The Hysteria about Cambridge Analytica, the Marketing 'CAMAL' with Its Nose under the Political Tent

TODAY'S REAL NEWS IS ABOUT THE HPYE AROUND CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA. Sometimes I have to believe that somebody way up in the ProgDem heirarchy has a Hit List that is being used one-by-one to try to destroy Donald Trump and the GOP. The Hit List started with Trump's alleged sexual 'depravities,' went on to his 'collusion' with Russia to win the election, tried to portray him as "pschologically unfit" to be President, and then moved on to his 'obstruction' in the face of the Fake Mueller probe meant to bring down Trump and his presidency by whatever means Mueller could come up with. • And now -- ALL of these Hit List items having failed miserably, the next item on the Hit List is the preposterous proposal that somehow it is "illegal" for Trump to have used modern online social media age marketing data to target and appeal to his supporters to get out and vote. • • • CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA, PROGDEM HYSTERIA, AND OBAMA USE OF FACEBOOK. That is what the Cambridge Analytica fuss is all about when you cut out the ProgDem hysterics over the fact that Trump actually won the presidency and they are rabid in their attempts to bring him down. I am going to call Cambridge Analytica "CAMAL" -- it is after all the UK marketing camel that has its nose under the political tent. • Let's start with the National Review's article by Jim Geragthy titled "Is Cambridge Analytica Really an ‘Information Weapon’ in a ‘Data War’?" The article, published on Monday, begins by saying : "Assuming all the reporting is accurate, Cambridge Analytica used Facebook data that was supposed to be off-limits to it. The firm allegedly paid Cambridge professor Aleksandr Kogan to collect the data on Facebook users and claim it was being used for academic purposes; in reality, Kogan collected and passed along 50 million individual profiles that “could be matched to electoral rolls. It then used the test results and Facebook data to build an algorithm that could analyze individual Facebook profiles and determine personality traits linked to voting behavior." If all that is true, and it's as good a short summary as any, then, says Geraghty : "No doubt, this is a breach of contract. No doubt, this is unethical. This is going to generate slews of lawsuits. But does this really constitute manipulating the election, or a form of 'data war' or a new 'information weapon'? How is this significantly different from any other form of campaign messaging?" It isn't, says Geraghty : "Guys...it’s Facebook, not a Hypno-Ray or Loki’s staff. At the heart of this is the question of whether a Facebook ad or any kind of clever advertising can get you to do something you otherwise would not do. Sure, an image of delicious food can make you hungry, but does it make you go to the restaurant and eat? Does the car commercial showing the guy driving fast through an empty road in the wilderness make you buy the car? Or does it just persuade you that enjoying that experience is worth the cost of the car? I’ll put it to my generally right-of-center audience : Do you think there’s some sort of manipulative social-media messaging that could persuade you to vote for, say, Nancy Pelosi?" Then Geraghty asks the right question : "If you really think a decisive portion of the electorate can be easily manipulated into voting for a candidate by slick advertising...can there really be such a thing as a free and fair election? (This is how the term “sheeple” gets thrown around.) The subtext of the accusations around Cambridge Analytica is that for a significant portion of Americans, voting for Hillary Clinton was the 'rational' choice and some sort of sinister advertising manipulated them into making the 'irrational' choice of voting for Donald Trump." • Geraghty points out the silliness in the CAMAL hysteria : "Vox writes, 'Cambridge Analytica was also able to use this real-time information to determine which messages were resonating where and then shape Trump’s travel schedule around it. So, if there was a spike in clicks on an article about immigration in a county in Pennsylvania or Wisconsin, Trump would go there and give an immigration-focused speech.' Okay, except Trump gave immigration-focused speeches his entire campaign....Did someone really need reams of data from Facebook to conclude that blue-collar workers in Pennsylvania or Wisconsin would be worried about globalization, job security, and competition from underpriced foreign labor?" Geraghty gives another example of tried and true political marketing techniques : "Assume you’re running a campaign for a pro–Second Amendment candidate in Pennsylvania. You would go to Guns & Ammo and every gun-related publication that is sold in the state, and offer to purchase a list of their subscribers and mailing addresses in the state. Then you would start sending campaign literature touting your candidate’s commitment to gun rights to those addresses. Honest to goodness, folks, this was considered groundbreaking 14 years ago : Republican firms, including TargetPoint Consultants and National Media Inc., delved into commercial databases that pinpointed consumer buying patterns and television-watching habits to unearth such information as Coors beer and bourbon drinkers skewing Republican, brandy and cognac drinkers tilting Democrat; college football TV viewers were more Republican than those who watch professional football; viewers of Fox News were overwhelmingly committed to vote for Bush; homes with telephone caller ID tended to be Republican; people interested in gambling, fashion and theater tended to be Democratic. Surveys of people on these consumer data lists were then used to determine 'anger