Since it's possible to persuade an ordinary person (inasmuch as there is such a thing) to murder an innocent in the space of one hour, the answer to the headline must violate Betteridge's Law.
At the start of the year, Prof Carroll requested that Cambridge Analytica provide details on the personal information it had collected on him. What he received was both worrying and intriguing. It included rankings on 10 issues - giving him a three out of 10 on gun rights, and seven out of 10 on national security importance, alongside the suggestion that he was unlikely to vote Republican.
"It seemed so invasive. This was about predicting my behaviour without my knowledge or consent," he told the BBC. But it was also confusing. The data was unclear - was the three out of 10 a good or bad thing? Did gun rights mean more or less gun control? And it also seemed rather brief.
"The chief executive of Cambridge Analytica had boasted that the firm had 4,000 to 5,000 data points on most US voters but what they gave me was a dozen at most," he said. He felt that the company was withholding information, which gave him grounds to mount a legal challenge in London's High Court. Cambridge Analytica has until April 5 to respond.
Building psychographic profiles of individual voters based on their lifestyles and preferences could be hugely powerful, thinks Chris Sumner, research director at the Online Privacy Foundation. "It is a huge problem," he told the BBC. The power of emotional advertising is well-known and drives a lot of decisions but right now there is less regulation on online political campaigns than on a marketing campaign for toothpaste."
His group replicated the methods of psychographic profiling over two years, firstly examining differences in personality traits, thinking styles and cognitive biases between voters in the UK's 2016 EU referendum and then devising their own campaign to test whether it might be possible to identify, target and influence voters.
"We found that people behaved as we predicted they would. If you get the messages right they can be very powerful indeed. Messaging works and is really effective - and can nudge people one way or the other."
Task for later : look up more details on this. Numbers as to how effective targeted messages can be would be extremely interesting.
Seth Alexander Thevoz, a political historian from Oxford University, is not convinced that the UK's political parties are currently using such sophisticated methods.
"We found that political ads aren't that accurate," he told the BBC. He explained that ads intended to target people in specific geographical areas were sent to people living in a completely different part of the country. "The things that Cambridge Analytica claims to be able to do, we haven't seen that slick an operation in the UK. At least not yet." he said.
The Conservative Party reportedly spent £1.2m on digital advertising during the 2015 general election, according to the Electoral Commission. Labour spent £160,000 and the Liberal Democrats £22,245. Virtually all of this money went into advertising on Facebook.
Major caveat : this doesn't preclude CA from involvement in the referendum or from the overspending scandal. But it points to an interesting inconsistency as to when the government use such systems.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-43489408
Someone wants something from Zuck. We don't know what. But Zuck in negotiating. And that is the whole story. The whole CA affair is just part of this negotiating. Nothing more.
ReplyDeleteBTW I have performed CA test, gave them access to my FB account etc. Results was so disappointed I was just sad. My profile made by AI was just completely failure.
not really, but they definitely can activate a voter to get to the voting station. It is a bit like marketing: if you are designing a campaign you consider reach and selling points. You rarely have the money and the coverage to actually convince people to buy, you rather try to inform(by introducing certain emotional spectrum that resonates with their personality) them that buying what you sell is somewhat better than buying the same thing that the other sell.
ReplyDeleteIf you are into mass media as a service and producing you can actually grow buyers by enforcing certain points over time while suppressing others. The latter however is not a campaign and if we consider the media landscape today it isn't really a conspiracy.
Consider a car advertisement as an example- no matter how nice and well targeted the add it will never make you go and buy the car. If you are about to change cars however it can make a difference(only if the price range is relevant for you as buyer). This is where brand profiling and brand building comes into play. If you rely on a single add to improve sales you are fucked simply because statistically speaking the car market is not that volatile, so what you do is set up a line of adds that ensure your brand builds up both emotionally, technically and financially to the type of buyers you are trying to turn on your side.
Sticking with the car example this is where you introduce variety of products- cheap and disposable for young people that are willing to buy their first car, have less money, and are expecting to grow, moderate but robust for middle aged people that are searching for stability and return and expensive and extravagant for people that want to show-off.
There is a whole spectrum here especially if we dive in the concrete political landscape and the dynamics that it introduced, but regardless of the details that the dive will add, the statement that profiling wins elections is over-exaggerated at best.
Targeted messaging is actually so effective that I think it should be regulated to reduce the tactics allowed. In PsyOps we used broad spectrum messages and found that to be effective enough to convert over 2000 Iraqi soldiers to noncombatants (voluntarily surrendered themselves as prisoners) in the span of a couple of months in the Persian Gulf War. That is the result of a single PsyOp company's work - less than 100 people. And that was using generic messaging. Other PsyOp units achieved similar success rates.
ReplyDeleteTailoring to specific targets (like CA was using) is orders of magnitude more effective, and the biggest reason it is used is that the user is usually unaware of the behavior change. Of course I don't have numbers on PsyOps tactics success rates (due to classified status), but medical research has been conducted on targeted message effectiveness in disease prevention, and can be reviewed for a somewhat parallel strategy.
https://academic.oup.com/epirev/article/32/1/56/496582
(Altimetric 97%, journal rank 99%)
https://www.inderscienceonline.com/doi/abs/10.1504/IJMC.2009.02244 (No altimetric, but 190 citations)
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2213858713700676 (Altimetric 97%)
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277953613004474 (Altimetric 83%)
The above are all strongly cited studies, and that list if far from exhaustive.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=targeted+messaging+effectiveness
It is interesting that people are trying to patent such targeted messaging:
https://patents.google.com/patent/US20130024524A1/en
Cliff Bramlett interesting input. Thanks.
ReplyDeleteCliff Bramlett Wow, thanks ! I'll take a look at those as time permits.
ReplyDeleteI've long thought of the tactics of CA and associated companies as being more nudges than anything else : blameworthy, in that they might make a statistically significant contribution that could potentially swing the result in a close contest, but not really responsible for the closeness of the result in the first place. Since the revelations of how much government involvement there is with such activities, as well as seeing Derren Brown in full flow (https://plus.google.com/u/0/+RhysTaylorRhysy/posts/DUBMNo9PFZj), I'm beginning to seriously rethink that.
Rhys Taylor, you're correct that their messages are "nudges" but what many people don't realize is how far those nudges take a person's subconscious reactions. Even skeptics can be susceptible, though they do gain a level of immunity through knowledge of the manipulation tactics, and are more likely to notice the results (and can then correct them).
ReplyDelete