(Spoiler alert) These guys are taking credit for Trump's victory in 2016 because of their ability to target on-line media toward undecided voters which they say tipped the scale for Trump. The men shown here are pleased with their ability to inject ideas into the social fabric with virtually no record of having done so.
Okay. Is that illegal? Based on all those books in the library, I'm going to suggest that disseminating ideas through words and pictures is not illegal (or even out of the ordinary). Did this make any difference in the 2016 USA election? Possibly, but I don't see how the effect of this is any different from ordinary political advertising. I worked briefly for a political ad agency that specialized in 1-page mailers targeted to specific neighborhoods during specific elections (*). Did these mailers turn the tide for the incumbent? I don't know. Maybe. But I assure you my bosses took credit for the win.
So, assuming these Cambridge Analytica guys are not completely full of shit (a big assumption, actually), is this illegal activity? Maybe, but let's dig deeper into their methods.
Here's an interview with a Cambridge Analytica insider (Christopher Wylie):
So they created an app (well, they paid someone else to develop it, so not even proprietary technology--sheesh!), that collects the Facebook profiles of the friends of the users of the app. Is that illegal (**)? Aren't Facebook profiles out there for free to be collected? Data collection of public profiles doesn't strike me as illegal, indeed all they did was expedite the ability to collect the data. And how many profiles did they actually collect and how important was it to the mission? This whistleblower doesn't seem to know.
So the collection of the data doesn't seem illegal, what they did with the data doesn't seem illegal, so what just got exposed here?
Social media allows people to communicate with each other on-line in clumps, such that the exponential effect of your friends and their friends and the friends of their friends can get very large very quickly. Mining all of that data can give you a big pile of information and what Cambridge Analytica seems to have done is create a method for quickly piling up Facebook profiles. (I'm going to ignore the sidebar about private messages because Wylie is not specific about how that is even possible or what that info yielded) This amount of info is fine for creating big broad abstractions but I'd suggest it's of virtually no use to get people to vote a certain way. You can pick out which voters are more important than others (hardly an exact science, but it could be useful for targeting your message) and then pummel them with the types of ads you want them to be susceptible to (which incidentally is what Facebook itself is doing to you all day every day). But if that were actually effective then Coke would've run Pepsi out of business years ago (or vice versa).
How is any of this out of the ordinary? How is any of this illegal? How does any of this relate to Donald Trump (or Hillary Clinton, for that matter, who was surely using some other company that wasn't good, I presume)?
The candidate hires people to do all this political stuff. The candidate hires people to tell him what speech to give to what audience, for example, or which donors are more likely to give up big bucks and which should just be ignored. The candidate hires people to print handbills and bumper stickers and then distribute them in different times and places. The candidate doesn't do any of this stuff--indeed, it's better if they don't really understand how this stuff works.
And does it work? Well Cambridge Analytica is eager to make people think this system works. Remember: Cambridge Analytica gets paid for what it can make people think it can do, not for what it actually does....which is virtually impossible to detect--by its own design! Perfect for conspiracy theorists (and dimwitted but extremely wealthy political candidates).
Meanwhile, the FBI is also probing college basketball and getting splashy headlines about shoe companies and assistant coaches paying for players to go to certain schools and sign with certain agents, managers, etc. Why do I bring this up? Because college coaches are similarly insulated from the recruiting tactics of their underlings and boosters (over whom the coaches have no control whatsoever). The coach is given a list of players to pursue and puts on his best salesman smile to greet the parents in the living room. The money that changes hands never goes through the head coach (it better not anyway!). We all know money changes hands...this is hardly surprising, right?
College sports is thoroughly corrupt, it always has been and we know this. Like politics, college sports has a framework that has been in place for years that is thoroughly corrupt and everyone has always known it. This is not a grand conspiracy theory, this is just the way of things: players don't always get paid....but some do.
But if the corruption itself is always meant to skew competitive balance, then how did this happen:
UMBC 74-54 Virginia
Why aren't we blaming Putin for this? This is waaaaaay more shocking than Trump defeating Hillary! And waaaaay more out of the ordinary than any of the shenanigans so far reported in the 2016 election--that was a 135-game winning streak that went down.
Look, social media is full of nonsense messages from unknown sources. So is the Bible, so is the Encyclopedia Britannica, so is virtually any history book ever written and your daily horoscope. Even well known stories sometimes turn out to be mostly false, such as this new investigation into the Tulip Mania of the 1630s shows (https://theconversation.com/tulip-mania-the-classic-story-of-a-dutch-financial-bubble-is-mostly-wrong-91413). The opposite happens too: the Iliad and the Odyssey were thought to be merely fanciful works of imagination until Heinrich Schliemann dredged up evidence of just such a battle in ancient Troy.
The difference now is there are more people than ever before spreading more versions of "truth" than ever before and more people listening to what everyone else is saying. There's more content for more audience and ever larger emotions that must go into it all. We all know what a viral video is, the concept by now is well-ingrained. Still my favorite:
Rather than proving collusion--or even criminality--during the 2016 election, this shows me that that was as perfectly normal an election as we've ever had in this country. This isn't out of the ordinary at all, this is just how we do things. I still believe--more firmly than ever!--that the reason Donald Trump is president is because the American people went to the polls and voted for him. I still don't know why, maybe crappy viral videos on Facebook is the answer. I doubt it but I suppose its possible. But even if that were true...so what? How is this different or criminal? Did we get into the Spanish-American War based on great information? Did we really understand the implications of the San Francisco Gold Rush or the Mexican War or the brokered Democratic Convention of 1852? Why on earth did Americans vote for Richard Nixon or Benjamin Harrison or Warren G. Harding? Who knows? People do weird shit.
Personally I think these Cambridge Analytica guys are just a bunch of shit talkin' capitalists. They get paid to help candidates do stuff that candidates typically know nothing about, thus these guys are bragging about their achievements when I'm not convinced they achieved anything at all. (***) This is the digital version of alchemy. Don't forget: for hundreds of years the best educated minds of the Western world spent their time trying to convert lead into gold...didn't work. Smart people do stupid shit, too. Furthermore, this does not prove collusion with Donald Trump (in fact, I'd say it proves the exact opposite) or Vladimir Putin (who I'm guessing had never heard of Cambridge Analytica until BBC4's "expose"). I can't help thinking this investigation is just a grand effort of sublimation, this is the gov'ts way of helping the citizenry to ignore the fact that we spend way too much time on Facebook.
As for the 2016 election: hey, don't blame me, I voted for Grumpy Cat.
(*) The run-off of the 1999 San Francisco mayor's race to be precise, which you can read about here: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_mayoral_election,_1999). Hmmm....the Wikipedia page doesn't mention soft money coming in from Sweden, but I heard tales about it at the time.
(**) He does suggest that they were also getting "some" private messages, though he doesn't explain how that happened or how many people were affected by this or how they used the information collected. This is almost surely illegal but doesn't seem to have been the key to any of their technical successes.
(***) Isn't the lesson here that a 3rd party can pick out states with enough electoral votes, then cherry pick the 4 or 5 things those districts have in common and then groom a candidate to say nothing but those things? I presume you wouldn't even need the whole states, just a bunch of districts within those states that could turn the whole electoral count. Isn't that what Cambridge Analytica basically saying that they just did?
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