Slashdot Mirror
Did A Billionaire Harvest Big Data From Facebook To 'Hijack' Democracy? (theguardian.com)
Long-time Slashdot readers walterbyrd and whoever57 both submitted the same article about the mysterious data analytics company Cambridge Analytica and its activities with SCL Group, a 25-year-old military psyops company in the U.K. later bought by "secretive hedge fund billionaire" Robert Mercer. One former employee calls it "this dark, dystopian data company that gave the world Trump."
Facebook was the source of the psychological insights that enabled Cambridge Analytica to target individuals. It was also the mechanism that enabled them to be delivered on a large scale. The company also (perfectly legally) bought consumer datasets -- on everything from magazine subscriptions to airline travel -- and uniquely it appended these with the psych data to voter files... Finding "persuadable" voters is key for any campaign and with its treasure trove of data, Cambridge Analytica could target people high in neuroticism, for example, with images of immigrants "swamping" the country. The key is finding emotional triggers for each individual voter. Cambridge Analytica worked on campaigns in several key states for a Republican political action committee. Its key objective, according to a memo the Observer has seen, was "voter disengagement" and "to persuade Democrat voters to stay at home"... In the U.S., the government is bound by strict laws about what data it can collect on individuals. But, for private companies anything goes.
A branch of this company reportedly also received half the campaign budgets of four pro-Brexit campaign groups, and there's some dark talk about "military-funded technology that has been harnessed by a global plutocracy...being used to sway elections in ways that people can't even see." The article notes the two firms have plied their services in Russia as well as Lithuania and the Ukraine, and suggests that "we are in the midst of a massive land grab for power by billionaires via our data. Data which is being silently amassed, harvested and stored."
A branch of this company reportedly also received half the campaign budgets of four pro-Brexit campaign groups, and there's some dark talk about "military-funded technology that has been harnessed by a global plutocracy...being used to sway elections in ways that people can't even see." The article notes the two firms have plied their services in Russia as well as Lithuania and the Ukraine, and suggests that "we are in the midst of a massive land grab for power by billionaires via our data. Data which is being silently amassed, harvested and stored."
and it won't stop as long as these "persuadable" voters make their decisions based on facebook posts.
Or vapid, vacuous candidacies based on nothing more than having a vagina...
Or from being a lawyer. OK, she she was also a politician, but you're just a bigoted shit-wad.
You ignore HRC's series of scandals:
US Law - See Whitewater, Rose Law Firm billing records, etc.
International Relations - Russian Reset, Benghazi
Military Operations - Benghazi
Other Required Skills - Like failing to understand confidentiality markings at the level required of mailroom clerks at the State Department, refusal to use secured government email server, and insistence of having her lawyers personally scrub her email archive after office before choosing to comply with government records retention la2s?
You also understand she had to re-start her campaign due to lack of interest, her listening campaigns were a pathetic attempt to try and find a plausible reason for her to run for President, and her campaign's decision to completely ignore several of the "Blue Wall" states she needed to win during the general campaign - ignored, as in never visited once nominated.
Yeah, that's quite the candidate, I can't imagine why she lost the election it must be "the Russians", no wait, "Big Data", no wait "Sexism", no wait... All we know for sure is it wasn't her fault (It never is, it's always a "Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy", like the one that put Bill's Baby Batter on Monica's blue dress, then forced him to lie about it under oath in a federal court...
Ken