It was the Russians!

[Suff]

All those investigations going on in the US to prove it was Trump and the Russians; that got him elected in some kind of illegal deal.

How foolish do they feel now? Apparently, according to the company involved, it was the Brits!

The Irony is too thick to cut..

Interesting stuff though. Apparently it shaved $37bn off the value of Farcebook...

[Workingman]

How many votes did Cambridge Analytics have in the election? Well, apart from its US registered employees, none. Not enough to swing a presidential election. What about Hilary? If she had the opportunity, nous, funds and wherewithal to do the same would she have refused? Pah!

It is campaigning and it has gone on forever. It might not be the sort of campaigning the Earl of Derby, Palmerston, G Washington or Abe Lincoln would recognise, but it is still campaigning - just the new way.

The Russians were the red herrings, as many of us suspected. They played a straight bat and refused to get involved so it was clear that the real 'culprits' would surface sooner or later.

Any chance that Kennedy and Nixon did not get elected on clean tickets?

[Suff]

A clean ticket? Unlikely in my lifetime.

However the ability to custom target and influence more than 50m people is quite some power. It takes it to a whole new order.

As I read it there was something shady going on in the background which was, technically, not quite legal. Have to re read all the press on it.

I just found it amusing that Mueller is spending time, money and political capital researching Russia for having "interfered" in the US presidential election. Whilst, at the same time, we have members of a British company claiming that they "swung" the US presidential election.... For Money!

[cromwell]

All this "It was the Russians! it's all the Russians fault!" is quite possibly the biggest load of old cobblers I have ever heard.

Hilary Clinton had all the media on her side and an election budget of $1.2 billion, and she still contrived to lose to Trump. It wasn't supposed to happen.

So the one thing they wanted was somebody to blame for it, and they settled on the Russians. The Russians are to blame for Trump being elected. The Russians are to blame for Brexit. The Russians are to blame for the rise of "populism" in Europe.

Rubbish, rubbish and more rubbish.

[Workingman]

There is a new dynamic, certainly in Western democracies, and the tired old parties are going to have to live with it. Rather than looking for scapegoats for their failures maybe they should take a long hard look at themselves.

[cromwell]

There's something missing from all this finger pointing, at the Russians, Facebook, social media in general and now Cambridge Analytica.

Which is - did it affect anything anyway? Posts on Facebook? Data mining? So what?

How can you prove that this in any way affected the result of the US Presidential election, or elections in Europe?

You can't - it's entirely subjective.

How did any of this affect the votes? In what way? What percentage of people had their voting intentions altered in any way bu any of this?

There's no answer. No data, no evidence, no objective proof.

That being so, you might ask, what's all the fuss about?

The fuss is about making an accusation so loud and so often that people will start to believe the accusation, proof or no. That Trump's election was in some way dodgy and illegal.

(And of course, about wielding a big stick at social media to get them into line).

[Workingman]

It makes me smile, ever so much, when I see the media getting all incensed over this.

Is it because the poor dears have lost the influence they once had and were proud of?

Remember the headline "It's The Sun Wot Won It" and the swagger it put in the steps of journalists who thought that they were importasnt.

Gone now, all gone. Blown away like a feather in the wind. Bless.

[Suff]

I guess that to answer that question Cromers, you would have to go back to Obama winning the Democrat nomination and the fact that social media was a key tool in that campaign.

It was also key in him winning two presidential elections.

Is it any surprise that social media was then "weaponised" to help Trump?

Is it only wrong if you get the "wrong" candidate??

The world has changed again and it is time to face up to it and stop pushing out the same old boogiemen.

[Suff]

And it just keeps getting better...

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.

Indeed. But some of the data analytics, alluded to in the article, used by Cambridge Analytics, are cutting edge in Industry right now. Databasing, categorising, linking and, most critical of all for this kind of work, data hygene.....

Once that was done and with a critical dataset of over 50m people, it was fairly simple to monitor likes, tweets and youtube posts when an advertising campaign went out.

With the help of Cambridge Analytics they weren't even telling a different story to two or three groups, they were telling thousands of nuanced and slightly differing stories to different voter types in volumes ranging from hundreds of thousands up to tens of millions.

For me the most amazing thing about the whole article is that Clinton gave up headline YouTube space at the 11th hour and the Trump campaign bought it up. Obama would _never_ have done it.

[Workingman]

A couple of things stood out for me.

Quoter from the Guardian:

None of the techniques described in the document are illegal. However, the scandal over Cambridge Analytica’s acquisition of data from more than 50 million Facebook users is lifting the lid on an industry that has learned how to closely track the online footprint and daily lives of US voters.

CA did not doing anything illegal, or so it appears, they simply harvested user profiles from Facebook and then used targeted adverts on the most used social media sites in much the same way as Google, Amazon, Apple and many other sites do every day. It is the modern way.

The other was the shock felt by CA staff when they visited Trump's campaign HQ.

“There was no database of record. There were many disparate data sources that were not connected, matched or hygiened,” she said of the process of ordering, sorting and cleaning enormous data sets. “There was no data science programme, so they weren’t undertaking any modelling. There was no digital marketing team.”

So they gave them a Persuasion Digital Marketing: Process flow chart that any GCSE pupil could have produced and they showed them mock-ups of the type of things they could do on YouTube and Google search - using paid ads, and off they went.

The press bnarons of yesteryear would have loved to have been able to do those things instead of only relying on billboards, TV and radio ads and their own publications.

Am I bothered? Not particularly. Am I bothered that millions of people take these things on board without question? I most certainly am!