points' (late-term abortion, trial lawyer fees, estate taxes) that coincided with the Bush agenda for as many as 32 categories of voters, each identifiable by income, magazine subscriptions, favorite television shows and other 'flags.' Merging this data, in turn, enabled those running direct mail, precinct walking and phone bank programs to target each voter with a tailored message." • Then, Geraghty brings out the Big Gun -- OBAMA USED FACEBOOK : "You know who else focused on using Facebook and 'targeted sharing' and created models from data sets to specifically target different groups of voters? The 2012 Obama campaign ! The Obama team had a solution in place : a Facebook application that will transform the way campaigns are conducted in the future. For supporters, the app appeared to be just another way to digitally connect to the campaign. But to the Windy City number crunchers, it was a game changer. 'I think this will wind up being the most groundbreaking piece of technology developed for this campaign,' says Teddy Goff, the Obama campaign’s digital director. That’s because the 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.' " • The difference, says National Review's Geraghty is that "the Obama campaign persuaded people to use a particular app to reach out to their friends and they consented to the terms of the agreement, while Cambridge Analytica allegedly used data that was obtained fraudulently. If it comes to that, prosecute them for fraud for claiming the data was for academic research when it was being used for private campaign messaging purposes....After all, it’s not like advertising can make us start doing things we otherwise would never do and say things we otherwise would never say, with just a snap, crackle, pop." • • • THE GUARDIAN TOUTS WYLIE. The tell-all wunderkid CHRISTOPHER WYLIE spilled his tormented guts to the Guardian in the person of writer-novelist Carole Cadwalladr. Wylie, who is at the proposed "center" of the CAMAL exposée, told the Guardian : "Cambridge Analytica will try to pick at whatever mental weakness or vulnerability that we think you have and try to warp your perception of what’s real around you.” You can access and read the whole Guardian tale of Wylie's IT torment at < https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/data-war-whistleblower-christopher-wylie-faceook-nix- bannon-trump >. Suffice it to say here that Wylie is 28, has shocking pink hair, is gay, a vegan, and alleges he was abused as a child. The Guardian's thumbnail biog of him says : "Wylie grew up in British Columbia and as a teenager he was diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia....After many months, I [Cadwalladr] learn the terrible, dark backstory that throws some light on his determination, and which he discusses candidly. At six, while at school, Wylie was abused by a mentally unstable person. The school tried to cover it up, blaming his parents, and a long court battle followed. Wylie’s childhood and school career never recovered. His parents -- his father is a doctor and his mother is a psychiatrist -- were wonderful, he says. 'But they knew the trajectory of people who are put in that situation, so I think it was particularly difficult for them, because they had a deeper understanding of what that does to a person long term.' He says he grew up listening to psychologists discuss him in the third person, and, aged 14, he successfully sued the British Columbia Ministry of Education and forced it to change its inclusion policies around bullying....What he cannot tolerate is bullying....He left school at 16 without a single qualification. Yet at 17, he was working in the office of the leader of the Canadian opposition; at 18, he went to learn all things data from OBAMA’s national director of targeting, which he then introduced to Canada for the Liberal party. At 19, he taught himself to code, and in 2010, age 20, he came to London to study law at the London School of Economics." Politics, says the Guardian, "is also where he feels most comfortable. He hated school, but as an intern in the Canadian parliament he discovered a world where he could talk to adults and they would listen. He was the kid who did the internet stuff and within a year he was working for the leader of the opposition." The Guardian calls Wylie "clever, funny, bitchy, profound, intellectually ravenous, compelling. A master storyteller. A politicker. A data science nerd." • Read the Guardian article if you want to dive into the troubled mind of a young man who is apparently an IT genie of sorts. You will find all the "usual suspects" dragged out by the hyper-left Guardian to smear Trump -- Steve Bannon, Robert Mercer, Rebecca Mercer, Alexander Nix, Michal Kosinski, David Stillwell, the UK's Conservative and Liberal Democrat Parties, Brexit, SCL Group, SCL Elections, the UK Ministry of Defense, the US Department of Defense, Mark Block, Dr Aleksandr Kogan, Lukoil, Russia, Putin, Vagit Alekperov, Bill Browder, Silicon Valley -- AND the Big Guy at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Donald Trump. The article reads like a novel, spinning a fascinating but not very believable story about the evils of political marketing 21st century style. • • • LIMBAUGH EXPLAINS CAMAL. Bob Unruh wrote a piece for WND on Tuesday, quoting Rush Limbaugh's explanation of the Cambridge Analytics exposée : "Opponents of President Trump have tried the 'resist' movement, without really altering his agenda. They’ve tried claiming his campaign colluded with Russia in 2016, but there’s been no evidence. They’ve tried portraying him as a bumbling stooge who doesn’t understand the legislative process, the Washington swamp or politics. Now, they’re suggesting that he broke some inexact boundary by using statistics and analytics in his