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Started reading
October 28, 2019
identify and combat extremism online.
What he thought they wanted
What he bought into
Biased
The sexy part of the Obama campaign was its branding and use of new media like YouTube.
What made him different
In touch with modern societu
In other words, the backbone of the Obama campaign was data. And the most important work Strasma’s team produced was the modelling they used to analyse and understand that data, which allowed them to translate it into an applied fit – to determine a real-world communications strategy through … artificial intelligence.
Similar to conservitives
You could begin to craft messages that would have a greater chance of swaying their opinions.
Targeting adds
Republican 2016 agenda
For me, this was a wholly new way of understanding elections. Data was a force for good, powering this campaign of change. It was being used to produce first-time voters, to reach people who felt left out.
Perswading voters, towards liberal points of view
The data has become more and more valuable, with Facebook making on average $30 from each of its 170 million American users.
In reality, we pay with our data into a business model of extracting human attention.
People were processed into data. We would serve as the raw material of this new data-industrial complex.
One of the first people to spot the political potential of this new reality was Steve Bannon,
The newly formed Cambridge Analytica became that arsenal. Refining techniques from military psychological operations (PSYOPS), Cambridge Analytica propelled Steve Bannon’s alt-right insurgency into its ascendancy.
Cambridge Analytica (CA) first piloted this new warfare in Africa and tropical islands around the world. The firm experimented with scaled online disinformation, fake news and mass profiling.
Seemingly out of nowhere, an uprising erupted in America with manic cries of MAGA! and Build the wall!
America is now living in the aftermath of the first scaled deployment of a psychological weapon of mass destruction.
‘move fast and break things’.
A bad culture for people's personal data
exploited Facebook
Why exploited ????
But the Liberal Democrats would almost never say, ‘I’m Lib Dem.’ Instead they would say, ‘I vote Lib Dem.’
Community ?
Incolvment ?
Loyalty ?
For them, supporting the Lib Dems was an act, not an identity.
Less likely to feel a coobection
MPs less likrky to be in touch
Gettleson was also one of the few people who understood what I was trying to do with data.
Clickard suggested I look more deeply into personality as a factor in voting behaviour.
five-factor model of personality, which represents personality as a set of ratings on five scales: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.
Simply, easy, identifiable features
open, curious, eccentric, stubborn and a bit bitchy at times.
The five-factor model was the key that cracked the Lib Dems code – and, in the end, provided the central idea behind what became Cambridge Analytica.
Although certainly important factors to people’s identities and experiences, there is no such thing as a woman voter or a Latino voter or any of these other labels.
Politics and fashion were built on the same foundation, I realised, in that they were both based on nuanced constructs of how people see themselves in relation to others.
These two domains serve each other well, as understanding culture can equip you to unpack the dynamics of extremist movements more than purely looking at their professed ideologies can.
Excetricy helps him to look at society with a diverent (Quantitve, data driven) pperspective
Targets are encouraged to begin catastrophising about minor or imagined events, and counternarratives attempt to remove meaning, creating an impression of confusing or senseless events.
Fake news
People high on the narcissism scale are susceptible because they are more prone to feelings of envy and entitlement, which are strong motivators of rule-breaking and hierarchy-defying behaviour. This means these targets will be more likely to develop an exaggerated suspicion of harassment, persecution, victimhood or unfair treatment.
It’s important to remember that, in a military context, the target’s personal agency or consent is not a concern. The target is the enemy.
Jucikas proposed pulling a wide variety of data by building automated data-harvesting utilities,
One unintended consequence of having large pluralities of citizens connected via mobile phone networks was that everybody could be traced, tracked, profiled and communicated with.
Database expands
then
Born too late to play colonial master in the old British Empire, he treated SCL as the modern equivalent.
‘play the white man’. ‘They [are] just niggers,’ he once said to a colleague in an email, referring to black politicians in Barbados.
Racist
YUMs – young unmarried males
‘You might not agree, but at least you know where I stand.’
Simple
even though it was essentially meaningless.
It turns out that Republicans can accept a batshit insane candidate, so long as it’s consistent insanity. This finding later informed almost everything that Cambridge Analytica worked on. From there, of course, it’s a short jump to having a candidate brag that he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody without losing support. In the course of our experiment, we compiled reams of personal information about the people of Virginia.
Experian, Acxiom and niche firms with specialist lists from evangelical churches, media companies and so on. Even some state governments will sell you lists of hunting, fishing, or gun licensees.
People would feel better about their day after an hour-long session in the Fox News rage room – they could groan out their stress, and afterward their problems at work or home were someone else’s fault. It meant that their struggles could be wholly externalised, sparing them the stark reality that maybe their employer didn’t care enough about them to give them a living wage. It would be too painful to admit that perhaps they were being taken advantage of by someone they saw every day rather than the faceless enemy of Obamacare and ‘illegals’.
This in turn triggers a reactance effect, whereby alternative viewpoints actually strengthen the audience’s resolve in their original belief, because they sense a threat to their personal freedom. The more Democrats criticised Fox’s bait, the more entrenched the audience’s views and the angrier they became.
shift attitudes by framing the language of messages to correspond to psychometric profiles.
they were still woefully inadequate for discerning all the nuances of personality and identity.
she was a true believer in these conservative crusades.
The room was packed with people – Bob Mercer, Bannon, Block, a couple of old men from the pro-Brexit right-wing UK Independence Party (UKIP),
When the time came, Nix stood up and gave a short speech about SCL’s pedigree, our work for the military, and how the firm didn’t normally indulge private clients as we were now (a lie) but how Mercer’s persistence at chasing him had worn him down.
A secret, as it is illegal
quantifying many of the intrinsic aspects of human behaviour and cultural interaction,
Coputers cannot handel things unless quantified in some way shape or form
He loathed Ayn Rand, because she objectified people into commodities.
He almost sees peop!e as actual humans not just objects.
As a self-anointed prophet, Bannon wanted a tool to peer into the future of our societies.
He wanted to bend society not just break it
Before catalysing America’s dharmic rebalancing, his movement would first need to instil chaos throughout society so that a new order could emerge.
And that’s how we began our work for Cambridge Analytica, the history-changing project that would fuel Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, and the death of personal privacy: hotboxing our way across the United States.
