Active discussion on different Guardian article about same topic:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16606924" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16606924</a>
What's fascinating to me about The Cambridge Analytica Files is the reaction from within Facebook. They seem to be panicking. I've never noticed Facebook reacting so defensively before, regardless of what they were accused of.<p>The writer even claims that Facebook threatened to sue the Guardian before publication: <a href="https://twitter.com/carolecadwalla/status/974995682124804099" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/carolecadwalla/status/974995682124804099</a><p>Really makes me wonder if there were any other big stories that got redacted pre-publication because Facebook threatened to sue the publisher.
Why do we keep getting these breathless articles about how secret geniuses used social media to "hack" elections? Do we really need a mass conspiracy to explain why large chunks of the population find populist/nationalistic leaders appealing? Motivating voters with this kind of rhetoric predates the internet, in fact it predates the United States.<p>As mentioned in the comments on the other hacker news post about facebook profiles being scraped by Cambridge Analytica:<p>1. Obama's 2008 election absolutely bragged about their use of social media to win. I vividly remember multiple long articles in the NYTimes talking about how they exploited new tech to reach voters.<p>2. During the 2016 election Clinton raised and spent nearly double trump. On top of that most of the money Trump got was towards the end of the election whereas Clinton had huge coffers from day one.<p>3. I read the guardian article linked and this is one of the few parts that seem to mention what exactly this "hacker" strategy was at Cambridge Analytica<p>>“And then I came across a paper about how personality traits could be a precursor to political behaviour, and it suddenly made sense. Liberalism is correlated with high openness and low conscientiousness, and when you think of Lib Dems they’re absent-minded professors and hippies. They’re the early adopters… they’re highly open to new ideas. And it just clicked all of a sudden.”<p>This is the insight that that apparently is being called a "psychological warfare tool?" You're telling me that Clinton's campaign didn't have sociologists and psychologists who were absolutely obsessed with exactly the same advertising criteria? This kind of psychological profiling is the kind of stuff you learn about in 101 classes at university. For the past 80 years (that I as a lay person know of, probably longer) people have spent their entire careers analyzing and applying propaganda and marketing to political campaigns. Why should anyone believe based on what's being presented in this article that not only was none of this stuff done before but that it somehow handed Trump one of the greatest election upsets in American history? The mental gymnastics people are going through to deny the fact that yes, many voters have conservative values, is getting out of hand.
I was wondering how Breitbart and Trump did so well. It makes sense now that it was not luck, but they had access to new "tech" in away. Fake news for them is kinda like how Obama was the first to used Twitter and other SM platforms to get connect with voters and get elected.<p>Reminds me of the quote ~ "it's artificial intelligence until you understand how it works. Then it's just algorithms"
I may be wrong but I'm not sure I get why they put so much emphasis on the getting of the data from Facebook, as I feel that that's really easy.<p>Can't you just 1. crawl public profiles 2. create convincing fake profiles by mixing around the info in real profiles, and then add people, and progressively crawl private profiles that way? 3. pay app owners to require more permissions and sell you the info, or create your own apps<p>I guess it's such a big deal because they managed to do it in a way that was legal, on first glance
This kind of work combining propaganda and disinformation with AI models and feedback into them to get a progressive change of belief is fascinating. I think of this as the first of many wars democracy will fight against AI and we are currently loosing.
Christopher Wylie is being utterly courageous. But even so, I'm reminded of Robert Oppenheimer. We still have nukes. And we'll still have targeted PSYOP. So it goes.
What I don’t understand about this company is how it supposedly uses facebook data that facebook itself doesn’t use for its ad platform. They seem to want to point out that they are smarter than facebook, and therefore are a better choice to do targeted ad publishing through. Why are they so relatively unknown and underused then? Any company could use this data to do better business, and it would be trivial for facebook to compile it. That it would have caused the election to swing seems a little far fetched. If anything, it would have provided the campaign with more than ever information about what the American people really want, and how much they want it. That there is lots of talk and no action is the fault of the campaigning party, not of the system used to figure out what their fellow citizens really care about. Republican president follows a Democratic double term, news at 11?
If this really works and you can't do this legally it will be done by governments covertly.<p>I find it difficult to believe it had a real impact though. I think they are just enjoying notoriety.