Cambridge Analytica Quotes

Facebook knows more about you than any other person in your life, even your wife,” Kogan told us.

In psychological warfare, the weak points are flaws in how people think. If you’re trying to hack a person’s mind, you need to identify cognitive biases and then exploit them.

Facebook is no longer just a company, I told them. It’s a doorway into the minds of the American people, and Mark Zuckerberg left that door wide open for Cambridge Analytica, the Russians, and who knows how many others. Facebook is a monopoly, but its behavior is more than a regulatory issue—it’s a threat to national security. The concentration of power that Facebook enjoys is a danger to American democracy.

It turns out that Republicans can accept a batshit insane candidate, so long as it’s consistent insanity.

What Cambridge Analytica did was use complex corporate setups across jurisdictions not only to launder money but to launder something that was becoming just as valuable: your data.

We are all vulnerable to manipulation. We make judgments based on the information available to us, but we are all susceptible to manipulation when our access to that information becomes mediated. Over time, our biases can become amplified without our even realising it.

perspecticide – the active deconstruction and manipulation of popular perception – you first have to understand on a deep level what motivates

At the same time, we have fallen for the idea that these services are ‘free’. In reality, we pay with our data into a business model of extracting human attention.

The underlying ideology within social media is not to enhance choice or agency, but rather to narrow, filter, and reduce choice to benefit creators and advertisers. Social media herds the citizenry into surveilled spaces where the architects can track and classify them and use this understanding to influence their behavior. If democracy and capitalism are based on accessible information and free choice, what we are witnessing is their subversion from the inside.

The military just used different terms—modeled influence attribution or target profiles observed acting in concert. But in fashion, we just call that a trend.

The display, which was called 'Can Democracy Survive the Internet?' was dedicated to a 'global election management' company called Cambridge Analytica. Cambridge Analytica claimed to have gathered 5,000 data points on every American voter online: what you liked and what you shared on social media; how and where you shopped; who your friends were... They claimed to be able to take this imprint of your online self, use it to understand your deepest drives and desires, and then draw on that analysis to change your voting behaviour. The boast seemed to be backed up by success: Cambridge Analytica had worked on the victorious American presidential campaign of Donald Trump; it had also run successful campaigns for US Senator Ted Cruz (twice); and others all across Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America.

In one experiment, CA would show people on online panels pictures of simple bar graphs about uncontroversial things (e.g., the usage rates of mobile phones or sales of a car type) and the majority would be able to read the graph correctly. However, unbeknownst to the respondents, the data behind these graphs had actually been derived from politically controversial topics, such as income inequality, climate change, or deaths from gun violence. When the labels of the same graphs were later switched to their actual controversial topic, respondents who were made angry by identity threats were more likely to misread the relabeled graphs that they had previously understood. What CA observed was that when respondents were angry, their need for complete and rational explanations was also significantly reduced. In particular, anger put people in a frame of mind in which they were more indiscriminately punitive, particularly to out-groups. They would also underestimate the risk of negative outcomes. This led CA to discover that even if a hypothetical trade war with China or Mexico meant the loss of American jobs and profits, people primed with anger would tolerate that domestic economic damage if it meant they could use a trade war to punish immigrant groups and urban liberals.

Finding ways to blame victims is psychologically prophylactic for some people because it helps them cope with anxiety induced by uncontrollable environmental threats while maintaining a comforting view that the world will still be fair to them.

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.

Jucikas went on to explain that sabering champagne is not about brute force; it's about studying the bottle and hitting the weakest spot with graceful precision. Done correctly, this requires very little pressure—you essentially let the bottle break itself. You hack the bottle's design flaw.

Scale is the elephant in the room. When Silicon Valley executives excuse themselves and say their platform’s scale is so big that it’s really hard to prevent mass shootings from being broadcast or ethnic cleansing from being incited on their platforms, this is not an excuse—they are implicitly acknowledging that what they have created is too big for them to manage on their own. And yet, they also implicitly believe that their right to profit from these systems outweighs the social costs others bear. So when companies like Facebook say, “We have heard feedback that we must do more,” as they did when their platform was used to live-broadcast mass shootings in New Zealand, we should ask them a question: If these problems are too big for you to solve on the fly, why should you be allowed to release untested products before you understand their potential consequences for society?

