I think I know one way that someone was fishing on Facebook.

[Baitball Blogger]

For about two or three months prior to the election my feed was loaded with pro-Israel links that just stopped as quickly as they began. I never understood where they originated. Some were bordering on the hardcore Neti types, but others were the kind of posts that progressives would approve of. I don't remember if I "liked" any, but I never had any reason to go out of my way to stop them. None were anti-semetic.

I am only now thinking about them and I realize that if I had responded in a anti-semetic manner, whoever was responsible for sending them to me would have had the kind of profile that would have been targeted for the Russian bots.

[bettyellen]

1. Interesting. I know I kept removing weird divisive stuff and after a while I didn't get it.

And friends who were more friendly to CT theories and dislike HRC got plenty of very weird stuff. I know so pointed out to them that lots of what they had shared was also on Breitbart etc. they didn't seem to care.

[Warpy]

2. Yep, that is one way they operate

They're also going after personality cultists who obediently bring garbage here and flout the rule against refighting the last primary. They live to refight the last primary.

You didn't rise to the stinkbait, but I think a lot of people do. Self righteous indignation and rabid bigotry are both bad drugs to a lot of people out there and they can't stay away from them.

Every day I find reasons to be grateful I don't have a Farcebook account, from the trolling to the danger of being contacted by people from my past who belong there, to being profiled for the enrichment of corporations I don't like very much. That Russian troll farms were allowed to spread their poison so widely before the management bothered to notice it is just one more reason to avoid it.

[mopinko]

3. those personality quizzes

strike me as a goldmine for the troll army. i would be very curious if those were part of the plan.
i never take them, but your post makes me wonder what would happen if i took them w an eye to being pegged as a possible target.

[More_Cowbell]

4. I was just going to say the same thing

They take a long time, you have the chance to click (or not click) on a lot of ads, and there might be some information there that's useful to a sponsor.

I'm also leery about posting things to Facebook from another site. Even if you log out of Facebook, the fact that you linked to Facebook from another site means that Facebook has a record about that. If you've ever seen those "so-and-so likes such-and-such a website," you know that so-and-so has clicked on that website either before or after logging on to Facebook. That's kind of scary.

[RandomAccess]

7. You're right - they were

It was from Facebook that Cambridge Analytica obtained its vast dataset in the first place. Earlier, psychologists at Cambridge University harvested Facebook data (legally) for research purposes and published pioneering peer-reviewed work about determining personality traits, political partisanship, sexuality and much more from people’s Facebook “likes”. And SCL/Cambridge Analytica contracted a scientist at the university, Dr Aleksandr Kogan, to harvest new Facebook data. And he did so by paying people to take a personality quiz which also allowed not just their own Facebook profiles to be harvested, but also those of their friends – a process then allowed by the social network.

Facebook was the source of the psychological insights that enabled Cambridge Analytica to target individuals. It was also the mechanism that enabled them to be delivered on a large scale.

The company also (perfectly legally) bought consumer datasets – on everything from magazine subscriptions to airline travel – and uniquely it appended these with the psych data to voter files. It matched all this information to people’s addresses, their phone numbers and often their email addresses. “The goal is to capture every single aspect of every voter’s information environment,” said David. “And the personality data enabled Cambridge Analytica to craft individual messages.”

Finding “persuadable” voters is key for any campaign and with its treasure trove of data, Cambridge Analytica could target people high in neuroticism, for example, with images of immigrants “swamping” the country. The key is finding emotional triggers for each individual voter.

Cambridge Analytica worked on campaigns in several key states for a Republican political action committee. Its key objective, according to a memo the Observer has seen, was “voter disengagement” and “to persuade Democrat voters to stay at home”: a profoundly disquieting tactic. It has previously been claimed that suppression tactics were used in the campaign, but this document provides the first actual evidence.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/07/the-great-british-brexit-robbery-hijacked-democracy

[pansypoo53219]

5. i rarely look at my facebook.

[L. Coyote]

6. Phishing?

Not exactly phishing in the true sense. Political profiling is what I would call it if that is what they were up to.