<story><title>New Cambridge Analytica Leaks</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/06/facebook-data-misuse-and-voter-manipulation-back-in-the-frame-with-latest-cambridge-analytica-leaks/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cm2012</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m a professional FB marketer and have managed both large budgets for private companies and also done political campaigns. I &lt;i&gt;guarantee&lt;/i&gt; the trump campaign doesn&amp;#x27;t use the low quality Cambridge Analytica scraped data in their targeting. They either use voter file records or lookalikes (like everyone else does). All CA data so released so far has been useless, untargeted stuff.&lt;p&gt;Think about where the data originally came from. People in 2015 downloaded an app, and the app scraped their friends lists. You know what&amp;#x27;s better than targeting 87 mil loosely connected people? Using the FB algorithm, which targets 330m much, much more accurately and with more connections!</text></item><item><author>shadowgovt</author><text>Probably the most useful takeaway from CA&amp;#x27;s approach is that it&amp;#x27;s useful to realize how malleable opinions are of large swaths of &amp;quot;independent&amp;quot; voters. Ad experts and entertainment companies have known this for decades, but I get the sense the average American citizen still thinks of themselves as a free and independent thinker and not a product of their environment.&lt;p&gt;Problem is, even if they are a free and independent thinker, voting populations are large enough that the &amp;quot;average is the outcome&amp;quot; phenomenon comes into play, and voters are on average demonstrably vulnerable to coercion. Not enough to flip people&amp;#x27;s opinions 180 degrees, but enough to, say, get a reality TV star elected over a politician with a checkered history (that has itself been subject to decades of effort and millions spent to make said history checkered).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>SeanAppleby</author><text>My understanding is that the most significant nonconventional heuristic that Cambridge Analytica got from FB data and exploited was by using FB like data to approximate OCEAN personality scores for almost all voting Americans using this technique [1], and then targeting correlations between people&amp;#x27;s big five ratings and their succeptibility to differnet types of marketing, such as targetingpeople high in neuroticism with emotionally charged ads, generally meant to instill fear. Am I off base?&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.aaai.org&amp;#x2F;ocs&amp;#x2F;index.php&amp;#x2F;ICWSM&amp;#x2F;ICWSM13&amp;#x2F;paper&amp;#x2F;view&amp;#x2F;6179&amp;#x2F;6311&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.aaai.org&amp;#x2F;ocs&amp;#x2F;index.php&amp;#x2F;ICWSM&amp;#x2F;ICWSM13&amp;#x2F;paper&amp;#x2F;view&amp;#x2F;...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>New Cambridge Analytica Leaks</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/06/facebook-data-misuse-and-voter-manipulation-back-in-the-frame-with-latest-cambridge-analytica-leaks/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cm2012</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m a professional FB marketer and have managed both large budgets for private companies and also done political campaigns. I &lt;i&gt;guarantee&lt;/i&gt; the trump campaign doesn&amp;#x27;t use the low quality Cambridge Analytica scraped data in their targeting. They either use voter file records or lookalikes (like everyone else does). All CA data so released so far has been useless, untargeted stuff.&lt;p&gt;Think about where the data originally came from. People in 2015 downloaded an app, and the app scraped their friends lists. You know what&amp;#x27;s better than targeting 87 mil loosely connected people? Using the FB algorithm, which targets 330m much, much more accurately and with more connections!</text></item><item><author>shadowgovt</author><text>Probably the most useful takeaway from CA&amp;#x27;s approach is that it&amp;#x27;s useful to realize how malleable opinions are of large swaths of &amp;quot;independent&amp;quot; voters. Ad experts and entertainment companies have known this for decades, but I get the sense the average American citizen still thinks of themselves as a free and independent thinker and not a product of their environment.&lt;p&gt;Problem is, even if they are a free and independent thinker, voting populations are large enough that the &amp;quot;average is the outcome&amp;quot; phenomenon comes into play, and voters are on average demonstrably vulnerable to coercion. Not enough to flip people&amp;#x27;s opinions 180 degrees, but enough to, say, get a reality TV star elected over a politician with a checkered history (that has itself been subject to decades of effort and millions spent to make said history checkered).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mumblemumble</author><text>Is FB making their raw data public, though?&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s a strategy&amp;#x2F;tactics divide to consider. Relying on FB&amp;#x27;s targeting algorithms is tactical - that&amp;#x27;ll give you great targeting once the time comes to execute your campaign.&lt;p&gt;But CA data, even if noisy, has been exfiltrated out from under privacy controls, so that you can get a much more direct look at it. That allows an analyst to get a more detailed sense of what social networks actually look like. I imagine that is more useful for figuring out what kinds of people you should be targeting in the first place, in order to maximize the leverage of your campaign.</text></comment>