The first tool of authoritarian regimes is always informational control—both in the gathering of information on the public through surveillance and the filtration of information to the public through owned media. In its early days, the Internet seemed to pose a challenge to authoritarian regimes, but with the advent of social media, we are watching the construction of architectures that fulfill the needs of every authoritarian regime: surveillance and information control. Authoritarian movements are possible only when the general public becomes habituated to—and numbed by—a new normal.

He further explained, “We started a project to see if we could get better at suggesting groups that will be meaningful to you. We started building artificial intelligence to do this. And it works. In the first six months, we helped 50% more people join meaningful communities.” His ultimate goal is “to help 1 billion people join meaningful communities….If we can do this, it will not only turn around the whole decline in community membership we’ve seen for decades, it will start to strengthen our social fabric and bring the world closer together.” This is such an important goal that Zuckerberg vowed “to change Facebook’s whole mission to take this on.”3 Zuckerberg is certainly correct in lamenting the breakdown of human communities. Yet several months after Zuckerberg made this vow, and just as this book was going to print, the Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed that data entrusted to Facebook was harvested by third parties and used to manipulate elections around the world. This made a mockery of Zuckerberg’s lofty promises, and shattered public trust in Facebook. One can only hope that before undertaking the building of new human communities, Facebook first commits itself to protecting the privacy and security of existing communities.

We can already see how algorithms competing to maximize our attention have the capacity to not only transform cultures but redefine the experience of existence. Algorithmically reinforced “engagement” lies at the heart of our outrage politics, call-out culture, selfie-induced vanity, tech addiction, and eroding mental well-being. Targeted users are soaked in content to keep them clicking.

Imagine an alien, Fox said, who's come here to identify the planet's dominant form of intelligence. The alien has s look, then chooses. What do you think he picks? I probably shrugged. The zaibatsus, Fox said, the multinationals. The blood of a zaibatsu is information, not people. The structure is independent of the individual lives that comprise it. Corporation as life form. Not the Edge lecture again, I said.

Chaos and disruption, I later learned, are central tenets of Bannon's animating ideology. Before catalyzing America's dharmic rebalancing, his movement would first need to instill chaos through society so that a new order could emerge. He was an avid reader of a computer scientist and armchair philosopher who goes by the name Mencius Moldbug, a hero of the alt-right who writes long-winded essays attacking democracy and virtually everything about how modern societies are ordered. Moldbug’s views on truth influenced Bannon, and what Cambridge Analytica would become. Moldbug has written that “nonsense is a more effective organizing tool than the truth,” and Bannon embraced this. “Anyone can believe in the truth,” Moldbug writes, “to believe in nonsense is an unforgettable demonstration of loyalty. It serves as a political uniform. And if you have a uniform, you have an army It serves as a political uniform. And if you have a uniform, you have an army.

If we want to understand why these technology companies behave this way we should listen to the words of those who built them. Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist behind Facebook, Palantir, and Paypal, spoke at length about how he no longer believes “freedom and democracy are compatible.” And in elaborating his views on technology companies, he expanded on how CEOs are the new monarchs in a techno-feudal system of governance. We just don't call them monarchies in public, he said, because “anything that's not democracy makes people uncomfortable.

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 a communicable disease threatens a population, you immunize certain vectors first—usually babies and old people, as they are most susceptible to infection. Then nurses and doctors, teachers and bus drivers, as they are most likely to spread a contagion through wide social interaction, even if they do not succumb to the disease themselves. The same type of strategy could help you change culture. To make a population more resilient to extremism, for example, you would first identify which people are susceptible to weaponized messaging, determine the traits that make them vulnerable to the contagion narrative, and then target them with an inoculating counter-narrative in an effort to change their behaviour. In theory, of course, the same strategy could be used in reverse to foster extremism.

The firm did this at the local level, creating right-wing pages with vague names like Smith County Patriots or I Love My Country. Because of the way Facebook’s recommendation algorithm worked, these pages would pop up in the feeds of people who had already liked similar content. When users joined CA’s fake groups, it would post videos and articles that would further provoke and inflame them. Conversations would rage on the group page, with people commiserating about how terrible or unfair something was. CA broke down social barriers, cultivating relationships across groups. And all the while it was testing and refining messages, to achieve maximum engagement. Now CA had users who (1) self-identified as part of an extreme group, (2) were a captive audience, and (3) could be manipulated with data.

