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Be careful what you “Like” online, folks. Buried in those ‘harmless affirmations’ — is enough significant “sampling data” that modern-day neural-net engines and quickly determine “what makes you tick” …
And almost as quickly, the Managers of such “personal data” can turn a “Leaning No” opinion — into a definite “Whatever!” (or perhaps even a “Hell Yes!”).
Do that ten-thousand times, in key precincts — and Elections can tip off-kilter, can quickly diverge from the previously prevailing “Snapshot in Time” (aka. the presumed National Poll results) — to “something nobody could have imagined ...”
Stranger things have happened, in recent memory … Dimes are meant to be Turned ...
by Carole Cadwalladr, theguardian.com — May 7, 2017
[...]
In January 2013, a young American postgraduate was passing through London when she was called up by the boss of a firm where she’d previously interned. The company, SCL Elections, went on to be bought by Robert Mercer, a secretive hedge fund billionaire, renamed Cambridge Analytica, and achieved a certain notoriety as the data analytics firm that played a role in both Trump and Brexit campaigns. But all of this was still to come. London in 2013 was still basking in the afterglow of the Olympics. Britain had not yet Brexited. The world had not yet turned.
“That was before we became this dark, dystopian data company that gave the world Trump,” a former Cambridge Analytica employee who I’ll call Paul tells me. “It was back when we were still just a psychological warfare firm.”
Was that really what you called it, I ask him. Psychological warfare? “Totally. That’s what it is. Psyops. Psychological operations — the same methods the military use to effect mass sentiment change. It’s what they mean by winning ‘hearts and minds’. We were just doing it to win elections in the kind of developing countries that don’t have many rules.”
[...]
If you want unexpected results, some Campaign advisors might suggest using some “unconventional methods”. As we just learned in recent News, Trump Advisors “had the means” to access and influence the upper management of Cambridge Analytica … The question remains: Did they also “have the motive” — to WIN at all costs?
Their continued unraveling trail of Denials and Clarifications, would seem to scream “Affirmative” to that ...
Associated Press, theguardian.com — Aug 4, 2017
Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, is revealing a brief advisory role with a firm related to a controversial data analysis company that aided the Trump campaign, the Associated Press has learned.
The disclosure of Flynn’s link to Cambridge Analytica will come in an amended public financial filing in which the retired US army lieutenant general also discloses income that includes payments from the Trump transition team, according to a person close to Flynn who spoke to AP on condition of anonymity, to describe details of the filing made to the White House.
[...]
Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, was a vice-president of Cambridge Analytica before he joined the Trump campaign.
So the Trump Campaign had an “inside guy” in the “Psyops” company Cambridge Analytica; and they had an “outside guy” too, to do whatever shadowy leg-work that might be required. (It would seem that Flynn must be “co-operating with the Mueller Investigation, since he is so carefully “cleaning-up” payments details like these, retro-actively.)
Their “motive” would obviously be: to get Mercer and Co. to do for Trump, what they had so successfully done for the Campaign Leave.EU — and that is pull off an “upset” victory … while the Talking Heads were earning their Pay — talking about foregone conclusions …
by Carole Cadwalladr, theguardian.com — May 14, 2017
[...]
But the Observer has seen a confidential document that provides clear evidence of a link between the two campaigns. More precisely, evidence of a close working relationship between the two data analytics firms employed by the campaigns — AggregateIQ, which Vote Leave hired, and Cambridge Analytica, retained by Leave.EU.
British electoral law is founded on the principle of a level playing field and controlling campaign spending is the key plank of that. The law states that different campaigns must not work together unless they declare their expenditure jointly. This controls spending limits so that no side can effectively “buy” an election.
But this signed legal document — a document that was never meant to be made public and was leaked by a concerned source — connects both Vote Leave and Leave.EU’s data firms directly to Robert Mercer, the American billionaire who bankrolled Donald Trump.
