Politics of the Free - It’s because Democrats, stupid. - The Bear and Badger

Tempy

poprock wrote:

Tempy wrote:

So what exactly is being done with these digital profiles that tabloids over here and US shock jocks/lightweight TV news isn't already accomplishing?

It’s powers of ten more effective than past methods.

The feedback loop is what does it. Learn where people’s views lean, block opposing news from ever reaching them, fill their media bubble with personalised arguments nudging them just a little further towards your agenda. Scan the data again and repeat. It’s a vicious circle that genuinely changes minds far more often than anything the ad industry have ever come up with, because it’s based on emotional responses and activities and it functions on a level the end user/victim has barely (if any) awareness of (and in an area the user thinks is private and personal, where they freely share more extreme views).

The same rules could apply anywhere, but it’s Facebook that really is the gold standard right now.

I guess my hesitation comes from the fact that my experience of facebook is that it's not particularly great at manipulating views.

I would be interested in studies that show some real effects of this. I am only hesitant because I feel like it is the latesf in a long line of emotional manipulation going back all the way to convincing oration, and I don't know if i believe it is that exceptionally more effective.

djchump

Tempy wrote:

... I would be interested in studies that show some real effects of this. I am only hesitant because I feel like it is the latesf in a long line of emotional manipulation going back all the way to convincing oration, and I don't know if i believe it is that exceptionally more effective.

I'm sure there's studies out there regarding advertising and the like.

GooberTheHat

Tempy wrote:

I guess my hesitation comes from the fact that my experience of facebook is that it's not particularly great at manipulating views.

But then you are adept at using the internet, fact checking, researching and the like. To some people, Facebook is the Internet. All their links to external sites comes via Facebook.

Tempy

poprock wrote:

Tempy wrote:

I don't think it's the dystopic sci-fi super weapon suggested here, more that it's just another small weapon in the vast suite of a media well equipped to preying on human nature

Yes, and it’s vital to remember that it’s nothing new, but that said it is by far the most powerful weapon that predatory media have ever got their grubby little hands on.

The original German article on this has been lost, because Vice bought it up and did their own English language version (removing unofficial translations from other sites), but here’s Vice’s version for you.

And one example of the insidious (and persuasive) nature of this new style of propaganda tailoring:

In the Miami district of Little Haiti, for instance, Trump's campaign provided inhabitants with news about the failure of the Clinton Foundation following the earthquake in Haiti, in order to keep them from voting for Hillary Clinton. This was one of the goals: to keep potential Clinton voters (which include wavering left-wingers, African-Americans, and young women) away from the ballot box, to "suppress" their vote, as one senior campaign official told Bloomberg in the weeks before the election. These "dark posts"—sponsored news-feed-style ads in Facebook timelines that can only be seen by users with specific profiles—included videos aimed at African-Americans in which Hillary Clinton refers to black men as predators, for example.

You want to prevent people voting for Clinton in an area where the polling indicates she has a chance. So you edit together a spurious piece of news footage that seems to portray her being racist. Then you show that ad only to African-American people who you know are on the fence and care about race as a key issue, in that specific region. Nobody outside that demographic even knows your piece of footage exists, so no counter-arguments are ever given.

I've read about dark posts before, they do seem particularly insidious and troubling as a concept (I wonder if I have ever been targeted for any reason?)

Again, I am interested in eveidence of the effectiveness as opposed to anecdote, though I imagine rather ironically the kind of data that would be needed to obtain that evidence is in the hands of people using it to tailor these kind of posts.

Tempy

GooberTheHat wrote:

Tempy wrote:

I guess my hesitation comes from the fact that my experience of facebook is that it's not particularly great at manipulating views.

But then you are adept at using the internet, fact checking, researching and the like. To some people, Facebook is the Internet. All their links to external sites comes via Facebook.

This is also true, though does that make FB more effective than the rest of their media diet?

I do hope I am not coming across as believing this to be piss, I know that it is a useful
tool, I am just skeptical to the idea that it's the game changer it is. The article shows the people talking about it feel it iis "AI", and a 'holy grail' but when you're investing millions you'd like to think it was worth it.

@chump i'm sure there are studies on ads, but i'd like studies on this particular issue - paradox of that noted above

poprock

Article in The Spectator wrote:

The problem, says Jill Lepore, a historian of polling at Harvard, is that while traditional polling was bad for democracy and could be unreliable, data science was still more damaging. Politicians’ views were dictated by consultants, not principle, while voters were told only what they wanted to hear. ‘The effects of data science on the political process are probably considerably worse.

She was talking about the key to it all: ‘microtargeting’. Cambridge Analytica sliced and diced the electorate so Trump could talk to small groups directly, or even one at a time: one email or letter to the timid introvert at No. 22 who cares about jobs and limited government, another to the loud extrovert next door who cares about gun rights and Isis. Psychographics was used in what Oczkowski calls ‘sentiment analysis’ and ‘tonality’, that is in deciding what to say to people and how to say it. Almost 50 years after The Selling of the President was written about the advertising industry’s intrusion into politics, this is the ultimate attempt to manipulate the electorate.

Facebook is the big sell for this method, but it’s across all forms of media. Social sites, Google ads, Online news, TV news newspapers, the speeches politicians are giving, public appearances, personal emails, actual letters in the post … you name it.

Tempy, you’re right that it’s just another tool in the marketing/propaganda box. But look at it this way: It’s not a new bullet in the gun. It’s a new machine gun to fire the bullets from, and it’s one that auto-targets.

These methods have been with us since the ’70s in advertising, but now these methods are driving the news. And news from our peers and friend groups (or that appears to be).