We like to think of ourselves as immune from influence or our cognitive biases, because we want to feel like we are in control, but industries like alcohol, tobacco, fast food, and gaming all know we are creatures that are subject to cognitive and emotional vulnerabilities. And tech has caught on to this with its research into “user experience,” “gamification,” “growth hacking,” and “engagement” by activating ludic loops and reinforcement schedules in the same way slot machines do. So far, this gamification has been contained to social media and digital platforms, but what will happen as we further integrate our lives with networked information architectures designed to exploit evolutionary flaws in our cognition? Do we really want to live in a “gamified” environment that engineers our obsessions and plays with our lives as if we are inside its game?

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.

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.

Waters spoke of the many ways that Facebook had “utterly failed.” The company had failed on diversity and inclusion. It had been caught in “redlining,” when housing advertisements were not shown to users of particular races — which Facebook was being sued for both by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, and privately by housing charities. Antitrust investigations were active in 47 states and the District of Columbia. The company had been fined $5 billion by the FTC over the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Facebook had enabled the government of Russia to interfere in the 2016 election.

Voter Activation Network.

Most campaigns can be boiled down to two core operations: persuasion and turnout.

The story of Cambridge Analytica shows how our identities and behaviour have become commodities in the high-stakes data trade.

Soon we were sharing personal information without the slightest hesitation. This was encouraged, in part, by a new vocabulary. What were in effect privately owned surveillance networks became ‘communities’, the people these networks used for profit were ‘users’, and addictive design was promoted as ‘user experience’ or ‘engagement’. People’s identities began to be profiled from their ‘data exhaust’ or ‘digital breadcrumbs’.

sociales, diseñada para «la nueva ciudadanía». Y asesorada por Steve Bannon, jefe de Campaña de Donald Trump y fundador de Cambridge Analytica. La Internet Research Agency

We were spying, pure and simple, with cover from Trinidadian leaders. It felt bizarre—unreal—to be observing what people were watching on a tiny, faraway island, somehow more like we were playing a video game than intruding on the private lives of actual people. Even today, thinking back on it, Trinidad seems more like a dream than something we actually did. But we did do it. The Trinidad project was the first time I got sucked into a situation that was grossly unethical, and, frankly, it triggered in me a state of denial

In the Hype Machine, everyone is a digital marketer, whether we’re fighting for ideas or for consumer dollars.

The data has become more and more valuable, with Facebook making on average $30 from each of its 170 million American users.

It’s June 2018, and I’m in Washington to testify to the U.S. Congress about Cambridge Analytica, a military contractor and psychological warfare firm where I used to work, and a complex web involving Facebook, Russia, WikiLeaks, the Trump campaign, and the Brexit referendum.

We are socialized to place trust in our institutions—our government, our police, our schools, our regulators. It’s as if we assume there’s some guy with a secret team of experts sitting in an office with a plan, and if that plan doesn’t work, don’t worry, he’s got a plan B and a plan C—someone in charge will take care of it. But in truth, that guy doesn’t exist. If we choose to wait, nobody will come.

In an attempt to calm the storm, and in tribute to Cox, the Leave and Remain campaigns agreed to stop all campaign activities for three days, an extraordinary decision with only a week remaining until the vote. However, AIQ secretly continued deploying digital advertisements for Vote Leave, knowing that the British media would not be able to tell whether they were continuing online ads.

AggregateIQ, but it signed an intellectual property agreement that granted SCL the rights to its work. SCL and, later, Cambridge Analytica frequently took advantage of a network of offshore companies registered under different names. Similar to the strategies employed by tax avoidance schemes, this network of companies around the world helped Cambridge Analytica bypass the scrutiny of electoral or data privacy regulators.

played a recording of Nigel Oakes, the CEO of SCL Group, Cambridge Analytica’s parent company. ‘Hitler attacked the Jews, because he didn’t have a problem with the Jews at all, but the people didn’t like the Jews,’ said Oakes. ‘So he just leveraged an artificial enemy. Well, that’s exactly what Trump did. He leveraged a Muslim.’ Oakes’s company was helping Trump do what Hitler did, but he seemed to find the whole thing amusing.

