Brittany Kaiser Quotes

With behavioral microtargeting, a term Cambridge trademarked, they could zoom in on individuals who shared common personality traits and concerns and message them again and again, fine-tuning and tweaking those messages until we got precisely the results we wanted.

All these data sets are known as “behavioral data,” and with this data, it is possible for data aggregators to build a picture of you that is incredibly precise and endlessly useful. Companies can then tailor their products to align with your daily activities. Politicians use your behavioral data to show you information so that their message will ring true to you, and at the right time: Think of those ads about education that just happen to play on the radio at the precise moment you’re dropping your kids off at school. You’re not paranoid. It’s all orchestrated.

When the Oakes brothers ran a defense campaign to stop election violence in South Africa in 1994, they helped to bring about the peaceful election of Nelson Mandela. As Alexander had shown me when I first visited the SCL offices, Mandela himself had endorsed SCL.

But the social media giants offered not only new tech but also man power. Seated beside Molly, Matt, and our data scientists were embedded employees from Facebook, Google, and Twitter, among other tech companies. Facebook called its work with the Trump campaign “customer service plus.”5 Google said it served the campaign in an “advisory capacity.” Twitter called it “free labor.”6 While the Trump team welcomed this help with open arms, the Clinton campaign for some reason decided not to accept such help from Facebook, which must have given Trump a distinct advantage that cannot be easily quantified—a spare set of highly skilled hands goes a long way in a campaign, as it is expertise that does not need to be managed or taught by the campaign manager, who is already working 24/7 with little sleep.

The strategy used focus groups, psychographic modeling, and predictive algorithms, and it harvested private user data through online quizzes and contests, using a perfectly legal opt-in.

The figure of 50 million was nearly twice the number of users whose data was stolen, and was what Cambridge had used to model some 240 million Americans. With that single, prodigious harvest, and personality profiling, Cambridge had been able to categorize, through predictive algorithms and the other data it had purchased, every single American over the age of eighteen according to many different models, including OCEAN scoring; that’s how it knew which individual Americans were “open,” “conscientious,” “neurotic,” and so on. And that’s what had made its microtargeting so precise and effective. It was one of the main ingredients in Cambridge’s secret sauce.

Google key word purchases had worked like crazy, too. If a user searched for “Trump,” “Iraq,” and “War,” the top result was “Hillary Voted for the Iraq War—Donald Trump Opposed It,

Throughout my time in the world of human rights, I had witnessed governments and powerful individuals using the suppression of movements, free thought, and voters as a strategy to retain power, sometimes at the cost of violence. This is why in the United States, voter suppression tactics are illegal.

the Mercers had done something far more powerful, and perhaps more disturbing: they had engineered a victory using a philosophy grounded in very advanced computer science, far more advanced than anything else on offer in the Republican Party.

Closure of the Friends API meant only one thing: no one would be able to further monetize Facebook data except for Facebook itself.

The company’s psychographics, the “Sri Lankans” were told, were top notch. Nobody had what CA had. It operated on the premise that campaigns were not about facts; they were about emotions.

At one point on the tapes, Mark started to talk about playing on people’s “hopes and fears.” He even went so far as to say, “It’s no good fighting an election campaign on the facts; it’s fought on emotion.” Hearing it worded like that made me cry. Was microtargeting just a way to play with people’s emotions? Cambridge hadn’t served persuadables the facts about candidates and their policies so they could make their own decisions. No, it had given them emotional garbage ads to stoke fear or give people false hope.

A disgruntled former colleague of Bob Mercer’s said that Bob believed “that human beings have no inherent value other than how much money they make.

I wondered how the Trump campaign had drawn the line between negative campaigning and voter suppression. Usually, there was a clear difference, but in the digital age it was hard to track and trace what had been done. Governments no longer needed to send the police or military out into the streets to stop protests. They could instead change people’s minds simply by paying to target them on the very screens in their hands.

