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For all the people who are surprised about the tRump voter-suppression operation being covered here, this started to come out in 2017, and guess what - *it's still happening*. https://twitter.com/Freeyourmindkid/status/1310619101979717633
So let's take a walk down memory lane.
Way back in the summer of 2015 we learned that GOP presidential candidate Ted Cruz had partnered with "little-known company" owned by his largest donor to do psychographic micro-targeting. https://www.politico.com/story/2015/07/ted-cruz-donor-for-data-119813
Way back in the summer of 2015 we learned that GOP presidential candidate Ted Cruz had partnered with "little-known company" owned by his largest donor to do psychographic micro-targeting. https://www.politico.com/story/2015/07/ted-cruz-donor-for-data-119813
That "little-known company" was Cambridge Analytica, and that donor was secretive hedge-fund executive Robert Mercer, who was also a major backer of right-wing news site Breitbart, helmed at the time by pustulent-corpse-impressionist Steve Bannon. https://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2015/07/the-cruz-breitbart-connection-210310
Cambridge Analytica was a subsidiary of SCL (Strategic Communications Laboratories), a psyops & psychological warfare outfit that evolved out of the Behavioral Dynamics Group, founded in 1989 by British upper-class twit & propagandist Nigel Oakes. https://medium.com/bc-digest/the-man-behind-cambridge-analytica-726d687448bd
Oakes is a bit of a cypher. He marketed SCL using names of respected scientists, but had no psychometrics credentials. Still, he managed to contract with a series of unsavory governments and questionable politicians throughout the 90s. http://www.italy24.ilsole24ore.com/art/politics/2017-01-19/the-story-behind-nigel-oakes-trump-s-weapon-of-mass-persuasion--190657.php?uuid=AEK0UyD
Eventually fellow Eton twit Alexander Nix came on board, as did Robert Mercer and Steve Bannon, who both invested in the company as a vehicle for their dirty tricks. For a deep-dive into their history of fuckery, check out this article by @textifire https://medium.com/textifire/cambridge-analytica-the-tea-partys-new-atlantic-bridge-a25ffcaa70e4
SCL's propaganda methods at this point were somewhat old school. They wanted to bring their techniques into the social media age, and found their solution in the person of Christopher Wylie, a self-taught programmer from Canada attending college in London. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/data-war-whistleblower-christopher-wylie-faceook-nix-bannon-trump
Microtargeting of voters was not new in 2013, but with the growing popularity of social media and the ability of computers to rapidly analyze huge troves of data, the stage was set for a new level of propaganda utilizing novel psychometric techniques. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/data-war-whistleblower-christopher-wylie-faceook-nix-bannon-trump
The paper that brought these techniques to a wider public - Private Traits and Attributes are Predictable from Digital Records of Human Behavior - was published in PNAS in 2013 with Michal Kosinski of the Cambridge Psychometrics Centre as first author.
https://scinapse.io/papers/2153803020
https://scinapse.io/papers/2153803020
The article's abstract is informative. The authors were able to build a model by correlating Facebook users' Likes with psychometric profiles collected via a survey app, and use this model to accurately predict a variety of highly personal attributes based on Likes alone.
Once you built the model based on enough data points, you could look at anyone's Facebook data and be able to predict not only traits, but likely behaviors by building profiles of any user. The trick for SCL/CA was how to get access to those profiles.
Kosinski wasn't interested in sharing his database, but Aleksandr Kogan, another Psychometrics Centre research, said he could harvest the data himself. They paid 320,000 Facebook users to take a personality survey through Amazon Mechanical Turk, but that was just the start.
The app used to administer the survey gave Kogan permission to access participants' Facebook profiles, as well as those of their friends (an average of 160 for each participant). CA ended up with data on millions of users, as well as a model for manipulating them.
The rest, as they say, is history, but this leaves out the very interesting stories of how psychometric profiling really works and how the tRump campaign, including existential snowflake Brad Parscale, utilized particularly dark tactics to suppress liberal votes.
Coming soon...
Coming soon...
This documentary promises to get into the nitty gritty of how they discouraged voters: https://twitter.com/Channel4News/status/1310640924029059074
To wrap up for today, I'd like to address why it's so hard for liberals to grasp how manipulation like this is even possible, much less that tRump's campaign might have pulled it off. According to @GeorgeLakoff, it has to do with the Enlightenment. https://www.berkeleyside.com/2017/05/02/berkeley-author-george-lakoff-says-dont-underestimate-trump
I actually wrote my very first (very boring) Twitter thread on this very topic. Basically, liberals tend to think that people can be convinced with logic and facts, and that nurture (experience) determines how we view things. https://twitter.com/sfhater/status/809189710861975552
Advances in cognitive neuroscience have shown that these assumptions aren't true. Emotion is intricately intertwined with cognition, and crucial to how humans learn. It also turns out that personality traits have a significant genetic component. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1111/gbb.12439
Liberals have traditionally been more dominant in academia, but not in the fields that embraced the science of manipulation: business and marketing. The GOP(esp Frank Luntz) spent years honing its messaging and talking points, delivering them in lock step.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Luntz
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Luntz
So though the brain is fairly plastic in many ways, personality is fairly consistent through adulthood. Your personality is your algorithm, and microtargeting selects messages designed to elicit a specific response based on each person's wiring.
This is the great danger of social media and a connected world, not the risk of having someone steal your credit card number. Each site you click on, each purchase you make, each comment, each like is tracked and recorded to build a model of who you are and how to manipulate you.
Add to this the vast troves of consumer data collected by credit card companies, retailers, credit reporting bureaus, not to mention connected/smart devices (your car, Alexa, Nest, your cell phone, etc.), and your algorithm is on full display for anyone willing to pay.
This is hard to accept. None of us want to believe that we can be manipulated by strangers. If you want to see proof of how this kind of thing works, I recommend checking out Watson Personality Insights and giving it a whirl.
âŠhttps://personality-insights-demo.ng.bluemix.net/
âŠhttps://personality-insights-demo.ng.bluemix.net/
Another site you can check out is Apply Magic Sauce, located at (wait for it...) the Cambridge Psychometric Centre website. https://applymagicsauce.com/demo
These prediction engines are based on the OCEAN model of personality, which measures traits known as Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreableness, and Neuroticism. It isn't even the most accurate model, in my opinion (there's a better one known as HEXACO).
In my opinion, this is only going to get more problematic as our data continues to be collected without our permission and concentrated in the hands of a few powerful corporations and the kleptocrats who run them.
I'm adding a link to a helpful thread on BBC 4's documentary on the tRump campaign's voter suppression operation by @profcarroll , who has been doing great work on the Cambridge Analytica story since 2017. https://twitter.com/profcarroll/status/1310593701509558273
