogan appears to have largely kept the work private. Colleagues said they had not heard about the post in St Petersburg. “I am very surprised by that. No one knew,” one academic who asked not to be named told the Observer. Russia is not mentioned in a 10-page CV Kogan posted on a university website in 2015. The CV lists undergraduate prizes and grants of a few thousand dollars and links to dozens of media interviews.

One Cambridge Analytica employee mentioned Kogan’s Russian work in an email to Nix in March 2014 discussing a pitch to a Caribbean nation for a security contract, including “criminal psychographic profiling via intercepts”.

“We may want to either loop in or find out a bit more about the interesting work Alex Kogan has been doing for the Russians and see how/if it applies,” the colleague wrote.

Kogan told the Observer: “Nothing I did on the Russian project was at all related to Cambridge Analytica in any way. No data or models.” His recollection was that the Russia project had started a year after his collaboration with Cambridge Analytica ended.

He said the St Petersburg position emerged by chance on a social visit. A native Russian speaker, Kogan was born in Moldova and brought up in Moscow until he was seven, when his family emigrated to the US, where he later obtained citizenship.

However, he stayed in touch with family friends in Russia and visited regularly. On one trip, he said, he “dropped an email” to the psychology department at St Petersburg.

“We met, had a nice chat, and decided let’s try to collaborate – give me more reason to visit there,” he told the Observer in an email.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3923685&forum_id=2#35645805)

As for whether it's related to Trump or Facebook data, is there any evidence of that? Kogan and CA say that neither the Facebook data nor any of Kogan's work at a Russian univirsity is related to the Trump campaign.

They may be lying through their teeth, of course, but nobody actually has any evidence that the Facebook data or any Russian action were related to the Trump campaign work, right? If CA is doing work for clients all around the globe, the fact that they also do work for Russians doesn't necessarily lead to the conclusion that Russians colluded with the Trump campaign through CA, right?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3923685&forum_id=2#35645865)

They denied doing any work for Russians at all.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3923685&forum_id=2#35645881)

Christopher Wylie, the whistleblower who has come forward to talk to the Observer, said it was never entirely clear what the Russian firm hoped to get from the operation.

“Alexander Nix’s presentation didn’t make any sense to me,” said Wylie, who left Cambridge Analytica soon after the initial meetings. “If this was a commercial deal, why were they so interested in our political targeting?”

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3923685&forum_id=2#35646028)

I'm certainly not discounting the possibility that CA is totally full of shit on any of this, but it seems like a lot of smoke without any actual fire thus far.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3923685&forum_id=2#35646198)

Pretty much.

"I take it you would support Mueller subpoenaing every file these crooks have relating to Trump and file Trump has relating to them?"

I don't know if there is any legal basis for that.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3923685&forum_id=2#35646258)

cliffs: libs are insane

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3923685&forum_id=2#35645352)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3923685&forum_id=2#35647066)

http://thehill.com/opinion/technology/379245-whats-genius-for-obama-is-scandal-when-it-comes-to-trump

According to The Guardian, Obama’s new database would be gathered by asking individual volunteers to log into Obama’s reelection site using their Facebook credentials. “Consciously or otherwise,” The Guardian states, “the individual volunteer will be injecting all the information they store publicly on their Facebook page — home location, date of birth, interests and, crucially, network of friends — directly into the central Obama database.”

Facebook had no problem with such activity then. They do now. There’s a reason for that. The former Obama director of integration and media analytics stated that, during the 2012 campaign, Facebook allowed the Obama team to “suck out the whole social graph”; Facebook “was surprised we were able to suck out the whole social graph, but they didn’t stop us once they realized that was what we were doing.” She added, “They came to [the] 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.”

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3923685&forum_id=2#35646426)

https://twitter.com/cld276/status/975564499297226752

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3923685&forum_id=2#35646444)