Like me, McNamee had played a significant role in the growth of a tech company that had taken the path less traveled, and that had made all the difference.

He had been one of Facebook’s earliest investors, and a mentor to both Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg. A few years back, he had also exploded onto the press scene, as an outspoken critic of Facebook. Now I wanted to know why. While waiting inside a fancy residence in New York with the film crew, I watched a video of the now-infamous Roger McNamee.

There’s nothing like a car ride with federal agents to make you question your life choices. That was exactly where I found myself the morning of July 18, 2018, winding through the streets of Washington, DC, heading toward an interview with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigators.

In the digital age, data was “the new oil.” Data collection was an “arms race,” he said.

In the digital age, data was “the new oil.” Data collection was an “arms race,” he said. Cambridge Analytica had amassed an arsenal of data on the American public of unprecedented size and scope, the largest, as far as he knew, anyone had ever assembled. The company’s monster databases held between two thousand and five thousand individual data points (pieces of personal information) on every individual in the United States over the age of eighteen. That amounted to some 240 million people.

But merely having Big Data wasn’t the solution, he said. Knowing what to do with it was the key. That involved more scientific and precise ways of putting people into categories: “Democrat,” “environmentalist,” “optimist,” “activist,” and the like. And for years, the SCL Group, Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, had been identifying and sorting people using the most sophisticated method in behavioral psychology, which gave it the capability of turning what was otherwise just a mountain of information about the American populace into a gold mine.

Alexander’s company looked at people to determine what they needed to hear in order to be influenced in the

Alexander’s company looked at people to determine what they needed to hear in order to be influenced in the direction you, the client, wanted them to go.

I thumbed through it, knowing I’d get to the rest of it later, but I zeroed in on a section about how the company used “psyops” in defense and humanitarian campaigns.

Short for “psychological operations,” which itself was a euphemism for “psychological warfare,” psyops can be used in war, but its applications for peacekeeping appealed to me. Influencing “hostile” audiences can sound terrifying, but psyops, for example, can be used to help shift young men in Islamic nations away from joining Al-Qaeda or to de-escalate conflict between tribal factions on Election Day.

The biggest mistake the political campaigns and communication campaigns face is starting where they are and not where they want to be,” Alexander said. “They tend to start with a preconceived idea of what is required. And that’s normally based on the subject matter.

to get people to act, you created the conditions under which they would be more likely to do what you wanted them to do. The simplicity of the concept blew my mind.

I was nostalgic for a time when I’d experienced elections that ran according to not only rules and laws, but ethics and moral principles.

Go ahead and check any browsing add-on such as Mozilla’s Lightbeam (formerly Collusion), Cliqz International’s Ghostery, or the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Privacy Badger to see how many companies are tracking your online activity. You could find more than fifty.

The term psychographics was created to describe the process by which we took in-house personality scoring and applied it to our massive database. Using analytic tools to understand individuals’ complex personalities, the psychologists then determined what motivated those individuals to act. Then the creative team tailored specific messages to those personality types in a process called “behavioral microtargeting.

gave millions of individuals “OCEAN” scores, determined from the thousands of data points about them. OCEAN scoring grew out of academic behavioral and social psychology. Cambridge used OCEAN scoring to determine the construction of people’s personalities. By testing personalities and matching data points, CA found it was possible to determine the degree to which an individual was “open” (O), “conscientious” (C), “extroverted” (E), “agreeable” (A), or “neurotic” (N).

First, CA could segment all the people whose info they had into even more sophisticated and nuanced groups than any other communications firm. (Yes, other companies were also able to segment groups of people beyond their basic demographics such as gender and race, but those companies, when determining advanced characteristics such as party affinity or issue preference, often used crude polling to determine where people generally stood on issues.) OCEAN scoring was nuanced and complex, allowing Cambridge to understand people on a continuum in each category. Some people were predominantly “open” and “agreeable.” Others were “neurotic” and “extroverts.” Still others were “conscientious” and “open.