Jucikas typed in a query, and a list of links popped up. He clicked on one of the many people who went by that name in Nebraska – and there was everything about her, right up on the screen. Here’s her photo, here’s where she works, here’s her house. Here are her kids, this is where they go to school, this is the car she drives. She voted for Mitt Romney in 2012, she loves Katy Perry, she drives an Audi, she’s a bit basic … and on and on and on. We knew everything about her – and for many records, the information was updated in real time, so if she posted to Facebook, we could see it happening.

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.

non-kinetic weapon

A still more sobering social media example of a different kind, one so important that it could well have influenced the presidential election of 2016, was the cooperation between Cambridge Analytica and Facebook. Cambridge Analytica, a political data firm, was largely the creation of Steve Bannon and his billionaire sponsor, Robert Mercer. One former co-executive referred to Cambridge Analytica as “Bannon’s arsenal of weaponry to wage a culture war on America using military strategies.” Cambridge Analytica combined a particularly vicious version of traditional “dirty tricks” with cutting-edge social media savvy. The dirty tricks, according to its former CEO, Alexander Nix, included bribery, sting operations, the use of prostitutes, and “honey traps” (usually involving sexual behavior, sometimes even initiated for the purposes of obtaining compromising photographs) to discredit politicians on whom it conducted opposition research. The social media savvy included advanced methods developed by the Psychometrics Centre of Cambridge University. Aleksandr Kogan, a young Russian American psychologist working there, created an app that enabled him to gain access to elaborate private information on more than fifty million Facebook users, information specifically identifying personality traits that influenced behavior. Kogan had strong links to Facebook, which failed to block his harvesting of that massive data; he then passed the data along to Cambridge Analytica. Kogan also taught at the Saint Petersburg State University in Russia; and given the links between Cambridge Analytica and Russian groups, the material was undoubtedly made available to Russian intelligence. So extensive was Cambridge Analytica’s collection of data that Nix could boast, “Today in the United States we have somewhere close to 4 or 5 thousand data points on every individual…. So we model the personality of every adult across the United States, some 230 million people.” Whatever his exaggeration, he was describing a new means of milieu control that was invisible and potentially manipulable in the extreme. Beyond Cambridge Analytica or Kogan, Russian penetration of American social media has come to be recognized as a vast enterprise involving extensive falsification and across-the-board anti-Clinton messages, with special attention given to African American men in order to discourage them from voting. The Russians apparently reached millions of people and surely had a considerable influence on the outcome of the election. More generally, one can say that social media platforms can now create a totality of their own, and can make themselves available to would-be owners of reality by means of massive deception, distortion, and promulgation of falsehoods. The technology itself promotes mystification and becomes central to creating and sustaining cultism. Trump is the first president to have available to him these developments in social media. His stance toward the wild conspiracism I have mentioned is to stop short of total allegiance to them, but at the same time to facilitate them and call them forth in his tweets and harbor their followers at his rallies. All of this suggests not only that Trump and the new social media are made for each other, but also that the problem will long outlive Trump’s brief, but all too long, moment on the historical stage.

A new logic of accumulation emerged in the boardrooms of silicon valley. Tech companies began making money from their ability to map out and organize information. At the core of this model was an asymmetry in knowledge: the machines knew a lot about our behaviour, but we knew very little about theirs.

Soon we were sharing personal information without the slightest hesitation. This was encouraged, in part, by a new vocabular. What were in effect privately owned surveillance networks became “communities,” the people these networks used for profit were “users,” and addictive design was promoted as “user experience” or “engagement.

Soon we were sharing personal information without the slightest hesitation. This was encouraged, in part, by a new vocabulary. What were in effect privately owned surveillance networks became “communities,” the people these networks used for profit were “users,” and addictive design was promoted as “user experience” or “engagement.

identity-motivated reasoning,

My brief exposure to hacking communities left a permanent impression. You learn that no system is absolutely –nothing is impenetrable and barriers are a dare. The hacker philosophy taught me that if you shift your perspective on any system: a computer, a network, even society, you may discover flaws and vulnerabilities.

He reads about intersectional feminism or the fluidity of identity –not as I later learned that, because he’s open to those ideas –but because he wants to invert them: to identify what ideas people attach themselves to and then to weaponize it. What I didn’t know that day is that Bannon wanted to fight a cultural war, and so he had come to people who specialized in informational weapons to help him build his arsenal.

