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> How would you even collect data about this? You gather the data required to make a good probability prediction for voter preference ((soft) labels for this e

> How would you even collect data about this? You gather the data required to make a good probability prediction for voter preference ((soft) labels for this easier to find than swing voter labels). Then when the model is uncertain, those are your swing voters / on the fence voters. > Postcode? Age? Race? Gender? Income? When it is found to be cost-effective: All and everything that is allowed by law and then some. In its pitch deck, Facebook boasted about its advertisers being able to target and identify: university, degree, concentration, course history, class year, housing/dormitory, age, gender, sexual orientation, zip (home and university/work), relationship status, dating interests, personal interests, club membership, jobs, political bent, friend graph, site usage/addiction level. Likes make this very easy (with a little luck, you can deduce all of zip, age, race, gender, income from a list of Likes). > What is it about CA's methods that were so effective? Hillary Clinton: “The real question is how did the Russians know how to target their messages so precisely to undecided voters in Wisconsin or Michigan or Pennsylvania – that is really the nub of the question. So if they were getting advice from say Cambridge Analytica, or someone else, about ‘OK here are the 12 voters in this town in Wisconsin – that’s whose Facebook pages you need to be on to send these messages’ that indeed would be very disturbing.” FBI: Using those techniques in June 2016, “the GRU compromised the computer network of the Illinois State Board of Elections by exploiting a vulnerability in the SBOE's website,” the report said. “The GRU then gained access to a database containing information on millions of registered Illinois voters, and extracted data related to thousands of U.S. voters before the malicious activity was identified. Similarly, in November 2016, the GRU sent spearphishing emails to over 120 email accounts used by Florida county officials responsible for administering the 2016 U.S. election,” the report said. “The spearphishing emails contained an attached Word document coded with malicious software (commonly referred to as a Trojan) that permitted the GRU to access the infected computer.” > After all someone had to do something similar for Obama. Obama's digital campaign was very successful, but the above seems to indicate that Kushner's campaign was way more aggressive and less scrupulous (and may have had connections with - or help from foreign adversaries). It may also be that propaganda and smears works better depending on your political preference and level of education and neurosis: Even if Hillary had spent the same amount of money and energy (some reports indicate that Hillary's digital campaign was a waste of money and displayed poor management), efficiently, it may be easier to sway a voter to vote Republican, if you can target their fears of immigrants, religious beliefs, distrust in gun regulation from the government, and conspiracy theories. Surely, the many wolf cries about fake news, and retweeting of conspiracy theories, has set up the Trump base for easier manipulation (you can simply create a meme to counter a story in a respected journal or keep them guessing on the alternative truth of it).

tptacek 7y ago
How successful was Obama's digital campaign? From what sources are we deriving that conclusion? Two countervailing arguments: First, the narrative about Obama's digital success is itself extraordinarily powerful and was used throughout the marketing industry to sell marketing services and products to commercial organizations; many of the obvious Google searches about Obama's campaign effectiveness will turn up a first SERP filled mostly with appeals to social media programs. Second, people have written that the impact of digital marketing on Obama's campaign might be overblown. Here's an example: https://harvardpolitics.com/united-states/just-good-obama-campaign/ https://harvardpolitics.com/united-states/just-good-obama-ca...
- throwawaywego 7y ago
  > How successful was Obama's digital campaign? From what sources are we deriving that conclusion? I'd agree that it may have been overblown (just like the Russian interference may have been overblown). Also, of course the marketeers ran with it and turned it into a sales pitch. But that detracts just a little from the effectiveness of Obama's digital campaign. As it was the first of its kind, relative to other campaigns that lacked a modern digital strategy, it gave a significant edge. Your argument seems of the form: "Hercules is strong. Some say he is really really strong. Ergo, Hercules was not strong". 2008: > The key technological innovation that brought Barack Obama to the White House wasn’t his tweets or a smartphone app. It was the Obama campaign’s novel integration of e-mail, cell phones, and websites. The young, technology-savvy staffers didn’t just use the web to convey the candidate’s message; they also enabled supporters to connect and self-organize, pioneering the ways grassroots movements would adapt and adopt platforms in the campaign cycles to come. > but a network of supporters who used a distributed model of phone banking to organize and get out the vote, helped raise a record-breaking $600 million, and created all manner of media clips that were viewed millions of times. It was an online movement that begot offline behavior, including producing youth voter turnout that may have supplied the margin of victory. > All of the Obama supporters who traded their personal information for a ticket to a rally or an e-mail alert about the vice presidential choice, or opted in on Facebook or MyBarackObama can now be mass e-mailed at a cost of close to zero. 2012: > Once again, the Obama campaign built a dream team of nerds to create the software that drove many aspects of the campaign. From messaging to fund-raising to canvassing to organizing to targeting resources to key districts and media buys, the reelection effort took the political application of data science to unprecedented heights. The Obama team created sophisticated analytic models that personalized social and e-mail messaging using data generated by social-media activity. > The Republican side, too, tried to create smarter tools, but it botched them. The Romney campaign’s “Orca,” a platform for marshaling volunteers to get out the vote on election day, suffered severe technical problems, becoming a cautionary tale of how not to manage a large IT project. For the moment, the technology gap between Democrats and Republicans remained wide. https://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/10/business/media/10carr.html https://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/10/business/media/10carr.htm... https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611823/us-election-campaign-technology-from-2008-to-2018-and-beyond/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611823/us-election-campai...

