Tag Archives: Cambridge Analytics

Cambridge Analytica – Bogey of the Week, by Sheldon Richman

Posted on April 2, 2018 | Leave a comment

Hillary Clinton is Ahab looking for the white whale of an excuse for her defeat in the 2016 election. Now it’s Cambridge Analytica. From Sheldon Richman at antiwar.com:

The panic over Cambridge Analytica looks like an acknowledgment that Russiagate is a losing horse.

CA is the latest excuse for Hillary Clinton’s ignominious loss to Donald Trump, following “the Russians” and former FBI Director James Comey. Since those others haven’t exactly carried the day – still no evidence given against Russia and plenty of unflattering stuff came out about Trump when Comey was grandstanding – it must have been time for a new tack. CA’s psychographic microtargeting appeared to fill the bill.

Here’s the story: CA (with billionaire Robert Mercer and Steve Bannon behind it) is said to have used profile data “harvested” from Facebook – that’s right: stuff people revealed about themselves – to predict what people would do when exposed to certain election-related material online. It was all so simple: Profiling data. Prediction. Manipulation. Trump Victory. Next stop the White House.

Swallowing the braggadocio of CA’s principals – unrelated, of course, to their hunt for new clients – people who refuse to believe Trump could possibly have won the election legitimately are screeching that CA’s diabolical methods likely determined the decisive narrow pro-Trump margins in the industrial northern swing states.

Any reasonable person would be skeptical. CA could really predict the behavior of strangers under various calibrated stimuli? Based on what they “liked” on Facebook and other personal tidbits they’ve disclosed?

I don’t know about you, but I “like” posts for any of several reasons: I may agree with the content, or appreciate the posting of a link however much I abhorred the message, or want to keep up with the ensuing discussion. The list could go on. The point is that trying to predict my reaction to ads or apparent news stories on the basis of my “likes” seems like a questionable use of time and money. At the very least, all kinds of problems plague the move from data collection to prediction to manipulation. We’re dealing with human beings, for heaven sakes. (See “Cambridge Analytica’s Facebook Data Abuse Shouldn’t Get Credit For Trump.”)

To continue reading: Cambridge Analytica – Bogey of the Week

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The New Military-Industrial Complex of Big Data Psy-Ops, by Tamsin Shaw

Posted on March 24, 2018 | 1 comment

There’s all sorts of obscure companies out there gathering, analyzing, massaging,  and manipulating data…and manipulating people. From Tamshin Shaw at nybooks.com:

Bryan Bedder/Getty Images

Alexander Nix, CEO of Cambridge Analytica, addressing the Concordia Summit in New York, September 19, 2016

Apparently, the age of the old-fashioned spook is in decline. What is emerging instead is an obscure world of mysterious boutique companies specializing in data analysis and online influence that contract with government agencies. As they say about hedge funds, if the general public has heard their names that’s probably not a good sign. But there is now one data analysis company that anyone who pays attention to the US and UK press has heard of: Cambridge Analytica. Representatives have boasted that their list of past and current clients includes the British Ministry of Defense, the US Department of Defense, the US Department of State, the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and NATO. Nevertheless, they became recognized for just one influence campaign: the one that helped Donald Trump get elected president of the United States. The kind of help the company offered has since been the subject of much unwelcome legal and journalistic scrutiny.

Carole Cadwalladr’s recent exposé of the inner workings of Cambridge Analytica shows that the company, along with its partner, SCL Group, should rightly be as a cautionary tale about the part private companies play in developing and deploying government-funded behavioral technologies. Her source, former employee Christopher Wylie, has described the development of influence techniques for psychological warfare by SCL Defense, the refinement of similar techniques by SCL Elections through its use across the developing world (for example, a “rumor campaign” deployed to spread fear during the 2007 election in Nigeria), and the purchase of this cyber-arsenal by Robert Mercer, the American billionaire who funded Cambridge Analytica, and who, with the help of Wylie, Trump campaign manager Steve Bannon, and the company’s chief executive Alexander Nix, deployed it on the American electorate in 2016.

But the revelations should also prompt us to ask deeper questions about the kind of behavioral science research that enables both governments and private companies to assume these powers. Two young psychologists are central to the Cambridge Analytica story. One is Michal Kosinski, who devised an app with a Cambridge University colleague, David Stillwell, that measures personality traits by analyzing Facebook “likes.” It was then used in collaboration with the World Well-Being Project, a group at the University of Pennsylvania’s Positive Psychology Center that specializes in the use of big data to measure health and happiness in order to improve well-being. The other is Aleksandr Kogan, who also works in the field of positive psychology and has written papers on happiness, kindness, and love (according to his résumé, an early paper was called “Down the Rabbit Hole: A Unified Theory of Love”). He ran the Prosociality and Well-being Laboratory, under the auspices of Cambridge University’s Well-Being Institute.

To continue reading: The New Military-Industrial Complex of Big Data Psy-Ops

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The Only Reason We’re Examining Facebook’s Sleazy Behavior Is Because Trump Won, by Michael Krieger

Posted on March 22, 2018 | Leave a comment

To his credit, Michael Krieger has been warning of the dangers of social media for a long time. From Krieger at libertyblitzkrieg.com:

Trust me, there’s nobody more thrilled to see Facebook’s unethical and abusive practices finally getting the attention they deserve from mass media and members of the public who simply didn’t want to hear about it previously. I’ve written multiple articles over the years warning people about the platform (links at the end), but these mostly fell on deaf ears.

That’s just the way things go. All sorts of horrible behaviors can continue for a very long time before the corporate media and general public come around to caring. You typically need some sort of external event to change mass psychology. In this case, that event was Trump winning the election.