What Billionaire Bob Mercer can do in one country, he can apparently do in another country, by simply exploiting the data trails that so many Socially-wired Citizens leave in their wakes …
Talk about leveraging your “targeted mailing lists” …
by PI Policy Officer Frederike Kaltheuner, Medium.com — Apr 13, 2017
What does Cambridge Analytica actually do?
Political campaigns rely on data operations for a number of decisions: where to hold rallies, which states to focus on, and how to communicate with supporters, undecided voters and non-supporters. Essentially, companies like Cambridge Analytica do two things: profile individuals, and use these profiles to personalise political messaging.
What some reporting on Cambridge Analytica fails to mention is that profiling itself is a widespread practice. Data brokers and online marketers all collect or obtain data about individuals (your browsing history, your location data, who your friends are, or how frequently you charge your battery etc.), and then use these data to infer additional, unknown information about you (what you’re going to buy next, your likelihood to be female, the chances of you being conservative, your current emotional state, how reliable you are, or whether you are heterosexual etc.).
Cambridge Analytica markets (!) itself as unique and innovative because they don’t simply predict users’ interests or future behaviour, but also psychometric profiles (even though the company later denied having used psychographics in the Trump campaign and people who have requested a copy of their data from the company have not seen psychographic scores.). Psychometrics is a field of psychology that is devoted to measuring personality traits, aptitudes, and abilities. Inferring psychometric profiles means learning information about an individual that previously could only be learned through the results of specifically designed tests and questionnaires: how neurotic you are, how open you are to new experiences or whether you are contentious.
[...]
Here’s some more of the “nut and bolts” on how Personalities get “categorized” — in this age of socializing online. If you are an avid Facebook user, then most likely they already “got your number” — your OCEAN Number that is (and all its granular sub-categories meta data) ...
[...]
Psychometrics, sometimes also called psychographics, focuses on measuring psychological traits, such as personality. In the 1980s, two teams of psychologists developed a model that sought to assess human beings based on five personality traits, known as the "Big Five." These are: openness (how open you are to new experiences?), conscientiousness (how much of a perfectionist are you?), extroversion (how sociable are you?), agreeableness (how considerate and cooperative you are?) and neuroticism (are you easily upset?). Based on these dimensions—they are also known as OCEAN, an acronym for openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, neuroticism — we can make a relatively accurate assessment of the kind of person in front of us. This includes their needs and fears, and how they are likely to behave. The "Big Five" has become the standard technique of psychometrics. But for a long time, the problem with this approach was data collection, because it involved filling out a complicated, highly personal questionnaire. Then came the Internet. And Facebook. And Kosinski.
Michal Kosinski was a student in Warsaw when his life took a new direction in 2008. He was accepted by Cambridge University to do his PhD at the Psychometrics Centre, one of the oldest institutions of this kind worldwide. Kosinski joined fellow student David Stillwell (now a lecturer at Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge) about a year after Stillwell had launched a little Facebook application in the days when the platform had not yet become the behemoth it is today. Their MyPersonality app enabled users to fill out different psychometric questionnaires, including a handful of psychological questions from the Big Five personality questionnaire ("I panic easily," "I contradict others"). Based on the evaluation, users received a "personality profile"—individual Big Five values—and could opt-in to share their Facebook profile data with the researchers.
Kosinski had expected a few dozen college friends to fill in the questionnaire, but before long, hundreds, thousands, then millions of people had revealed their innermost convictions. Suddenly, the two doctoral candidates owned the largest dataset combining psychometric scores with Facebook profiles ever to be collected.
[...]
Remarkably reliable deductions could be drawn from simple online actions. [...] merely on the basis of ten Facebook "likes."
[...]
Above all, however — and this is key — it also works in reverse: not only can psychological profiles be created from your data, but your data can also be used the other way round to search for specific profiles: all anxious fathers, all angry introverts, for example—or maybe even all undecided Democrats? Essentially, what Kosinski had invented was sort of a people search engine.
Unfortunately, for that Tech-Wiz inventor, his personality-profiling engine was co-opted by SCL, or Strategic Communication Laboratories (Mercer’s initial Data-mining AI company) — before Kosinski even knew what hit him. And the rest as they say, is Brexit history …
That last article is both very interesting, and very scary at the same time. If you don’t know what “Psychometrics” is about, you should definitely check it out. It is the Future. And it is here now.
