Cambridge Analytica: The Data That Turned the World Upside Down

I&#x27;m loath to uncritically accept the claims of this article. It just tells you what they did and how Cambridge Analytica thought it had an impact. How do they actually know it worked? The claims are pretty strong, yet the article reads a little like marketing copy for the company. After all, <i>a lot</i> of things happened in the election, really <i>a lot</i>. Plus, the whole thing about &quot;shadowy private company relying on subconscious decision-making&quot; does kinda set off my bullshit alarms.

Whether or not I agree with the premise of Cambridge Analytics&#x27;s services directly leading to the Trump campaign emotionally manipulating loads of disparate groups into electing him, it&#x27;s alarming how easy it is to conceive of someone intentionally doing such a thing at such a scale.<p>YC made a request for startups targeting news and democracy the other day. I&#x27;d like to propose additional underlying unmet societal needs:<p>Emotional resiliency &amp; nonviolent communication.

We royally fucked up with the internet. I literally have to question my own motives for things, and often wonder if I have been manipulated into my beliefs, opinions, and desires. It is kind of scary to think about!<p>How do we move to a less centralized internet and is it too late?

Not again this story. This is a very sensationalist take on the impact of micro-targeting. It probably has some impact, but every political campaign has been doing this for years and there isn&#x27;t something inherently special about Cambridge Analytica&#x27;s approach (other then being funded by the Mercers and hence Trumps go-to firm).<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;view&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2017-02-01&#x2F;trump-s-secret-sauce-is-just-more-ketchup" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;view&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2017-02-01&#x2F;trump-s-s...</a>

From a satirical article published on Halloween last year:<p>&gt; [Campaign] has also hired a firm specializing in big data and advanced intrapsychologic modeling. [Data firm] then takes data from Cookie Monster and analyzes it using their own proprietary Artificial Intelligence-powered (AI) algorithm, which allows the campaign to not only identify key voters, but to also identify key parts of their brains that are activated by certain messages.<p>&gt; “Most campaigns only look at individual voters. We take it a step further and dig down into key parts of the voter’s subconscious. That way, we can say, ‘This meme penetrated a voter’s volitional association area of their prefrontal cortex — let’s double down on this message.’”<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;soapbox-dc&#x2F;every-political-reporters-campaign-tech-article-ever-d46fe7b7e54f#.d1uejpogs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;soapbox-dc&#x2F;every-political-reporters-camp...</a><p>I&#x27;m sure Cambridge Analytica would love us to think they had an unprecedented impact. I haven&#x27;t seen any actual evidence though.

There are several elements of this article that are refuted by Dominic Cummings, who ran the Vote Leave campaign (a different organization than Leave.EU).<p>You can read a more detailed description by an insider for the software Vote Leave used at his personal blog, here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dominiccummings.wordpress.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;10&#x2F;29&#x2F;on-the-referendum-20-the-campaign-physics-and-data-science-vote-leaves-voter-intention-collection-system-vics-now-available-for-all&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dominiccummings.wordpress.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;10&#x2F;29&#x2F;on-the-refe...</a>

The impression I got when I originally read this article was that:<p>1) Trump outsmarted Clinton (and the presumed technology advantage she inherited from the Obama campaign apparatus) with psychometric local targeted propaganda &#x2F; communication<p>2) Some of that communication may have been deliberately targeted at discouraging democratic voters by putting negative articles about Clinton in their social media feed.<p>This is interesting in the context that Trump only won by a 70K voter advantage split over three states.

I wonder if this isn&#x27;t some kind of mass denial happening in some subset of the world. I&#x27;ve been seeing a lot of theories abot why Trump won, including mass manipulation and Russian influence. But what about the simplest explanation - that he won because <i>people voted for him</i> (usual vote counting shenanigans that happen every election aside)? Is this fact so scary people need to rationalize it away?

What if CA could not, in fact, <i>influence</i> the outcome of the election, but instead <i>predict</i> it, and then they just made the bet to approach the winning party and got $$$?<p>And then they just keep doing this at each election or referendum and claim each time to have been influential?<p>What if?

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;view&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2016-12-08&#x2F;no-big-data-didn-t-win-the-u-s-election" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;view&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2016-12-08&#x2F;no-big-da...</a>

So they received 15 million for being able to influence people on a massive scale (at least that&#x27;s the claim). The article makes it sound like they can micro-target a solid percentage of the US population into action or non-action. If this were true, 15 million is a ridiculously low amount of money they got for that ability. I mean the money they should be raking in from advertising should be...tons. If they can change the election behavior of millions of people surely they can get millions of people to buy an extra soft drink here and there...

So maybe this is an advertorial for CA, or maybe it&#x27;s Chicken Little clickbait. Or maybe both. But even Kosinski&#x27;s work alone is frightening. This is one way that AIs will pwn us. Indeed, how AIs <i>are</i> pwning us.

There were several articles on Cambridge Analytics and Trump but none made it to the HN front page, including the English translation of the original German article.

Is this title just the six most used words in the article? :-D

This HN title is word salad.