The short documentary everyone is talking about:
An undercover investigation by Channel 4 News reveals how Cambridge Analytica secretly campaigns in elections across the world. Bosses were filmed talking about using bribes, ex-spies, fake IDs and sex workers.
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or Paperback
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Links to books and other items on this page and elsewhere on Greg Ladens' blog may send you to Amazon, where I am a registered affiliate. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases, which helps to fund this site.
Funny where they get them to talk about going after targets with exactly what Channel 4 is doing to them.
Whataboutism.
The problem here is CA, not C4.
But of course you have to defend these democracy poisoning scum, from Mercer and Bannon on down.
That’s not what aboutism. I thought it was funny. I think that’s what C4 was going for in the edit.
Hillary blame your continues.
At least the American candidates hired these guys because it was a key for getting some big donor money.
Ted Cruz campaigned for 6 votes in Iowa that cared about Star Trek based on CA, but now this is apparently part of Trump-Russia collusion or something.
Did a Democrat run over your kitten when you were a little boy?
It takes something seriously traumatic to ingrain such an irrational loathing for a target, in the manner that you display.
The irrational loathing is towards CA, and anyone else that gets associated with Trump.
What’s irrational about loathing people who are pissing in the face of democracy?
Yes, it’s amazing how Channel 4 got hold of all the spies and hired all those hookers. Jesus.
On a sane note: They (Cambridge) passed themselves off as a legitimate organization in order to get access to the data FB had. It shouldn’t have taken FB’s data folks to realize Cambridge were shitbags, but if they weren’t expecting people to use data so dishonestly it may not be a surprise.
The even scarier part of this is that it isn’t clear that Cambridge actually did anything to protect the data they spread around to the scum they worked with. If they off-loaded the data themselves there should be real concern about what else is being done with it.
Did Facebook know CA was involved? Looks like CA hired someone to get the data with their own app, FB okayed the app’s downloads, and found out about CA’s involvement later, at which point FB had to cover it up because the initial OK was illegal per consent decree.
OK. For the first minute there I was wondering why people were loathing (or not) California.
Yes, it’s irrational to be upset at a company when they obtained scads of personal data and did nothing to protect it (at a minimum), scattering it to the wind and without regard to who obtained it. By that logic you shouldn’t be upset with Equifax.
The second part of your comment is equally stupid.
Have you heard of Catalist?
http://chrislittleton.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Inside-Obama-Cave.pdf
More whataboutism.
FFS.
Other than the facts that it was a well run group that did things legally, but for someone who was not white, what do you have against Presidents Obama’s tech group?
> what do you have against Presidents Obama’s tech group?
Two things- the general idea of people having databases on the whole population.
What I am also against here is this whining when Republicans use certain tactics to win elections but no comment or even praise when Democrats do it to win elections. 527s, SuperPacs, now social media.
When Obama did it, it was praised as how advanced his tech team was. They mined the entire Facebook social connections graph for their turnout operation, and Facebook looked the other way. Now when CA does something similar, this is democracy under threat.
What. The. Fuck?
Words fail me.
“Two things- the general idea of people having databases on the whole population.
What I am also against here is this whining when Republicans use certain tactics to win elections but no comment or even praise when Democrats do it to win elections. 527s, SuperPacs, now social media.
When Obama did it, it was praised as how advanced his tech team was. They mined the entire Facebook social connections graph for their turnout operation, and Facebook looked the other way. Now when CA does something similar, this is democracy under threat.”
Hypocrisy sucks. I fucking hate it.
The USA democratic party are a bunch of nuke loving arseholes and dont have an ethical leg to stand on. They will not get rid of them. Wouldnt put any sort of behavior past em.
Ditto the elephant fucksticks.
Both mobs are fucked.
I dunno why they get so much support from voters except to think that the voters are fucked in the head.
And theres very much consilience toward the idea americans are nuts.
The Cambridge Analytica incident is just another piece of excrement to add to the pile of weasel and elephant poop that is the Trump candidacy and presidency.
What do you say about a candidate who totally coarsened the election process, a president who tries to cause a nation of immigrants to feel fear and loathing towards newer immigrants, praises and congratulates the president of our most serious adversary, doesn’t enforce sanctions against same for election tampering, kicks American journalists out of the Oval office and then invites chief Russian spies and the chief Russian propaganda network into it!!! [Hint: Why do you think we had to “redecorate” the oval office afterwards?], praises Nazis, retains the likes of Bannon, Miller, Conway, and Gorka as advisers, tries to destroy the FBI, one of our best crime fighting organizations, lies like a sack of shit, cheats on his wife with porn stars, sexually assaults and otherwise abuses women, threw rocks at a baby as a child!!,a president who selects a horde of complete nincompoops to head major government departments, eviscerates agencies like the EPA that protect us against industrial toxins, treats scientists like refuse, and tries to silence free speech?
What do I say? I say impeach the son of a bitch before he can do further irreversible damage to our nation and our world.
And censure and neuter the terrible twins Pence and Ryan before that, they are some of the evil puppeteers behind Trump (note their presence, Pence to the right and Ryan to the left of Trump when he is speaking from the podium) being manipulated in turn by others in the background, those with the real power and the money such as the Kochs to pervert the democratic process as we see with Cambridge Analytical and its parent company SCL from which old Etonian Alexander Nix has yet to be removed.
It would appear that it is to the right of politics where CA and SCL have been most involved with funding links and directorships to Tory party hierarchy in the UK, articles on this have been appearing today as the Prime Minister May was quizzed at PMQs today by SNP member Ian Blackford about Tory links and funding.
The PM slalomed around any questions with typical evasion,
This is no surprise as another old Etonian set up SCL and he looks to be a real gent — NOT. Check out the links in that Wiki article on Oakes.
