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The main point from this article seems to be that the service was provided for free, without registering it as a donation. Some details on the actual technolo

The main point from this article seems to be that the service was provided for free, without registering it as a donation. Some details on the actual technology are in this related article: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/26/robert-mercer-breitbart-war-on-media-steve-bannon-donald-trump-nigel-farage https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/26/robert-merc... > On its website, Cambridge Analytica makes the astonishing boast that it has psychological profiles based on 5,000 separate pieces of data on 220 million American voters Then there are some speculation what data could it be and how would it be used. From that, it seems that the difference between other "Better audience targeting" tools used for typical commercial advertising campaigns would be mainly scale and accuracy? As a side note, does anyone else thinks that this specific photo in article about manipulation was used to manipulate my emotions and invoke negative view of the other side? https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/26/robert-mercer-breitbart-war-on-media-steve-bannon-donald-trump-nigel-farage#img-4 https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/26/robert-merc...

adnzzzzZ 10y ago
>Then there are some speculation what data could it be and how would it be used. From that, it seems that the difference between other "Better audience targeting" tools used for typical commercial advertising campaigns would be mainly scale and accuracy? Some of it is explained on this 5 minutes video (ignore the clickbait title). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yo3gOoOSdhY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yo3gOoOSdhY According to this professor one of the things they used for better targetting is a person's Big 5 personality profile that they extract from Facebook likes.
- bamboozled 10y ago
  Thanks for sharing that, he raises some really good points!!!
- FeatureRush 10y ago
  Oh, so it's also a better underlaying model. Looking now at the company website they are using less popular name OCEAN Personality Model for Big 5. As far as I know Big5 is not the final, definitive model. There is this famous quote about performance of NLP machine learning system going up after firing a linguist, I wonder if we will someday hear similar comment about psychologists?
- NPMaxwell 10y ago
  Great video. Lots to think about. Like personality tests in general, test of big 5 personality traits correlate with behavior at about .2 to .3. For example, they have a correlation of .2 to .3 with GPA (http://www.gwern.net/docs/conscientiousness/2007-noftle.pdf http://www.gwern.net/docs/conscientiousness/2007-noftle.pdf). This is a typical correlation level with behavior for all personality tests. To give you a sense of this, simulate a personality test result with 90 zeros and 10 ones. Then add a column of 90 zeros and 10 ones for the behavior you are predicting. Arrange your behavior ones so that 7 line up with personality zeros (were not predicted) and 3 line up with ones (predicted). That's a correlation of .24. If you picked 10% randomly, you would have found (on average) 1 of the people showing the behavior and you would have mistakenly flagged 9 who would not produce the behavior. With the test, you find 3 and mistakenly flag 7. If the test and behavior are spread 50/50, you find 32, when random selection of 50% would have found 25. Combine that correlation with the problem that the Facebook data is not perfectly correlated with how people would fill out the Big 5 personality instrument. If you insisted that your modelers create a model of the the Big 5 and then insisted that they use the Big 5 scores to predict behavior, chances are that you would have correlations near zero. The opportunity here is in creating models directly from Facebook characteristics to the behavior of interest. The Big 5 theory may help guide which FB characteristics to test, but then you need to set it aside to create working models.
chrisan 10y ago
> As a side note, does anyone else thinks that this specific photo in article about manipulation was used to manipulate my emotions and invoke negative view of the other side? Yes, he's either got a crazy face or "laughing all the way to the bank" face. They used fairly "stock" photos of Mercer and perhaps Banon, but Trump has a look of confusion and Farage looks mental. For the record I'm neither pro Trump or pro Brexit. I wish both sides wouldn't participate in behaviors like this. I wonder how long until your browser or an addon can get the gist of the article's subjects compare with image recognition the facial expressions and let you know if there might be some editorial bias. Just something to put in your subconscious before the editor/author works on your subconscious
- mike_hearn 10y ago
  Note also the image used to depict Leave voters: young men waving flags and wearing waistcoats. Despite the fact that Leave gets a big chunk of its support from everywhere that isn't London and Leave was more popular with the old than the young, they chose to illustrate it like that because they know it'll cause Guardian readers to puke a little. You can see that sort of thing everywhere, subtle manipulation through image choice. Here's another example: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/01/06/brussels-punishing-britain-brexit-will-play-right-hands-says/ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/01/06/brussels-punishin... That article is supposedly about Brexit and Marine Le Pen, but the image chosen for the top of the article claims to be a picture of a Russian journalist (holding up pictures of Trump, Le Pen and Putin). In fact she's not a journalist at all, her name is Maria Katasonova and she is an obscure candidate for a far-right Russian political party. I can only assume the point of doing this is to try and plant the subconscious message that Russian journalism is unreliable.
algesten 10y ago
Another point is that the election of Trump, Brexit and Breitbart News are linked by common corporate interests.
- FeatureRush 10y ago
  You are right, although at least this article presented it more as a personal agenda thing than corporate interest, but it's getting hard to tell where the difference lies between them.
- tomp 10y ago
  As opposed to CNN, WaPo, Bremain and Clinton's campaign?!
  - facetube 10y ago
    Which one of those runs stories that argue against observed scientific fact? Which one of those repeatedly stokes religious intolerance and anti-immigrant sentiments, to the detriment of a nation built on immigration and tolerance? There is no moral equivalence here.
    - FeatureRush 10y ago
      Coming from Poland, where recently we struggle with news authenticity it took me less than 60 seconds to finds this: www.cnn.com/2017/02/23/world/pope-atheists-again/ > Pope: It's better to be an atheist than a bad Christian - CNN.com How this is not a fake news and misrepresentation of what the Pope have said? It's so bad that the story was removed from HN and even pro-atheist reddit didn't bough it...
      - literallycancer 10y ago
        The title is usually chosen by someone else than the author of the article. Other than the clickbait title, the article seems fairly normal?
quirkafleeg 10y ago
Here's a Google image search for Farage: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=nigel+farage&tbm=isch https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=nigel+farage&tbm=isch He's not exactly known for looking Churchillian.
- LeifCarrotson 10y ago
  So he's clearly very expressive and not particularly photogenic. What problems does that actually expose about his platform, or how does it show that his opponents are correct? It is barely even an ad-hominem attack - am attack on his character or reputation might lead me to believe that his viewpoint is held by untrustworthy people, but his face? It means nothing. And yet it does have a small subconscious impact, causing a bias in my thinking.
  - ptaipale 10y ago
    But of course choosing well-timed pictures, also known as "photojournalism", is a long-established method of applying political influence of media. It was done to Hillary Clinton, it's done to Trump.
    - ascorbic 10y ago
      The photos he tweets himself are no better. It's just him. https://twitter.com/Nigel_Farage/media https://twitter.com/Nigel_Farage/media
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - timrichard 10y ago
    He does look a bit ridiculous when photographed with the trademark pint of beer, and is often mocked accordingly. Milliband was also mocked for looking silly when eating a bacon sandwich, but that was reframed as shallow media shenanigans. Depends on the agenda, I guess.
  - quirkafleeg 10y ago

