How Big data mines personal info to manipulate voters and craft fake news
(June 2017, Nina Burleigh)
#Facebook, #Cambridge_Analytica, #artificial_intelligence #big_data #psychographics #OCEAN #surveillance
http://www.newsweek.com/2017/06/16/big-data-mines-personal-info-manipulate-voters-623131.html
“It’s my ([Alexander Nix]) privilege to speak to you today about the power of Big Data and psychographics in the electoral process,” he began. As he clicked through slides, he explained how Cambridge Analytica can appeal directly to people’s emotions, bypassing cognitive roadblocks, thanks to the oceans of data it can access on every man and woman in the country.
After describing Big Data, Nix talked about how Cambridge was mining it for political purposes, to identify “mean personality” and then segment personality types into yet more specific subgroups, using other variables, to create ever smaller groups susceptible to precisely targeted messages.
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Big Data, artificial intelligence and algorithms designed and manipulated by strategists like the folks at Cambridge have turned our world into a Panopticon
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it made tens of millions of “friends” by first employing low-wage tech-workers to hand over their Facebook profiles: It spiders through Facebook posts, friends and likes, and, within a matter of seconds, spits out a personality profile, including the so-called OCEAN psychological tendencies test score (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism)
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Facebook was even more useful for Trump, with its online behavioral data on nearly 2 billion people around the world, each of whom is precisely accessible to strategists and marketers who can afford to pay for the peek. Team Trump created a 220 million–person database, nicknamed Project Alamo, using voter registration records, gun ownership records, credit card purchase histories and the monolithic data vaults Experian PLC, Datalogix, Epsilon and Axiom Corporation.
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Facebook offers advertisers is its Lookalike Audiences program. An advertiser (or a political campaign manager) can come to Facebook with a small group of known customers or supporters, and ask Facebook to expand it. Using its access to billions of posts and pictures, likes and contacts, Facebook can create groups of people who are “like” that initial group, and then target advertising made specifically to influence it.
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By 2012, there had been huge advances in what Big Data, social media and AI could do together. That year, Facebook conducted a happy-sad emotional manipulation experiment, splitting a million people into two groups and manipulating the posts so that one group received happy updates from friends and another received sad ones. They then ran the effects through algorithms and proved—surprise—that they were able to affect people’s moods. (Facebook, which has the greatest storehouse of personal behavior data ever amassed, is still conducting behavioral research, mostly, again, in the service of advertising and making money.
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Psychographic algorithms allow strategists to target not just angry racists but also the most intellectually gullible individuals, people who make decisions emotionally rather than cognitively. For Trump, such voters were the equivalent of diamonds in a dark mine. Cambridge apparently helped with that too. A few weeks before the election, in a Sky News report on the company, an employee was actually shown on camera poring over a paper on “ The Need for Cognition Scale,” which, like the OCEAN test, can be applied to personal data, and which measures the relative importance of thinking versus feeling in an individual’s decision-making.
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Big Data technology has so far outpaced legal and regulatory frameworks that discussions about the ethics of its use for political purposes are still rare. No senior member of Congress or administration official in Washington has placed a very high priority on asking what psychographic data mining means for privacy, nor about the ethics of political messaging based on evading cognition or rational thinking, nor about the AI role in mainstreaming racist and other previously verboten speech.
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After months of investigations and increasingly critical articles in the British press (especially by The Guardian ’s Carole Cadwalladr, who has called Cambridge Analytica’s work the framework for an authoritarian surveillance state, and whose reporting Cambridge has since legally challenged), the British Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), an independent agency that monitors privacy rights and adherence to the U.K.’s strict laws, announced May 17 that it is looking into Cambridge and SCL for their work in the Brexit vote and other elections.
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Now in the White House, Kushner heads the administration’s Office of Technology and Innovation. It will focus on “technology and data,” the administration stated. Kushner said he plans to use it to help run government like a business, and to treat American citizens “like customers.”