campaign, apparently obtained from Facebook users. Reuters jumped in to attack, stating: 'Facebook Inc’s shares fell more than 4 percent...after media reports that a political consultancy that worked on President Donald Trump’s campaign gained inappropriate access to data on 50 million Facebook users.' The report said even 'the head of European Parliament said on Monday that EU lawmakers will investigate whether the data misuse has taken place, adding the allegation is an unacceptable violation of citizens’ privacy rights.' ” Limbaugh asks : "But what really was the 'inappropriate access' or the 'data misuse'?....Facebook is not a victim here, and Cambridge Analytica is by no means the only entity which has Facebook’s own data collection. Facebook collects the data. Cambridge Analytica is like any other outfit that found a way to access it, and it’s not illegal." Limbaugh pointed out that all Facebook users who agree to participate in a survey sign disclaimers. • Reuters reported that CAMAL, "working for" President Trump’s campaign, “gained inappropriate access to data on 50 million Facebook users. One Wall Street analyst said the reports raised ‘systemic problems’ with Facebook’s business model and a number said it could spur far deeper regulatory scrutiny of the platform. Analysts said it created a 'potentially...serious public relations ‘black eye’ for the company, and its value dropped by billions because of the episode.” • Limbaugh, however, said that whatever Cambridge did in obtaining and analyzing data isn’t anything different from what other companies have done already for other campaigns : “Folks, the bottom line is, it isn’t any big deal because it’s nothing unique. The Democrats have perfected using the personal data stored by internet companies for I don’t know how long. And Google leads the league in it, and they’re in bed with the Democrats and always have been. Facebook is number two. They’re in bed with the Democrats. It’s the modern day equivalent of high-tech grassroots politics. It’s all about finding out who your voters are and where they are and what they respond to, which politics and parties have been doing for as long as there have been both. But the Democrats, you see, and Obama, the brilliant, the cool, the sophisticated Obama, and Eric Schmidt and Sergey Brin and Larry Page and all these high quality leftists, they exclusively own that sector.” • Limbaugh pointed out a 2013 article in the New York Times that reported the Obama campaign used as much information as it could obtain about voters, showing what they were watching and to what they would respond : “The system gave Obama a significant advantage over Mitt Romney, according to Democrats and many Republicans....Using data wasn’t new for the Obama strategists. The 2008 campaign developed the most sophisticated system to date to identify tens of millions of voters and place them into useful categories: those most likely to vote Republican, who would be ignored; those supporting Obama -- and how likely they were to vote. That system -- based on a complicated scoring method that relied on the processing of reams of data -- was first devised by an outside consultant, Ken Strasma....The point is that in 2013 the New York Times is 'praising Obama and praising the geniuses on Obama’s tech team' for being able to figure out how to data mine from Google and Facebook to advance Obama’s agenda. 'So the very same thing that media is trying to make you think is criminal activity, they were praising Obama to the hilt in countless newspaper stories all during 2013." • Rush Limbaugh concluded : "“It was not a leak! It was not a hack! There is nothing illegal here. The Russians are a bunch of amateur pikers compared to what Cambridge Analytica was doing. But Cambridge Analytica is also pikers compared to what Obama was doing with Eric Schmidt and the Google guys who practically had a satellite office in the West Wing during the Obama administration....Everybody was getting into Facebook data because that’s why Facebook collects it! There was no hack. There was no breach....Cambridge Analytica...obtained their data by doing exactly what other Facebook app developers did. It’s nothing unique. It’s nothing exclusive, and it’s nothing out of the ordinary.” • Limbaugh blasted ProgDems who were demanding investigations : “Obama gets praised as being a genius for doing this exact thing five years ago! The paper that proclaimed Obama a genius in two or three different stories is now writing of the same kind of operation as almost criminal when it’s done on behalf of Donald Trump.” • One person seems ot agree with Rush Limbaugh -- Carol Davidsen, former director of integration and media analytics for OBAMA FOR AMERICA, who said in a string of tweets that the 2012 campaign led Facebook to "suck out the whole social graph" and target potential voters. They would then use that data to do things like "append their email lists.” Davidsen says Facebook found out but allowed the mining to continue : “They came to office in the days following election recruiting & were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side.” • • • CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA RESPONDS. CAMAL now finds itself in the middle of a Fake political firestorm over 'information warfare' that is being used to influence the electoral process. CAMAL is accused of harvesting Facebook user data to profile voters that that were ultimately targeted by the Trump campaign, which spent over $6 million on information obtained by the firm -- $6 million is a low figure for such market data research. CAMAL issued a statement last Saturday, saying it "fully complies" with Facebook's terms of service, and was working with the site to resolve the issue. • Of course, this won't stop the ProgDem outcry -- Virginia