Thread

1. cm2012 · 1790392207 · focus · HN ↗

   Standard PSA: Cambridge Analytica electing Trump is not a true story. Cambridge Analytica absolutely broke Facebook's terms of service with its personality quiz scheme but it did not affect the 2016 election.

   I'm an advertiser who has managed hundreds of millions of dollars for small startups and big corporations, brands, as well as a few small political campaigns.

   Even at the time of the Trump election, the kind of ad targeting that Cambridge Analytica says they were offering through the personality quizzes was absolute garbage. There is a reason why the official response from Boz doesn't even mention the personality quiz stuff, because it was essentially irrelevant to the Trump campaign's performance on paid advertising on Meta. And I would go further to say that, except for his success in fundraising, all of his Meta advertising probably didn't move that many votes.

   Cambridge Analytica, the organization, of course, loves to claim that they're the dark evil viziers behind the Trump campaign and they've advertised themselves as such to dictators all over the world. But that's just like Edward Bernays writing "Propaganda" back in the day, it is a way to sell their services. Trump digital director Brad Parscale said the campaign did not even use Cambridge Analytica’s controversial psychographic targeting.

   Not to mention, the only reason that Cambridge Analytica had that open graph information available is because communities like Hacker News begged again and again for Facebook to open the graph and not have a walled web. After that they cut off that graph access.

   1. mapontosevenths · 1790400428 · focus · HN ↗

      You may be missing the actual crimes.

      You're right that the tools were hype, and that they didn't work. So why, despite knowing that Cambridge Analytica tools were useless, did Trumo keep paying it?

      Well, Robert and Rebekah Mercer were primary backers of the Trump campaign, and they also owned a major stake in Cambridge Analytica. Giving something like $49 million dollars to Trump and Co.

      What are the odds they made a profit on the deal?

      1. cm2012 · 1790427729 · focus · HN ↗

         There were actual crimes but it was essentially the Russian government hacking email campaigns related to Hillary Clinton and drip-feeding them to the press. On the ad side there's none that I'm aware of.

         1. mapontosevenths · 1790431613 · focus · HN ↗

            From the article: "Jurors also found Facebook misled the public about investigations into data brokers following the Cambridge Analytica scandal, finding the company liable for over 2 million violations."

            A jury just found that there were more than 43 million crimes (total) committed on the ad side. I think you're saying that the illegal data collection wasn't related to the advertising end, but it was. That's why they did it. Whether it was actually useful or not is irrelevant.

            More importantly to me, the billionaires using it to launder their bribes to the US president probably won't ever be convicted, but that does not mean they aren't just low class crooks who can afford good lawyers.

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