Cambridge Analytica posts

[brettdale]

Been seeing a few posts about them.

They're saying on twitter thats its all misleading about what they do.

What did they do???

Some posts are saying chat bots??? Some are saying they tried to entrap Politicians.

Whats the actual story?

[rzemanfl]

1. Watch the video. They have a mafia business model. n/t

[Brother Buzz]

6. For the lazy ones, I'm posting the YouTube link

[backtoblue]

2. Go to V & M

I posted a few videos about them in there. Worth watching

[Hoyt]

3. Tired of the posts. Anyone dim-witted enough to fall for that junk would not have voted for Clinton

in the first place.

We better learn how to GOTV and counter swiftboating, lies, the next "Comey," etc., or we'll spend the rest of our lives yelling about stuff we should have spotted at the time.

[frazzled]

11. This affected the primary as much as the general

And anyone with half the memory cells in their head will recall all the harsh and derogatory (and almost always false) charges about Hillary Clinton that appeared here during the primary season in late 2015 and through mid-2016, often from posters citing things they'd read on Facebook, and often from a "friend."

We are told that Corey Lewandowski met with Cambridge Analytical in 2015, so we're not just talking about the general election here. The despicable stories affected many to whip up opposition to her long before the nominating conventions even happened, and those false and defamatory stories stuck like glue. We also know that enough of the "Hillary haters" supposedly on our side (and we saw plenty here) could not be brought to vote for her in the general election, opting either not to vote at all or to vote for a third-party candidate.

Yes, even our own folk here on the left were highly likely to have been affected by this and similar tactics.

[Hoyt]

12. I hear you, had my debates with supposed Sanders folks. And I'm convinced that divisive primary

hurt our chances in November. But, we can't let outside stuff like that affect us. We weren't ready for it. Even if FB were shut down, there'll be something similar next election. It's just swiftboating on another platform.

[frazzled]

13. So what do you suggest to end this kind of swiftboating?

Of course, we could start right here: I think the rules affecting mischievous behavior and spreading unverified stories here have been much too weak. I don't think the member-based review system works at all during a heated primary. Something much more dispassionate and less vulnerable to manipulation needs to be used.

But we are peanuts. The wider world of social media, and conventional media, and political advertising is uncontrollable. And it is a problem that affects us. All of us. We are living with the proof right now. So I don't think just brushing it aside as "that will always happen" is a particularly useful statement.

We live in a country that values freedom of speech, for the press and through trickle-down interpretation, for individuals as well. But that stops at the water's edge: foreign interference needs to be routed out, and those who collaborated here need to be prosecuted.

That's a start.

[Hoyt]

14. Well, if we want to stop foreign interference, we need to stop doing it first.

We need to be ready with money and ads to counter lies. Our candidates need to be tougher. I believe if Clinton had turned to trump and cursed him out when he was stalking her around the stage, it would have been not contest.

But, I don't have all the answers for sure. But this junk is not going away, it's going to become more common.

[frazzled]

15. But there were plenty of ads and appearances that countered the lies

Even plenty of mainstream media fact checking that countered the lies. It didn’t help.

People gonna believe what they want to believe, ads and facts be damned.

[Hoyt]

16. Then, it doesn't matter and we need to make sure everyone who rejects

those lies vote.

[Abu Pepe]

17. They first showed up here during the Ukrainian Revolution.

Their obsession with the US Ambassador and the cookies thing was their tell. It angered them in ways Im guessing only a Russian could be angered. People claiming to be Americans were waaay too pissed about that to be real.

[frazzled]

18. Oh yeah, that was soooo obvious

But a certain number of otherwise rational people seemed to buy into it, after numerous repetitions.

[Squinch]

4. Check out the videos.

There's a youtube here:
https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=10380218

But also don't miss Christopher Wylie's (a CA founder's) interviews detailing how they used psych profiling on the FB posts they hijacked.

This one:
https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=10381610

And this one:
https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=10378384

[brettdale]

5. cheers

Thanks for all the links.

[Squinch]

8. No problem. I usually look at video posts and think, "Oh, just tell me what they say," but

you have to see these to get the understanding of what they did. I see so many posters here who are acting as if it was just a data breach and some advertising and only the dopey were affected. It's a lot more than that and it's really chilling. And they're trump's election consultants.

[VOX]

7. Big thanks, Squinch.

Appreciate it.

[Squinch]

9. Very welcome!

[lapfog_1]

10. so...

CA paid facebook to run a paid opinion survey (they paid facebook users for their political opinions)... as part of that survey, they got permission to get those users profiles.

Then, once in facebook database, they also data mined the friends of the survey responders.

With all of that data, including profiles and posts and personal data, they ran those 50M or 70M facebook profiles plus through a data analytics program that looked (probably) for keywords, likes on posted stories, etc to generate a profile of that Facebook user. That profile would have some fairly detailed data like, for example, if the user viewed a lot of "conspiracy" videos or news stories, did they lean conservative or liberal or whatever, did they have friends of particular ethnic backgrounds, etc.

That was their "work product" that was given to Trump campaign and, very likely, to the Russian "fake news" people that would then target groups of these people to receive specific articles like "Hillary runs a child molestation ring out of a pizza place in DC" or "Huma Abedin is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood" or whatever... which totally depended on how gullible they predicted each of the 50M to 70M facebook users that CA profiled. All in an effort to push people to vote against Hillary and for Donald. Or for some of the facebook users, to not vote at all because of the confusing stories they would get via their facebook feed.

And, of course, it didn't stop with facebook... various bots would also post these same stories to twitter and make them "trending" as if a *lot* of real people both read the story and liked it.

Propaganda 101. "Many people are saying..."

But the original mining of Facebook database by CA was without the permission of the Facebook users... and perhaps without the permission of facebook (other than the original survey responders). Whether it was done without the knowledge or permission of Facebook is TBD... but I suspect a lot of people within Facebook knew about it.