Democrat Senator Mark Warner, one of the loudest voices in the debate about online political advertising, said the Cambridge Analytica-Facebook spat was indicative of a market that's "essentially the Wild West" of advertising. "Whether it's allowing Russians to purchase political ads, or extensive micro-targeting based on ill-gotten user data, it's clear that, left unregulated, this market will continue to be prone to deception and lacking in transparency," Warner said on Saturday. "This is another strong indication of the need for Congress to quickly pass the Honest Ads Act to bring transparency and accountability to online political advertisements." • Paul Grewal, Facebook's vice president and deputy general counsel, says : "All parties involved -- including the SCL Group/Cambridge Analytica, Christopher Wylie and [thisisyourdigitallife creator] Aleksandr Kogan -- certified to us that they destroyed the data in question. In light of new reports that the data was not destroyed, we are suspending these three parties from Facebook, pending further information. We will take whatever steps are required to see that the data in question is deleted once and for all -- and take action against all offending parties." Cambridge Analytica says no information was used in the service of Trump's presidential ambitions : "No data from GSR was used by Cambridge Analytica as part of the services it provided to the Donald Trump 2016 presidential campaign. Cambridge Analytica only receives and uses data that has been obtained legally and fairly." • Here is Cambridge Analytica's full statement : "Cambridge Analytica fully complies with Facebook's terms of service and is currently in touch with Facebook following its recent statement that it had suspended the company from its platform, in order to resolve this matter as quickly as possible. Cambridge Analytica's Commercial and Political divisions use social media platforms for outward marketing, delivering data-led and creative content to targeted audiences. They do not use or hold data from Facebook profiles. In 2014, we contracted a company led by a seemingly reputable academic at an internationally-renowned institution to undertake a large scale research project in the United States. This company, Global Science Research (GSR), was contractually committed by us to only obtain data in accordance with the UK Data Protection Act and to seek the informed consent of each respondent. GSR was also contractually the Data Controller (as per Section 1(1) of the Data Protection Act) for any collected data. GSR obtained Facebook data via an API provided by Facebook. When it subsequently became clear that the data had not been obtained by GSR in line with Facebook's terms of service, Cambridge Analytica deleted all data received from GSR. We worked with Facebook over this period to ensure that they were satisfied that we had not knowingly breached any of Facebook's terms of service and also provided a signed statement to confirm that all Facebook data and their derivatives had been deleted. No data from GSR was used by Cambridge Analytica as part of the services it provided to the Donald Trump 2016 presidential campaign. Cambridge Analytica only receives and uses data that has been obtained legally and fairly. Our robust data protection policies comply with US, international, European Union, and national regulations." • • • DEAR READERS, political parties and candidates have gathered consumer-research data and used it to target voters for decades. Remember when we were told that Democrats are likely to prefer clear spirits, like vodka or gin, while Republicans are tend to favor brown liquors, like bourbon or scotch. Companies keep track of their customers, what they buy, how much they spend, and where they live, to help with future marketing efforts. Most of them are perfectly happy to sell that information to anyone willing to buy it. And, politicians do buy it. Would a reasonable candidate spend hard-come-by political donations to send messages to voters who will never vote for him or her? I certainly hope not. That's our contributions they would be wasting. • And, if you think that Facebook and Google don't have a profile of you that they refine and sell to advertisers who want to reach you, just consider why you get the ads you see when you're on Facebook or Google. Why, after you hit even once an ad on Facebook or Google, does that ad follows you, ad nauseum, online, messing up the pages you are reading and becoming obnoxious to the point that you vow never to click on that company again or buy even one item from them. That is what Facebook was allowing Cambridge Analytica to do -- use your Facebook profile, improved with their own political marketing profiles, to target you as a voter with the right message. Simple. Not very different from the days when where you went to church or school or worked was used to target you by Republicans and Democrats. It is called Political Marketing 101. • But, it has now become the latest Hit List item the ProgDems are trying to use to erase Donald Trump's presidency. And, it has taken on a life of its own as politicians in the UK and the US see media points to be made in "finding the facts." Cambridge Analytica also moved late today, announcing it has suspended CEO Alexander Nix pending the results of an ongoing investigation that it improperly accessed 50 million Facebook accounts. The CAMAL statement read : "In the view of the Board, Mr. Nix’s recent comments secretly recorded by Channel 4 and other allegations do not represent the values or operations of the firm and his suspension reflects the seriousness with which we view this violation." • Tomorrow, we'll take a look at different aspects of the affair involving the CAMAL with its nose under the political tent.