If you were honest you would realize the methods used the two cases are monumentally different.
The fact that you believe that comparison to be true means you aren’t being honest.
There are many issues with the Democratic party, but equating them with the modern Republican party is completely unjustified: The modern republicans are completely racist, blatantly anti-poor, anti-woman — anti anyone who is not a wealthy white male. Remember that the only reason the tea-baggers ever organized was that the people who funded their “grass roots” groups were pissed off that a black man was walking into the front door of the White House.
The political system in the US is rocky, but the bad seeds in the Democratic party completely pale in their level of fundamental evil next to the Republicans.
I cant excuse an organization being an arsehole because some other organization is a bigger arsehole.
I think this is a quite valid rationale to have.
I didn’t excuse them. I said their level of evil pales next to that of the Republican party.
Agree. Sort of.
Jeez they are real shitheads but.
Need to have a good hard look at themselves, the dems.
The republicans are total scum. Intellectually bereft. Ethicaly bereft.
Lets not take ones eyes off the bigger picture which is i spose, bereftness.
People who love nukes but aint racist dont impress me at all in the same way
a rapist who aint racist dosnt impress me.
Its not a feather in the dems cap that they aint overtly racist. Its not a platform. Its not special. Its just normal.
Whats not normal is being a nuke lover, and that they certainly are.
And noone ever calls em out hardly.
Fuck the donkeys and the elephants.
“Every time an individual volunteers to help out – for instance by offering to host a fundraising party for the president – he or she will be asked to log onto the re-election website with their Facebook credentials. That in turn will engage Facebook Connect, the digital interface that shares a user’s personal information with a third party.
Consciously or otherwise, the individual volunteer will be injecting all the information they store publicly on their Facebook page – home location, date of birth, interests and, crucially, network of friends – directly into the central Obama database.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/feb/17/obama-digital-data-machine-facebook-election
“If they contacted the campaign website through mobile apps, cellphone numbers and address books were downloaded. Computer “cookies” captured Web browsing and online spending habits.”
http://investigations.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/01/28/16726913-obama-campaign-gives-database-of-millions-of-supporters-to-new-advocacy-group
CA is in the news because of the illegality they did once they decided to break FB’s terms of service. We are learning more about the activities each day. Your ignorant (or is it blatant dishonesty behind it) dismissal of their actions, coupled with your “it’s the same thing Obama’s team did” is typical for you. There is nothing to your assertions.
Either
– You don’t understand what happened because you didn’t read the reports
– You “know” that Obama’s team did illegal things because — well, it’s easy to guess why you would think that
Your misrepresentation of FB’s data policies (as well as those of other groups) concerning data is almost understandable, because FB makes finding out details as difficult as they can — which is typical business practice. Still, it would be a breath of fresh air if you would, at least once, study the issues and make an attempt to understand details instead of making your typical statement from ignorance: they’re the same as Obama but he was worse.
New York Times, Vox, Wired, Washington Post, none of these focused on CA’s breaking FB terms of service. All of this show up in the latter half of the story, and instead focus on CA’s harvesting of Facebook data to win the election, except WP focuses on FB’s privacy issues.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/technology/facebook-cambridge-analytica-explained.html
Now that we have statements by the people who set up CA’s operation we know (because they stated as such) that the way they treated the data they gathered was tremendously different from the way candidate and later President Obama’s operation used it. CA repeatedly violated FB’s terms of use, released the data to outside for profit organizations (also a violation), gave it to organizations led by other governments (violation), and repeatedly lied to FB by saying they had deleted the data when they had not.
When you hear people saying they did the same thing Obama’s organization did — they are telling you a massive lie.
You mean not just whataboutism, but mendacious and misleading whataboutism? Shocked, I tell you. Who would *do* such a terrible thing?
And why?
With regards to mining Facebook to win elections, they are roughly the same.
Facebook is upset with CA over the policy violations, but it is not why CA is in the news now.
Cambridge Analytica sent out a series of tweets, and posted the substance of those tweets on its website.
As you should have guessed already, the messages are lies and misleading information.
The first message was (emphasis inside is mine)
Notice the present tense. They might be attempting to comply now that everyone is watching them, but in the years involved they were blatantly violating those terms of service, repeatedly, and lying to FB about doing so. That is the reason they were suspended.
They spent some time trying to dismiss their former employee Wylie (he’s the guy who has been explaining all the shady things CA was doing), and tried to lay complete blame on an outside company. Neither of those claims is supported by what has come out.
They tried the same thing mikeN did, equating their activities with those of the ’08 and ’12 Obama campaigns. That is, of course, pure bullshit, because of the flagrant misuse of data by CA in both those situations (and other reasons that have been disclosed during investigations. Some people will believe it, but they are the people to whom facts don’t matter.)
One of the most amusing lines of crap was their claim (in their tweets) that they never engaged in producing coercive materials, only in advertising (again, emphasis is mine).
That was immediately followed by
Of course, advertising is at its core designed to be coercive — that first comment could be the most blatant lie they’ve told in their defense. (Again, the already patently dishonest folks will eat this shit up.)
The funniest (to me) bit is this: CA’s twitter page has this banner message at the top:
No, they don’t produce things designed to be coercive, not at all./snark
You really have to wonder just how far down the intellectual/moral rabbit hole people have to be in order to say anything like “CA didn’t do anything wrong and certainly did nothing different than that black guy the nation made a mistake with did.”
Just saw the latest Bill Maher. Again the complaint was about mining Facebook data on tens of millions of people to elect Trump, not about violation of Facebook policies. No mention that Obama campaign did the same though.
Yet somehow the people who are aware Obama campaign did something similar want to turn the story into something about stealing private info from Facebook.
Keep lying mikeN. It’s all you have in this.