Leaked: Cambridge Analytica's blueprint for Trump victory

[MelissaB]

Two days ago, we revealed Brittany Kaiser introduced Cambridge Analytica employees to Israeli hackers. Today, she leaks the company's blueprint for the Trump campaign to @PaulLewis & @paulhilder. Interesting play, Brittany.

Link to tweet

Leaked: Cambridge Analytica's blueprint for Trump victory

Exclusive: Former employee explains how presentation showed techniques used to target voters

The blueprint for how Cambridge Analytica claimed to have won the White House for Donald Trump by using Google, Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube is revealed for the first time in an internal company document obtained by the Guardian.

The 27-page presentation was produced by the Cambridge Analytica officials who worked most closely on Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

A former employee explained to the Guardian how it details the techniques used by the Trump campaign to micro-target US voters with carefully tailored messages about the Republican nominee across digital channels.

Intensive survey research, data modelling and performance-optimising algorithms were used to target 10,000 different ads to different audiences in the months leading up to the election. The ads were viewed billions of times, according to the presentation.

The document was presented to Cambridge Analytica employees in London, New York and Washington DC weeks after Trump’s victory, providing an insight into how the controversial firm helped pull off one of the most dramatic political upsets in modern history.

More: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/mar/23/leaked-cambridge-analyticas-blueprint-for-trump-victory?CMP=share_btn_tw

[bronxiteforever]

1. Big kick and recommend!

[dalton99a]

2. Great find

[Iliyah]

3. With th help from the GOPs and flipped machines as well as

suppression, gerrymandering, and down right stealing.

[iluvtennis]

8. Yep.

[Beartracks]

17. Tried and true techniques like gerrymandering and...

... voter suppression and 30+ years of rightwing propaganda could only do so much. The Analytics work and Russian interference were needed to tip it all over the edge.

==========

[poboy2]

4. recommend and thank you-nt

[neohippie]

5. This belongs here too

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/facebook-had-a-closer-relationship-than-it-disclosed-with-the-academic-it-called-a-liar/2018/03/22/ca0570cc-2df9-11e8-8688-e053ba58f1e4_story.html?utm_term=.5f59433bb636

It appears that Facebook had given Kogan access to data over 57 Billion friendships worldwide in another research project. There is a lot more in this story, it's worth reading. But basically shows how much data these companies are collecting and sharing beyond what they want to admit to publicly.

The methodology of the study has similarities to the collection methods used when Kogan worked with Cambridge Analytica, and it also makes reference to an app built by Kogan. To conduct the study, the researchers recruited freelance workers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk crowdsourced labor program and paid them $1 each to participate. Of that group, 857 participants authorized Kogan to gather some information from their Facebook profiles automatically, the study said.

The authors obtained the friend networks of those participants, calculating the current location and the percentage who lived outside the United States. Facebook then provided the authors with data “on every friendship formed in 2011 in every country in the world at the national aggregate level.” The data set included a total of 57,457,192,520 friendships, according to the paper.

The paper says that participants signed a consent form that detailed all parts of the study. “No deception was used,” the researchers added.

Facebook already had an agreement with the Federal Trade Commission, dating to 2011, in which Facebook promised to get people’s permissions before their data was shared. But privacy experts say Facebook’s developer policies at the time allowed programmers to access locations and other data such as relationship status, photos and likes from friends’ profiles without notifying them.

[neohippie]

6. This seems relevant too

What took Facebook so long to lock down all this user data.

It looks like it was ripe for this kind of abuse from 2010 through 2014, and Facebook is only now going public with this.



https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/03/facebook-cambridge-analytica/555866/

Academic researchers began publishing warnings that third-party Facebook apps represented a major possible source of privacy leakage in the early 2010s. Some noted that the privacy risks inherent in sharing data with apps were not at all clear to users. One group termed our new reality “interdependent privacy,” because your Facebook friends, in part, determine your own level of privacy.

For as long as apps have existed, they have asked for a lot of data and people have been prone to give it to them. Back in 2010, Penn State researchers systematically recorded what data the top 1,800 apps on Facebook were asking for. They presented their results in 2011 with the paper “Third-Party Apps on Facebook: Privacy and the Illusion of Control.” The table below shows that 148 apps were asking for permission to access friends’ information.

[dalton99a]

10. +1.

[BlueJac]

7. K&R

[Wounded Bear]

9. K & R...nt

[BillyBobBrilliant]

11. Can we at least have a

Going Away Party for democracy in America?

[neohippie]

12. might as well add this too

Let's not forget that Russian oligarch, backed Yuri Milner who owns a 10% share of Facebook, also owns a lot of Silcon Valley companies like Digital Skies Technologies, Spotify, AirBnB, and Zynga, one of the creators of a lot of those games and has investments with Kushner companies too

https://www.theguardian.com/news/201...shner-investor

Institutions with close links to Kremlin financed stakes through investor in Trump son-in-law’s venture, leaked files reveal

by Jon Swaine and Luke Harding


Two Russian state institutions with close ties to Vladimir Putin funded substantial stakes in Twitter and Facebook through an investor who later acquired an interest in a Jared Kushner venture, leaked documents reveal.

The investments were made through a Russian technology magnate, Yuri Milner, who also holds a stake in a company co-owned by Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior White House adviser.

The discovery is likely to stir concerns over Russian influence in US politics and the role played by social media in last year’s presidential election. It may also raise new questions for the social media companies and for Kushner.


Alexander Vershbow, who was a US ambassador to Russia under George W Bush and to Nato under Bill Clinton, said the Russian state institutions were frequently used as “tools for Putin’s pet political projects”.

https://www.wired.com/2011/10/mf_milner/

It certainly hasn’t played that way in the tight-knit club of Valley venture capitalists. In fact, the more successful Milner has gotten, and the faster he has compounded his success—beginning with his night-raid investment in Facebook in 2009 and now encompassing major positions in Zynga, Groupon, Twitter, and Spotify—the more suspect and outré he has come to seem. He’s definitely not your conspicuous non-consumption Valley billionaire.

This is a good time to repost some of these stories


https://www.thenewamerican.com/usnew...ian-mafia--kgb

Ternovskiy reportedly has rebuffed DST's efforts, describing them as "harassing and hounding."

Ryan Tate at gawker.com appropriately describes the DST limo episode as "creepy." However, the experience goes beyond "creepy," illustrating the nexus between Russia's "business" community and it's intelligence structures. How did DST know Ternovskiy's flight schedule? There are a number of ways that DST could have gotten that information, nearly all of which would be illegal in any country where the "rule of law" is more than merely an empty slogan. But considering DST's high-level ties to Vladimir Putin's KGB-FSB police-state apparatus, obtaining Ternovskiy's airline itinerary must have been child's play.

The Russian teenager is demonstrating better business sense and greater ethical judgment than American corporations, such as social network behemoth Facebook and Wall Street titan Goldman Sachs. Over the past year, DST has made several large investments in Facebook, and now holds a ten percent share in the company, which boasts more than 500 million users worldwide — and continues to grow at a phenomenal rate.

[erronis]

15. +1 - thanks for this info too. I hope the knowledge base of these people and their connections

can survive attempts to bring down the internet.

[CelticWinter]

13. Thanks MelissaB K&R

[RandomAccess]

14. From the Tweet thread -

More
Replying to @carolecadwalla @PaulLewis @paulhilder
They're already bragging that Brittany Kaiser is keynoting at CPAC 2019:

https://t.co/VpAItoMYbd

Link to tweet

[tblue37]

16. K&R for visibility. nt