I would never claim that this propaganda is what won Trump the election, or what won the Brexit referendum. But it played a part, and a bigger one than the general public realise. That needs to change – more reporting and digging into these methods will help raise awareness and hopefully raise credulity in future.

Now that this stuff is getting mentioned by our mainstream press, I’m sure some groups are on the case and pulling together studies on how effective it actually was.

One last point: This stuff isn’t expensive. It’s far, far cheaper than the old ways of doing your research and targeting. For Trump’s whole campaign you’re talking a fee of less than $10m to the analytics and propaganda consultants (I think I read somewhere $7.4m). That’s really not very much to buy the biggest election in the world.

Yossarian

It's worth noting in this that Trump won by a swing of (IIRC) 40K votes in three key swing states. This doesn't need to have been wildly successful for that.

cockbeard

Even if the punk aren't yet writing music about it, they are printing t shirts

www.mercht.com/c/donny

poprock

Yossarian wrote:

It's worth noting in this that Trump won by a swing of (IIRC) 40K votes in three key swing states. This doesn't need to have been wildly successful for that.

Yeah. And remember that what a political party want to do is shift public opinion on key points that their party are campaigning on.

Shifting people’s opinions, on a one-person-at-a-time level, is achievable when you can insert tailor-made messages that play to confirmation bias right inside the things they read for fun.

Unlikely

Yossarian wrote:

Actually, he likely heard it from Robert Mercer (cross-post from current affairs thread): [url=https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/26/robert-mercer-breitbart-war-on-media-steve-bannon-donald-trump-nigel-farage

Fascinating.

hunk

Tempy wrote:

Targeted propaganda is a lot like targeted ads. It may nudge undecided people on fb and twitter in the direction the propaganda wants them to. It may not effect you per se but on a population level gains in percentage could be significant enough to turn an election. Thus proving the propaganda's effect on a population level and a nation as a whole.

I am sure it can but I also don't think it's the dystopic sci-fi super weapon suggested here, more that it's just another small weapon in the vast suite of a media well equipped to preying on human nature

The tech has been beta tested in countries like Russia before application in the West during Brexit and US elections. The results speak for themselves no? How much of the win is due to propaganda is up for debate but if it works for ads it'll definitely be serviceable to propaganda purposes.
Also, they can dominate certain trending topics and google search results which is kindof scary. Thus opinion becomes public fact?

djchump

Tempy wrote:

... @chump i'm sure there are studies on ads, but i'd like studies on this particular issue - paradox of that noted above

/shrug

Just saying. This is a form of advertising, and I figure it'd be easier to find research about e.g. targeted online advertising strategies than about political such and such - seems like it's a wider and more established field.

dynamiteReady

Posted already?:

Diluted Dante

The Tories used targeted Facebook ads to great effect in the 2015 election.

Tempy

hunk wrote:

Tempy wrote:

Targeted propaganda is a lot like targeted ads. It may nudge undecided people on fb and twitter in the direction the propaganda wants them to. It may not effect you per se but on a population level gains in percentage could be significant enough to turn an election. Thus proving the propaganda's effect on a population level and a nation as a whole.

I am sure it can but I also don't think it's the dystopic sci-fi super weapon suggested here, more that it's just another small weapon in the vast suite of a media well equipped to preying on human nature

The tech has been beta tested in countries like Russia before application in the West during Brexit and US elections. The results speak for themselves no? How much of the win is due to propaganda is up for debate but if it works for ads it'll definitely be serviceable to propaganda purposes. Also, they can dominate certain trending topics and google search results which is kindof scary. Thus opinion becomes public fact?

Yes, that's what I am asking

[Deleted User]

g.man wrote:

Amazon are recommending I stock up on dried cat food at the mo...

Cheers G. That reminded me I needed to order dog food.

Tempy

The system works!

Yossarian

Amazon targeting LivDiv via G there. Terrifying.

[Deleted User]

Welcome... to the world of tomorrow!

Yossarian

Ooh, where can I buy that?

[Deleted User]

Amazon
If you have a Prime account you will recieve your world of tomorrow tomorrow, by then of course it will be the world of Wednesday.

g.man

Heh

cockbeard

Liveinadive wrote:

Amazon If you have a Prime account you will recieve your world of tomorrow tomorrow, by then of course it will be the world of Wednesday.

Wednesworld

You think that's one of the extra floors in the next series of Westworld

Everyone starting to feel mildly optimistic that the weekend isn't too far away

poprock

cockbeard wrote:

Everyone starting to feel mildly optimistic that the weekend isn't too far away

… BUT IT TURNS OUT TO BE A LIE.

Yossarian

cockbeard wrote:

Liveinadive wrote:

Amazon If you have a Prime account you will recieve your world of tomorrow tomorrow, by then of course it will be the world of Wednesday.

Wednesworld

You think that's one of the extra floors in the next series of Westworld

Everyone starting to feel mildly optimistic that the weekend isn't too far away

Apparently, surveys of people's moods show that, despite the fact that everyone bitches about Mondays, Wednesday is actually the day of the week where people feel the most down.

[Deleted User]

I always hated Tuesday when I worked a standard week.
A real non-day.

Diluted Dante

It's 'hump day' apparently. Although this became a reason on certain parts of the internet for girls to post pictures of their arses, so I guess there is an upside there.

monkey

Tuesday is the worst day. At least on Monday, you've just had the weekend to break up the monotony so it doesn't feel quite as samey. By Tuesday, the rot is back and you've got a long way to go until your next couple of days of freedom.

cockbeard

Tomorrow begs to differ

It's payday

A mate is down London town from Derby

I'm on a half week (assuming I can get everything done)

Tuesday is awesome

Yossarian

https://www.axios.com/four-russian-diplomats-died-in-the-last-three-months-2281281560.html

Hmm.

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