US Politics Mega-thread - Page 14

On March 22 2018 05:24 ticklishmusic wrote:
https://twitter.com/MLevineReports/status/976550709209550848

The plot thickens (it's already pretty thick, but we're approaching pitch drop levels of viscosity). Sessions says he didn't know about the investigation, though.

.. Mr Turnbull described how the company created the “Defeat Crooked Hilary” brand of attack ads, that were funded by the Make America Number 1 super-PAC and watched more than 30 million times during the campaign.

In one exchange Alexander Nix revealed the company used a secret self-destructing email system that leaves no trace. He said: “No-one knows we have it, and secondly we set our… emails with a self-destruct timer… So you send them and after they’ve been read, two hours later, they disappear. There’s no evidence, there’s no paper trail, there’s nothing.”

On March 22 2018 06:10 Excludos wrote:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/3/20/1750614/-Part-three-of-Cambridge-Analytica-report-makes-a-liar-out-of-everyone-on-the-Trump-campaign

Another dropped bomb.




Apparently there are 5 parts total. So 2 more to go

On March 22 2018 06:37 Introvert wrote:
Two weeks ago, everyone knew CA was massively over-hyped and made most of it's money by selling itself well. This hasn't changed, except now we know they are shady actors to boot (although their FB data gathering was hardly new). This looks more like it is just the latest "why we lost" excuse.

In spoiler is a thread by a NYT reporter talking about this:

+ Show Spoiler +

On March 22 2018 06:37 Introvert wrote:
Two weeks ago, everyone knew CA was massively over-hyped and made most of it's money by selling itself well. This hasn't changed, except now we know they are shady actors to boot (although their FB data gathering was hardly new). This looks more like it is just the latest "why we lost" excuse.

In spoiler is a thread by a NYT reporter talking about this:

+ Show Spoiler +

On March 22 2018 07:06 Excludos wrote:


This is the definition of strawman. Don't.. Literally no one has even mentioned the election results. This is a firm breaking the law on behalf of Donald Trump and his team by violating the privacy of millions upon millions of people. You should be outraged by this yourself, no matter where on the spectrum you lie. I think that deserves a little bit more than "Oh those silly libruls are excusing their loss again"

[T]he Obama team had a solution in place: a Facebook application that will transform the way campaigns are conducted in the future...

[T]he more than 1 million Obama backers who signed up for the app gave the campaign permission to look at their Facebook friend lists. In an instant, the campaign had a way to see the hidden young voters. Roughly 85% of those without a listed phone number could be found in the uploaded friend lists. What’s more, Facebook offered an ideal way to reach them. “People don’t trust campaigns. They don’t even trust media organizations,” says Goff. “Who do they trust? Their friends.”

The campaign called this effort targeted sharing. And in those final weeks of the campaign, the team blitzed the supporters who had signed up for the app with requests to share specific online content with specific friends simply by clicking a button. More than 600,000 supporters followed through with more than 5 million contacts, asking their friends to register to vote, give money, vote or look at a video designed to change their mind. A geek squad in Chicago created models from vast data sets to find the best approaches for each potential voter. “We are not just sending you a banner ad,” explains Dan Wagner, the Obama campaign’s 29-year-old head of analytics, who helped oversee the project. “We are giving you relevant information from your friends.”

Early tests of the system found statistically significant changes in voter behavior. People whose friends sent them requests to register to vote and to vote early, for example, were more likely to do so than similar potential voters who were not contacted. That confirmed a trend already noted in political-science literature: online social networks have the power to change voting behavior.