The more I read about the recent Facebook scandal, it’s clear this sort of thing’s been going on for a very long time. The major difference is this time the data mining was used by campaign consultants of the person who wasn’t supposed to win. Donald Trump.

To get a sense of what I mean, let’s take a look at some excerpts from a deeply troubling article recently published at the Guardian, ‘Utterly Horrifying’: Ex-Facebook Insider Says Covert Data Harvesting Was Routine:

Hundreds of millions of Facebook users are likely to have had their private information harvested by companies that exploited the same terms as the firm that collected data and passed it on to Cambridge Analytica, according to a new whistleblower.

Sandy Parakilas, the platform operations manager at Facebook responsible for policing data breaches by third-party software developers between 2011 and 2012, told the Guardian he warned senior executives at the company that its lax approach to data protection risked a major breach…

Parakilas, whose job was to investigate data breaches by developers similar to the one later suspected of Global Science Research, which harvested tens of millions of Facebook profiles and provided the data to Cambridge Analytica, said the slew of recent disclosures had left him disappointed with his superiors for not heeding his warnings.

“It has been painful watching,” he said, “because I know that they could have prevented it”…

To continue reading: The Only Reason We’re Examining Facebook’s Sleazy Behavior Is Because Trump Won

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Hillary Clinton, Not Donald Trump or Cambridge Analytica, Is Gaslighting America, by Nick Gillespie

Posted on March 22, 2018 | 1 comment

Donald Trump’s campaign may have used Facebook in 2016 as effectively as Barack Obama’s campaign used it 2012. Suddenly, Facebook poses a threat to democracy and the electoral process. It didn’t back in 2012, of course, at least if you’re a Democrat. From Nick Gillespie at reason.com:

The election of Donald Trump hasn’t just brought a poorly mannered reality TV star into the Oval Office and our newsfeeds. It has also popularized the concept of gaslighting, or tricking rational people into thinking they’re insane. The phrase is a reference to a 1944 movie in which Charles Boyer tries to convince his young bride, played by Ingrid Bergman, that she’s nuts so he can cover up a murder and search for jewels hidden in the house they share (the house’s gas lamps flicker due to Boyer’s late-night searches, hence the title).

Go Google “Donald Trump is gaslighting America” and you’ll find a constantly growing list of stories from outlets ranging from CNN to Teen Vogue to Vanity Fair to Refinery 29. The common thread is some variation on the theme that Trump’s brazen lies, misstatements, and rhetorical sleights of hand are designed to drive us all batshit crazy by contradicting what we plainly see happening to the United States of America. At rock bottom, Trump’s detractors believe there is simply no way that he could have legitimately won the 2016 election, especially against Hillary Clinton, of whom President Obama said, “I don’t think that there’s ever been someone so qualified to hold this office.”

Yet it’s not Donald Trump who is gaslighting us, but Hillary Clinton, whose complete and utter refusal to take responsibility for her loss is at the heart of what’s so weird about contemporary America. You read it here first: Trump is the effect and not the cause of the ongoing mudslide that is the daily news. Ever since about 11 p.m. ET on November 8, 2016, Clinton and her allies in the media have worked overtime to provide increasingly fanciful explanations for her failure to beat the least-credible candidate ever in American history. Sometimes the apologias are conscious, sometimes not, but nobody really wants to accept what happened (in fact, even Trump himself couldn’t believe it for a while, which helps explain why his transition was so incompetent). The result is a non-stop barrage of stories, some more credible than others, that Trump’s win was the result of some sort of sinister machination that has undermined our democracy. Following from this interpretation every aspect of his behavior, from his bro-ing out with Vladimir Putin to his indifferent spelling and capitalization while tweeting, is just one more sign that we are living in a world gone stark, raving mad.

To continue reading: Hillary Clinton, Not Donald Trump or Cambridge Analytica, Is Gaslighting America

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The Problem Is Facebook, Not Cambridge Analytica, by Leonid Bershidsky

Posted on March 21, 2018 | 1 comment

When it comes to saving and using Facebook personal data, the app developers are pikers compared to Facebook itself. From Leonid Bershidsky at bloomberg.com:

Outrage over a U.K. firm’s use of Facebook data for the Trump campaign should lead to a much bigger question.

The biggest data of them all.

Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

Facebook is being hammered for allowing the data firm Cambridge Analytica to acquire 50 million user profiles in the U.S., which it may or may not have used 1  to help the Trump campaign. But the outrage misses the target: There’s nothing Cambridge Analytica could have done that Facebook itself doesn’t offer political clients.

Here, in a nutshell, is the CA scandal. In 2014, Aleksandr Kogan, an academic of Russian origin at Cambridge University in the U.K., built a Facebook app that paid hundreds of thousands of users to take a psychological test. Apart from their test results, the users also shared the data of their Facebook friends with the app. Kogan sold the resulting database to CA, which Facebook considers a violation of its policies: The app was not allowed to use the data for commercial purposes. Carol Cadwalladr and Emma Graham-Harrison, writing for the U.K. publication Observer, quoted former CA employee Christopher Wylie as saying the firm “broke Facebook” on behalf of Stephen Bannon, the ideologue and manager behind the Trump campaign.
 It didn’t escape keen observers that if the Trump campaign used Facebook user data harvested through an app, it did no more than Barack Obama’s 2012 data-heavy re-election campaign. It’s not documented exactly how Obama’s team gathered oodles of data on potential supporters, but a deep dive into the tech side of that campaign by Sasha Issenberg mentioned how “‘targeted sharing’ protocols mined an Obama backer’s Facebook network in search of friends the campaign wanted to register, mobilize, or persuade.” To do this, the protocols would need to use the same feature of the Facebook platform for developers, discontinued in 2015, that allowed apps access to a user’s friends’ profiles — with the user’s consent, as Facebook invariably points out.

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