adnzzzzZ 10y ago

>Then there are some speculation what data could it be and how would it be used. From that, it seems that the difference between other "Better audience targeting" tools used for typical commercial advertising campaigns would be mainly scale and accuracy? Some of it is explained on this 5 minutes video (ignore the clickbait title). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yo3gOoOSdhY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yo3gOoOSdhY According to this professor one of the things they used for better targetting is a person's Big 5 personality profile that they extract from Facebook likes.

bamboozled 10y ago
Thanks for sharing that, he raises some really good points!!!
FeatureRush 10y ago
Oh, so it's also a better underlaying model. Looking now at the company website they are using less popular name OCEAN Personality Model for Big 5. As far as I know Big5 is not the final, definitive model. There is this famous quote about performance of NLP machine learning system going up after firing a linguist, I wonder if we will someday hear similar comment about psychologists?
NPMaxwell 10y ago
Great video. Lots to think about. Like personality tests in general, test of big 5 personality traits correlate with behavior at about .2 to .3. For example, they have a correlation of .2 to .3 with GPA (http://www.gwern.net/docs/conscientiousness/2007-noftle.pdf http://www.gwern.net/docs/conscientiousness/2007-noftle.pdf). This is a typical correlation level with behavior for all personality tests. To give you a sense of this, simulate a personality test result with 90 zeros and 10 ones. Then add a column of 90 zeros and 10 ones for the behavior you are predicting. Arrange your behavior ones so that 7 line up with personality zeros (were not predicted) and 3 line up with ones (predicted). That's a correlation of .24. If you picked 10% randomly, you would have found (on average) 1 of the people showing the behavior and you would have mistakenly flagged 9 who would not produce the behavior. With the test, you find 3 and mistakenly flag 7. If the test and behavior are spread 50/50, you find 32, when random selection of 50% would have found 25. Combine that correlation with the problem that the Facebook data is not perfectly correlated with how people would fill out the Big 5 personality instrument. If you insisted that your modelers create a model of the the Big 5 and then insisted that they use the Big 5 scores to predict behavior, chances are that you would have correlations near zero. The opportunity here is in creating models directly from Facebook characteristics to the behavior of interest. The Big 5 theory may help guide which FB characteristics to test, but then you need to set it aside to create working models.