He reads about intersectional feminism or the fluidity of identity not, as I later learned, because he's open to those ideas but because he wants to invert them: to identify what ideas people attach themselves to and then to weaponize it. What I didn’t know that day is that Bannon wanted to fight a cultural war, and so he had come to people who specialized in informational weapons to help him build his arsenal.

a psychological warfare firm,

psychological profiling,

I described Cambridge Analytica’s tactics of voter manipulation – how the firm identified and targeted people with neurotic or conspiratorial predispositions, then disseminated propaganda designed to deepen and accentuate those traits. I explained how, after obtaining people’s data from Facebook, Cambridge Analytica could in some cases predict their behaviour better than their own spouses could, and how the firm was using that information to, in effect, radicalise people

Hoy en día, la mayoría de los sitios donde podemos encontrar noticias serias ya son de pago, por lo que, poco a poco, la información se está convirtiendo en un producto de lujo. Además, se ha de tener en cuenta que vivimos en un entorno en el que las noticias falsas son gratis.

A menos que sus padres sean vulcanos en secreto, nadie en este mundo es un pensador puro y racional.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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,

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

scientist and eventual whistleblower Christopher Wylie’s excellent book, “Mindf*ck: inside Cambridge Analytica’s plot to break the world,” wherein Wylie, who describes himself as the gay Canadian vegan who somehow ended up creating “Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare mindfuck tool.

The only morality of the algorithm is to optimize you as a consumer, and in many cases you become the product. There are very few examples in human history of industries where people themselves become products, and those are scary industries – slavery and the sex trade. And now we have social media. — Christopher Wiley, Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower and author of MindF*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America.

Facebook was an infinite player that now seems to be moving down a more finite path. Founded in 2004, Facebook came to life with a well-articulated Cause to “give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.” Today, however, it finds itself embroiled in scandals that do anything but “bring the world closer together.” Facebook has been accused of violating their users’ privacy, tracking our habits online (even when we’re not on Facebook), failing to adequately police fake accounts or fake news disseminated across their service, then using all the data they collect either to sell or to maximize the dollars they can earn from selling advertising. I doubt this is what Mark Zuckerberg meant by “giving people power.” Has Facebook veered from their once inspiring infinite path because of the overwhelming pressure their leaders feel to answer to Wall Street’s finite expectations? Is it because they are doubling down on a business model driven by selling advertising instead of making an Existential Flex to reshape the entire company? Is it because their leaders have lost connection with their Just Cause and who they need to be primarily serving in order to keep the game in play? Is it hubris? Today, when Facebook does right by the people, it is too often a result of public pressure or scandal and rarely a proactive decision made to protect those they serve and advance their Cause. Facebook reacted to the scandal that erupted around Cambridge Analytica, for example, only after there was a scandal, even though they were aware of Cambridge Analytica’s unethical practices before we found out about

Recently, Filipino politics kinda looks a lot like the United States,” he continued, rolling his eyes and gesturing with his hands. “You’ve got a president who was Trump before Trump was Trump, and you have relationships with people close to him with SCL and Cambridge Analytica. And you had a lot of data being collected—the second largest amount of data after the United States being collected in the Philippines. Also if you look at how SCL and Cambridge Analytica operated in a lot of countries . . . one of the things they talk about is that they use . . . they don’t go into a country as Cambridge Analytica. They don’t go into a country as SCL Group because it’s too obvious. So you use local partners—” “Proxies,” I clarified. “You use proxies,” he continued. “. . . They’re on camera admitting this. They go into countries, set up bullshit companies that are just fronts and they send in staff. It makes it very difficult for regulators or opposition parties to actually identify what’s happening. And as they also have admitted, once an election is done, they just get out. So they’re in. They’re out. They’ve got their guy in, and then you know they can come back and ask for favors.” “Okay,” I interrupted, “Alexander Nix [the Cambridge Analytica president] came to the Philippines at the end of 2015 before the campaigns began, and there was a photo of him—”13 “Yeah, he met with people there,” said Chris. “—the staff of Duterte,” I finished. “Yeah! What do you think he was doing there?” Chris asked.14