Second, CA provided clients, political and commercial, with a benefit that set the company apart: the accuracy of its predictive algorithms. Dr. Alex Tayler, Dr. Jack Gillett, and CA’s other data scientists constantly ran new algorithms, producing much more than mere psychographic scores. They produced scores for every person in America, predicting on a scale of 0 to 100 percent how likely, for example, each was to vote; how likely each was to belong to a particular political party; or what toothpaste each was likely to prefer.

Third, CA then took what they had learned from these algorithms and turned around and used platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Pandora (music streaming), and YouTube to find out where the people they wished to target spent the most interactive time. Where was the best place to reach each person?

At the fourth step in the process, another ingredient in the “cake recipe,” and the one that put CA head and shoulders above the competition, above every political consulting firm in the world, they found ways to reach targeted audiences, and to test the effectiveness of that reach, through client-facing tools such as the one CA designed especially for its own use. Called Ripon, this canvassing software program for door-to-door campaigners and phone bankers allowed its users direct access to your data as they approached your house or called you on the phone. Data-visualization tools also helped them determine their strategy before you’d even opened your door or picked up your phone.

Then campaigns would be designed based on content our in-house team had composed—and the final, fifth step, the micro-targeting strategy, allowed everything from video to audio to print ads to reach the identified targets. Using an automated system that refined that content again and again, we were able to understand what made individual users finally engage with that content in a meaningful way. We might learn that it took as many as twenty or thirty variations of the same ad sent to the same person thirty different times and placed on different parts of their social media feed before they clicked on it to act. And knowing that, our creatives, who were producing new content all the time, knew how to reach those same people the next time CA sent something out.

What CA did was evidence-based. CA could provide clients with a clear picture of what they had done, whom they’d reached, and, by scientifically surveying a representative sample, what percentage of the people they had targeted were taking action as a result of the targeted messaging. It was revolutionary.

The most powerful of my slides compared swing voters. One group of swing voters was “Closed and Agreeable.” Those people received an ad about guns that used language and images that reinforced the values of tradition and family. I pulled up an image of a man and a boy, in silhouette, duck hunting at sunset. The text read, “From father to son . . . since the birth of our nation.” It emphasized how guns could be shown as something people shared with those they loved. For example, my grandfather had taught me to shoot when I was a kid.

Another image was for a very different audience: the “Extroverted and Disagreeable” swing voter. This slide depicted a woman. “The ‘Extroverted and Disagreeable’ voter needs a message that is all about her ability to assert her rights,” I said. “This type of voter likes to be heard. On any topic,” I said. “She knows what’s best for her. She has a strong internal locus of control and hates to be told what to do, especially by the government.” The woman on the slide was wielding a handgun, a fierce expression on her face. The text below read, “Don’t Question My Right to Own a Gun, and I Won’t Question Your Stupidity Not To.

What Cambridge Analytica offers is the right message for the right target audience from the right source on the right channel at the right time. And that’s how you win.

One remarkably successful technique had resulted from Trump’s ground game. After the candidate gave speeches, the CA team was able to do a great deal of persuasion measurement, or “brand lift studies,” and then used clips from the more-well-received speeches in online ads.

Vote Leave messaging delivered misinformation and fake news about countries such as Turkey, which was negotiating its accession to the European Union. They riled up swing voters by suggesting that a vote to remain was a vote to impoverish Britain’s sacred National Health Service.

To the Truth: May it set us all free.

In the digital age, data was “the new oil.” Data collection was an “arms race,” he said. Cambridge Analytica had amassed an arsenal of data on the American public of unprecedented size and scope, the largest, as far as he knew, anyone had ever assembled.

Pero necesitaba un trabajo. Era emprendedora y no me asustaba hacer cosas que me pudieran reportar dinero, aunque no fueran mi primera opción. Había salido de mi zona de confort a una edad temprana, ofreciéndome como voluntaria para la campaña de Howard Dean a la presidencia en 2003, y después para la campaña de John Kerry con tan solo quince años.