“It Wasn’t Russia,” It Was Obama-Based Social Media Mining That Beat Hillary
by Trent Lapinski via Hackernoon.com,
ZeroHedge.com
Wed, 03/21/2018
ust over a year ago I wrote, “Did Donald Trump Use Artificial Intelligence To Win The Election?”, which was an article about Cambridge Analytica.
If you haven’t been paying attention lately, Facebook just banned Cambridge Analytica from their platform, including the whistleblower that blew the whistle on how Cambridge Analytica was potentially misusing data. Meanwhile, the mainstream media has gone into a frenzy, crashing Facebook’s stock, forcing executives out of the company, and calling for social media reform.
This story is seriously a year old, and although I was not the first journalist to write about this, I did bring it to the attention of about 6,300+ readers. While it is new that we have a whistleblower, and the number “50 million accounts”, what the media isn’t telling you is how Cambridge Analytica actually pulled this off.
The fact of the matter is the data that Cambridge Analytica acquired from Facebook, much of which they obtained legally and as Facebook intended them to, was entirely useless without machine learning. Machine learning is one of the baby steps required for building artificial intelligence, it is a field of computer science that gives computer systems the ability to “learn” with data without being programmed by a person. It was this technology that Cambridge Analytica used to analyze tens of millions of users profiles using data they acquired from Facebook, and put together psychological profiles of users. They then used Facebook’s targeted advertising system to display ads and content at those users geared towards their own psychological profile. Think of it as persuasive arguing on steroids hyper targeted by your own beliefs about the world.
For example, I let Cambridge Analytica analyze my data and they pegged me as a liberal. I know this may be a shocking revelation to all of my haters who believe I’m a conservative Russian agent conspiracy theorist who sells tinfoil hats for a living, but according to my Facebook data I’m a liberal. They also determined I’m more intelligent than 96% of Facebook users, and I somehow lost intelligence points because I like the Beatles (mostly a John Lennon fan), but that is a subject for an entirely different article.
What this means is Cambridge Analytica knows I am probably not going to vote for Trump based on my psychological profile. However, that is actually more valuable to them than not. There is little point to spending advertising dollars on people who you know will vote for your candidate, the person you want to target is actually the person who will not vote for your candidate and instead convince them to not vote. This is what I believe Cambridge Analytica did, I believe they targeted liberals in swing states and promoted anti-Hillary content in an attempt to convince people not to vote. It means they had to target fewer people, spend less money, and ultimately accomplish their goal of winning the election.
The Rest…HERE
