To have any shot at sorting thru everything that went into the American election in 2016, we'll have to make a real attempt to separate the means from the ends.
And we have to figure out who the players are -
- the people who vote
- the people those people vote for or against
- the people who manipulate both the vote-casters and the vote-getters.
And we have to make more of an effort to figure out what the objectives really are.
I've been going on about The Daddy State for quite a while, but I think it's more than that - actually, more than that and a lot less than that at the same time.
The short version of my hypothesis boils it down to:
This is not government - this is a fucking robbery.
And the way the thing was set up is the key to understanding how ideology is co-opted; used as a decoy; and becomes the proverbial License To Steal, all under the guise of Rugged Individualism and Patriotic Zeal, or whatever turns the crank of the voter you're trying to motivate.
There's also the little wrinkle of having to separate the shit that's actually illegal from the shit that's just run-of-the-mill Rat-Fucking.
Nothing particularly new about any of that, but there is definitely a lot that's new about the way the bad actors have been going about all that bad acting.
The chief executive of SCL U.S. (the U.S. branch of the parent company of Cambridge Analytica) worked for Michael Flynn for 6 years. SCL got a Pentagon contract because of that relationship, Nigel Oakes told @EmmaLBriant https://t.co/MAAB8VuUss pic.twitter.com/308FdKwOGa— Natasha Bertrand (@NatashaBertrand) April 18, 2018
by Emma L. Briant, University of Essex:
Due to my expertise on this topic, I was compelled by the UK Electoral Commission,
Information Commissioners Office and the Chair of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport
Committee's Fake News Inquiry Damian Collins MP to submit information and research
relating to campaigns by SCL, Cambridge Analytica and other actors. Statements from
my research interviews with staff at Cambridge Analytica (CA), SCL personnel or
otherwise related to their campaigns were submitted in evidence to the Inquiry. It is
essential therefore that I comment on and contextualize what are academic research
interviews. I discuss the evidence I submitted here in three accessible explanatory texts.
The interviews submitted in evidence address key questions and illustrate the unethical
nature of this company’s practices. Cambridge Analytica promotes itself as a “data-
driven” company and there has been much debate over how data was obtained and
used in the US election, including use of personality tests and ‘psychographic targeting’.
Regarding this, the Director of Business Development Brittany Kaiser said, “What they used on certain campaigns and what they didn't, it's hard to say, but all of our data, you know, that [...] was used for everything, whether or not we actually did psychographic groupings or not, it doesn't change the fact that we undertook to those quant surveys and that was put into our data set. And then some of those, some of those, uh, variables were used in our models. So in general you would say everything was used in everything but [...] not to the extent that I think some people had prophesized.” (Interview: Kaiser/Briant, 4th March 2018).
We have an awful lot more shit to shovel thru before we find the pony.
Information Commissioners Office and the Chair of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport
Committee's Fake News Inquiry Damian Collins MP to submit information and research
relating to campaigns by SCL, Cambridge Analytica and other actors. Statements from
my research interviews with staff at Cambridge Analytica (CA), SCL personnel or
otherwise related to their campaigns were submitted in evidence to the Inquiry. It is
essential therefore that I comment on and contextualize what are academic research
interviews. I discuss the evidence I submitted here in three accessible explanatory texts.
The interviews submitted in evidence address key questions and illustrate the unethical
nature of this company’s practices. Cambridge Analytica promotes itself as a “data-
driven” company and there has been much debate over how data was obtained and
used in the US election, including use of personality tests and ‘psychographic targeting’.
Regarding this, the Director of Business Development Brittany Kaiser said, “What they used on certain campaigns and what they didn't, it's hard to say, but all of our data, you know, that [...] was used for everything, whether or not we actually did psychographic groupings or not, it doesn't change the fact that we undertook to those quant surveys and that was put into our data set. And then some of those, some of those, uh, variables were used in our models. So in general you would say everything was used in everything but [...] not to the extent that I think some people had prophesized.” (Interview: Kaiser/Briant, 4th March 2018).
We now know from Chris Wylie that data they used was harvested in unethical ways and hoarded to analyse, ‘microtarget’, and change audience behaviour, all enabled by Facebook’s business model. CA Chief data officer Alex Tayler has explained that psychological analysis is used for not just dividing up an audience along the lines of gender or what you’ve bought, but along the lines of the disposition – the psychological profile of those audiences.”
Regulation is failing to keep up with the rapid progression of coordinated data-driven propaganda powered by AI and augmented with insights from neuroscience and psychology, this should raise alarm for us all.
We have an awful lot more shit to shovel thru before we find the pony.
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