Fast forward a year or so, and enter Kushner, Flynn, and Bannon — Stage Right.
To give you a concrete idea, how these “micro-targeting” Pysops work in practice, let me include this one last snippet (from the motherboard link), even though it stretches that pesky three-paragraph fair-use rule:
In the Miami district of Little Haiti, for instance, Trump's campaign provided inhabitants with news about the failure of the Clinton Foundation following the earthquake in Haiti, in order to keep them from voting for Hillary Clinton. This was one of the goals: to keep potential Clinton voters (which include wavering left-wingers, African-Americans, and young women) away from the ballot box, to "suppress" their vote, as one senior campaign official told Bloomberg in the weeks before the election. These "dark posts" — sponsored news-feed-style ads in Facebook timelines that can only be seen by users with specific profiles—included videos aimed at African-Americans in which Hillary Clinton refers to black men as predators, for example.
That is the dark-side of Micro-targeting — which works to target specific “Psychographic Profiles” (actually tens of thousands of similar profiles simultaneously) — and feed them a steady news-stream diet, of out-of-context negative “fake news” nuggets — to get as many of those targeted-Facebook users to Vote AGAINST someone, as conceivably possible. (Let the fact-checkers try to sort it out, Post mortem.)
Get enough, Socially-wired Citizens targeted closely-enough, with enough “Push-Button” Messages, and guess what? You WIN!
Thanks Big Data. Thanks for Brexit; Thank you even more, for Trump. WooHoo, enjoy your pay.
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Who fact-checks the News-nuggets, being so specifically targeted? (up til recently “No one”.)
Is this kind of Micro-targeting, with “Psychological-triggered Messaging” even Legal?
Well as the Medium.com article explains: “It depends.”
Nearly every single 2016 US presidential candidate has either sold, rented, or loaned their supporters’ personal information to other candidates, marketing companies, charities, or private firms. Marco Rubio alone made $504,651 by renting out his list of supporters. This sounds surprising but can be legal as long as the fine print below a campaign donation says that the data might be shared.
I suspect that people search engines like Kosinski’s, will soon make the “trading of supporter lists” a quaint relic of the past.
It is a Brave New Micro-world out there. Regulate, Innovate and Adapt, or get run-over …
That or “sound the alarm” to your Facebook Friends (and their Friends, and their Friends) … Knowledge is still power, in their “just-for-you” Messaging World. Sunshine still makes those Psyops Managers scatter to the hills, back to their alt-normal story-lines — where everything is still as ‘Right as Rain’.
(We don’t hear Steve Bannon talk about his Cambridge Analytica connection much, do we? Hopefully Michael Flynn is over-compensating for Steve, in that regard ...)
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There’s much more to this world-conquering Mercer story, about the connections between SCL and CA, about Mercer’s astounding Hedge-fund success, more about the deviousness of viewer-based Micro-targeting, more about Jared’s Data-bots operation — BUT I’m sure I’ve already WAY over taxed the “attention span” of the average reader. (Hell, I over taxed my own, about 2 hours ago.)
If you’ve read this far — I commend you, and I suggest you check out some of the Links. It took a few days to compile them, to make sense of them — to excerpt and re-stitch them into the time-line threads, explored here.
BUT whatever you do, don’t dare Recommend this Post — if you do, you know what happens next:
Cambridge Analytica puts you on their “Mercer-aware List” … a small but significant group of Netizens, that they are still researching how to crack, how to manipulate. As with every psy-profile group so far however, they have found: “We ALL have our Buttons”. Find that, and they’ve found an entré ...
Above all be wary out there Folks. Privacy is a thing of the past, in this billionaire age of political-cyber-warfare. Brexit proved it; the Election of Trump proved it: that this Psyops targeting thing really works!
May the most Users-connected Candidate win … Or at least convince them NOT to Vote for the other guy.