chrisan 10y ago

> As a side note, does anyone else thinks that this specific photo in article about manipulation was used to manipulate my emotions and invoke negative view of the other side? Yes, he's either got a crazy face or "laughing all the way to the bank" face. They used fairly "stock" photos of Mercer and perhaps Banon, but Trump has a look of confusion and Farage looks mental. For the record I'm neither pro Trump or pro Brexit. I wish both sides wouldn't participate in behaviors like this. I wonder how long until your browser or an addon can get the gist of the article's subjects compare with image recognition the facial expressions and let you know if there might be some editorial bias. Just something to put in your subconscious before the editor/author works on your subconscious

mike_hearn 10y ago
Note also the image used to depict Leave voters: young men waving flags and wearing waistcoats. Despite the fact that Leave gets a big chunk of its support from everywhere that isn't London and Leave was more popular with the old than the young, they chose to illustrate it like that because they know it'll cause Guardian readers to puke a little. You can see that sort of thing everywhere, subtle manipulation through image choice. Here's another example: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/01/06/brussels-punishing-britain-brexit-will-play-right-hands-says/ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/01/06/brussels-punishin... That article is supposedly about Brexit and Marine Le Pen, but the image chosen for the top of the article claims to be a picture of a Russian journalist (holding up pictures of Trump, Le Pen and Putin). In fact she's not a journalist at all, her name is Maria Katasonova and she is an obscure candidate for a far-right Russian political party. I can only assume the point of doing this is to try and plant the subconscious message that Russian journalism is unreliable.

algesten 10y ago

Another point is that the election of Trump, Brexit and Breitbart News are linked by common corporate interests.

FeatureRush 10y ago
You are right, although at least this article presented it more as a personal agenda thing than corporate interest, but it's getting hard to tell where the difference lies between them.
tomp 10y ago
As opposed to CNN, WaPo, Bremain and Clinton's campaign?!
- facetube 10y ago
  Which one of those runs stories that argue against observed scientific fact? Which one of those repeatedly stokes religious intolerance and anti-immigrant sentiments, to the detriment of a nation built on immigration and tolerance? There is no moral equivalence here.
  - FeatureRush 10y ago
    Coming from Poland, where recently we struggle with news authenticity it took me less than 60 seconds to finds this: www.cnn.com/2017/02/23/world/pope-atheists-again/ > Pope: It's better to be an atheist than a bad Christian - CNN.com How this is not a fake news and misrepresentation of what the Pope have said? It's so bad that the story was removed from HN and even pro-atheist reddit didn't bough it...
    - literallycancer 10y ago
      The title is usually chosen by someone else than the author of the article. Other than the clickbait title, the article seems fairly normal?

quirkafleeg 10y ago

Here's a Google image search for Farage: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=nigel+farage&tbm=isch https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=nigel+farage&tbm=isch He's not exactly known for looking Churchillian.

LeifCarrotson 10y ago
So he's clearly very expressive and not particularly photogenic. What problems does that actually expose about his platform, or how does it show that his opponents are correct? It is barely even an ad-hominem attack - am attack on his character or reputation might lead me to believe that his viewpoint is held by untrustworthy people, but his face? It means nothing. And yet it does have a small subconscious impact, causing a bias in my thinking.
- ptaipale 10y ago
  But of course choosing well-timed pictures, also known as "photojournalism", is a long-established method of applying political influence of media. It was done to Hillary Clinton, it's done to Trump.
  - ascorbic 10y ago
    The photos he tweets himself are no better. It's just him. https://twitter.com/Nigel_Farage/media https://twitter.com/Nigel_Farage/media
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- timrichard 10y ago
  He does look a bit ridiculous when photographed with the trademark pint of beer, and is often mocked accordingly. Milliband was also mocked for looking silly when eating a bacon sandwich, but that was reframed as shallow media shenanigans. Depends on the agenda, I guess.
- quirkafleeg 10y ago