The year is 2015 and the grand march to the fiasco that was the Election Year of 2016 is just getting under way. Back then, when the world made a little more sense, Cambridge Analytica was not backing Donald Trump, because that would have been insane. Imagine, that guy, President?
Anywho, the tale of how millions Americans had propaganda whispered in their ears by Moscow actually begins Ted Cruz, the man who sold out Texans to Russia.
And remember, can’t spell Rasputin Republicans with out Putin!
Ted Cruz using firm that harvested data on millions of unwitting Facebook user
Harry Davies, The Guardian, 11 Dec 2015
www.theguardian.com/...
Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign is using psychological data based on research spanning tens of millions of FaceBook users, harvested largely without their permission, to boost his surging White House run and gain an edge over Donald Trump and other Republican rivals, the Guardian can reveal.
A little-known data company, now embedded within Cruz’s campaign and indirectly financed by his primary billionaire benefactor (Me - Benefactor is Robert Mercer), paid researchers at Cambridge University to gather detailed psychological profiles about the US electorate using a massive pool of mainly unwitting US Facebook users built with an online survey.
As part of an aggressive new voter-targeting operation, Cambridge Analytica – financially supported by reclusive hedgefund magnate and leading Republican donor Robert Mercer – is now using so-called “psychographic profiles” of US citizens in order to help win Cruz votes, despite earlier concerns and red flags from potential survey-takers.
That is a lot to parse, especially being 3 years old. First off, we need to remember this started with Ted Cruz.
Ted Cruz was in bed with Cambridge Analytica at the beginning, he was the reason massive amounts of data was “unwitting”ly pooled by questionable methods.
I also find Cambridge Analytica’s claim they invented “psychographic profiles” quite comical, but more on their OCEAN of data later.
I mostly wanted to full stop to show via The Guardian Ted Cruz was Cambridge Analytica’s original poster boy funded by Robert Mercer.
These services did not come cheap.
Analysis of Federal Election Commission (FEC) filings shows Cruz’s campaign has paid Cambridge Analytica at least $750,000 this year (Me — Remember, its 2015). The “behavioural microtargeting” company has also received around $2.5m over the past two years from conservative Super Pacs to which Mercer or members of his family have donated.
Oh and before we move on, this pull quote from the article is to delicious not savor for its sublime doublespeak, or lying through omission if you will, in this statement from FaceBook:
“[M]isleading people or misusing their information is a direct violation of our policies and we will take swift action against companies that do, including banning those companies from Facebook and requiring them to destroy all improperly collected data,” a Facebook spokesman said in a statement to the Guardian.
Mmhmmmm, well isn't that nice. Total lies, but nice.
However, the Facebook data was then used to generate sophisticated models of each of their personalities using the so-called “big five” personality traits and characteristics – openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism (known as the OCEAN scale).
The correct term is psychosociodemographic modeling. This is not a new concept.
Isaac Asimov's Foundation touches on this with psychohistory, used to make general predictions about the future behavior. Basically, the laws of statistics as applied to large groups of people which can predict herd movement, but never the movement of individual members of the herd.
This was updated by Neal Stephenson and J. Frederick George in Interface, a masterpiece and a must read for any political junkie coming to terms with our InfoTech Age.
I will not spoil this story, but a teaser of what we are capable of if we tied psychosociodemographic modeling to a virtual reality. We’d create the Eye of Cy which is currently Sci-fi:
End of day, Cambridge Analytica is dragging marketing data across grouping specific data to create an index they then model into their OCEAN system.
Big Five is lazy, real lazy.
We had 64 we built the Emotion Engine in the late 90s. Though I did steal from Interface some of the names, like Post-Depression Can Stacker. We dragged catalogs of marketing data across geospecific tax maps, which was only sorta a revolutionary idea at the time.
We weren’t the only ones either, but everyone was consumer centric, never civil centric.
That is the key here.
Sure, our Emotion Engine could make an great assumption on your buying habits of say brand of bread or flowers you prefer on Mother’s Day.
But it never occurred to anyone I was involved with to use this technique with civics instead of consumer.
That should be considered weaponizing psychosociodemographic modeling. Now one would be working to undermine the natural flow of commerce of information in the electoral process of nation-states.
Not corporations.
That is a very slippery Eye of Cy slope.
By summer 2014, Kogan’s company had created an expansive and powerful dataset. His business partner boasted on LinkedIn that their private outfit, Global Science Research (GSR), “owns a massive data pool of 40+ million individuals across the United States – for each of whom we have generated detailed characteristic and trait profiles”.
Here's their promo video from 2015, which is amazingly still live:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_SlD7D_xug
How close was Ted Cruz to Cambridge Analytica?
On Wednesday in Washington, Cruz was the only member of the Senate armed services committee to skip a hearing on US strategy to combat the Islamic State. Instead, he travelled to attend a fundraising luncheon in New York hosted by the president of Keep the Promise I, the Super Pac funded by Mercer that, one day earlier, had announced a $600,000 digital advertising strategy to be rolled out via social media in early voting states.
A spokesman for Mercer declined to comment for this article.
I bet they did, someone should follow up with Ted Cruz though.
Ted Cruz sold out Texans’ data to Russians.
How this bullshit happened.
Someone needs to call Ted Cruz on this bullshit.