tptacek 7y ago

How successful was Obama's digital campaign? From what sources are we deriving that conclusion? Two countervailing arguments: First, the narrative about Obama's digital success is itself extraordinarily powerful and was used throughout the marketing industry to sell marketing services and products to commercial organizations; many of the obvious Google searches about Obama's campaign effectiveness will turn up a first SERP filled mostly with appeals to social media programs. Second, people have written that the impact of digital marketing on Obama's campaign might be overblown. Here's an example: https://harvardpolitics.com/united-states/just-good-obama-campaign/ https://harvardpolitics.com/united-states/just-good-obama-ca...

throwawaywego 7y ago
> How successful was Obama's digital campaign? From what sources are we deriving that conclusion? I'd agree that it may have been overblown (just like the Russian interference may have been overblown). Also, of course the marketeers ran with it and turned it into a sales pitch. But that detracts just a little from the effectiveness of Obama's digital campaign. As it was the first of its kind, relative to other campaigns that lacked a modern digital strategy, it gave a significant edge. Your argument seems of the form: "Hercules is strong. Some say he is really really strong. Ergo, Hercules was not strong". 2008: > The key technological innovation that brought Barack Obama to the White House wasn’t his tweets or a smartphone app. It was the Obama campaign’s novel integration of e-mail, cell phones, and websites. The young, technology-savvy staffers didn’t just use the web to convey the candidate’s message; they also enabled supporters to connect and self-organize, pioneering the ways grassroots movements would adapt and adopt platforms in the campaign cycles to come. > but a network of supporters who used a distributed model of phone banking to organize and get out the vote, helped raise a record-breaking $600 million, and created all manner of media clips that were viewed millions of times. It was an online movement that begot offline behavior, including producing youth voter turnout that may have supplied the margin of victory. > All of the Obama supporters who traded their personal information for a ticket to a rally or an e-mail alert about the vice presidential choice, or opted in on Facebook or MyBarackObama can now be mass e-mailed at a cost of close to zero. 2012: > Once again, the Obama campaign built a dream team of nerds to create the software that drove many aspects of the campaign. From messaging to fund-raising to canvassing to organizing to targeting resources to key districts and media buys, the reelection effort took the political application of data science to unprecedented heights. The Obama team created sophisticated analytic models that personalized social and e-mail messaging using data generated by social-media activity. > The Republican side, too, tried to create smarter tools, but it botched them. The Romney campaign’s “Orca,” a platform for marshaling volunteers to get out the vote on election day, suffered severe technical problems, becoming a cautionary tale of how not to manage a large IT project. For the moment, the technology gap between Democrats and Republicans remained wide. https://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/10/business/media/10carr.html https://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/10/business/media/10carr.htm... https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611823/us-election-campaign-technology-from-2008-to-2018-and-beyond/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611823/us-election-campai...