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Cambridge Analytica and the Russians

 
Walco 2017-07-16 12:23:37 

The feds should be focusing on Cambridge in their effort to determine who guided the Russians regarding the online placement of Clinton fake news in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania before the election.

Watch this page ...

 
Headley 2017-07-16 14:13:48 

In reply to Walco

I'm sure they are. That is at the heart of the Muller investigation. Should be a good read if/when all the dots are linked.

 
Walco 2017-07-16 17:42:50 

In reply to Headley

Commie has been singing the praises of Cambridge Analytical's big data skills since before the election. There are some interesting characters behind that company--names like Mercer and Bannon.

People give Kushner way too much credit for the handling of the data side of Trump's campaign. He is only marginally smarter well Donald "Fredo from the Godfather" Trump Jr. I expect that a few people from Cambridge will be wearing orange jumpsuits by the time all is said and done.

Interesting times ahead.

 
Commie 2017-07-16 18:23:40 

In reply to Walco

They are not behind. They are in front.

And it's Analytica. Incidentally they have a high success record in the Caribbean through their offshoot SCL.

 
Commie 2017-07-16 18:24:15 

In reply to Walco

Nothing will happen. This is all bs.

 
Walco 2017-07-16 18:37:46 

In reply to Commie

I stand corrected regarding the name.

I found this New York Times article a while back that suggests Cambridge is a bullshit organization that makes big promises and delivers little. Your thoughts please.

Link Text

 
Walco 2017-07-16 18:59:42 

In reply to Commie

Nothing will happen. This is all bs.

Never thought you would climb out on a limb for President Loco. A few words of caution from this conservative New York Times columnist:
Here is a good rule of thumb for dealing with Donald Trump: Everyone who gives him the benefit of the doubt eventually regrets it.

 
Headley 2017-07-16 19:53:21 

In reply to Walco

Here is a good rule of thumb for dealing with Donald Trump: Everyone who gives him the benefit of the doubt eventually regrets it.


big grin big grin big grin So true.

A man who never laughs, is a man keeping a tight lid on a lot of unmentionables.

Do not dismiss Cambridge Analytics and the other guys from the dark side. There is a lot of gullible material out there to work with.

 
Chrissy 2017-07-16 19:56:27 

In reply to Walco

They are lol

 
Walco 2017-07-17 06:23:53 

But Mr. Nix’s little-known firm, Cambridge Analytica, claimed to have developed something unique: “psychographic” profiles that could predict the personality and hidden political leanings of every American adult.

 
Walco 2017-07-17 06:27:03 

But a dozen Republican consultants and former Trump campaign aides, along with current and former Cambridge employees, say the company’s ability to exploit personality profiles — “our secret sauce,” Mr. Nix once called it — is exaggerated.

Cambridge executives now concede that the company never used psychographics in the Trump campaign. The technology — prominently featured in the firm’s sales materials and in media reports that cast Cambridge as a master of the dark campaign arts — remains unproved, according to former employees and Republicans familiar with the firm’s work.

“*** I think there’s a big question about whether we think psychographic profiling even works.”

 
Walco 2017-07-17 06:37:35 

But even as Cambridge seeks to expand its business among conservative groups, questions about its performance have soured many Republicans in Mr. Trump’s orbit.

Cambridge is no longer in contention to work for Mr. Trump at the Republican National Committee, a company spokesman confirmed, nor is it working for America First Policies, a new nonprofit formed to help advance the president’s agenda.

In recent months, the value of Cambridge’s technology has been debated by technology experts and in some media accounts. But Cambridge officials, in recent interviews, defended the company’s record during the 2016 election, saying its data analysis helped Mr. Trump energize critical support in the Rust Belt. Mr. Nix said the firm had conducted tens of thousands of polls for Mr. Trump, helping guide his message and identify issues that mattered to voters.

But when asked to name a single race where the firm’s flagship product had been critical to victory, Mr. Nix declined.

 
Walco 2017-07-17 06:43:23 

Uniquely, the company claims to be able to extrapolate those findings to millions of other people it has not surveyed, assigning them one of 32 distinct personality types. Cambridge then blends those profiles with commercial data and voting histories, revealing “hidden voter trends and behavioral triggers,” according to a 2016 company brochure.

Those profiles, in turn, would allow campaigns to customize advertising, direct-mail slogans and door-knocking scripts, each calibrated to prod the targeted voter toward — or away from — a candidate.

 
Walco 2017-07-17 06:46:24 

But Cambridge’s psychographic models proved unreliable in the Cruz presidential campaign, according to Rick Tyler, a former Cruz aide, and another consultant involved in the campaign. In one early test, more than half the Oklahoma voters whom Cambridge had identified as Cruz supporters actually favored other candidates. The campaign stopped using Cambridge’s data entirely after the South Carolina primary.

 
Commie 2017-07-17 07:32:59 

In reply to Walco

The article is bs.

The seed of the bs is not understanding what Analytica do. So a company massages possibly the greatest political upset since polling came around and you are one of the publications they humiliated and they are not credible ? Methonks the Times are doing a bit of misdirection.

Btw they worked in Yard too.

Nix is a salesman and a pretty snarky one at that but what is behind him is pretty significant. Its scientists and eggheads who use AI to map how social media and communications create a picture of an elections race.

Btw up till recently a former Caribbean PM sat on the board of SCL. Might even still be on it.

 
sudden 2017-07-17 07:43:03 

More Cambridge Analytica Link Text

He said that Mercer, Farage and co had all met at a conference in Washington. “The best dinner we ever went to. Around that table were all the rejects of the political world. And the rejects of the political world are now effectively in the White House. It’s extraordinary. Jeff Sessions. [Former national security adviser Michael] Flynn, the whole lot of them. They were all there.”

 
sudden 2017-07-17 07:43:43 

In reply to Commie

From what i understand that PM sat on the Board prior to the MERCERS HAHAHAHA

 
sudden 2017-07-17 07:50:25 

A project that Cambridge Analytica carried out in Trinidad in 2013 brings all the elements in this story together. Just as Robert Mercer began his negotiations with SCL boss Alexander Nix about an acquisition, SCL was retained by several government ministers in Trinidad and Tobago. The brief involved developing a micro-targeting programme for the governing party of the time. And AggregateIQ – the same company involved in delivering Brexit for Vote Leave – was brought in to build the targeting platform.


Link Text

 
Walco 2017-07-17 12:26:24 

In reply to sudden

I had a feeling this thread would smoke you out of hiding smile Welcome back!

 
Walco 2017-07-17 12:26:24 

In reply to Commie

The seed of the bs is not understanding what Analytica do. So a company massages possibly the greatest political upset since polling came around and you are one of the publications they humiliated and they are not credible ? Methonks the Times are doing a bit of misdirection.

Notwithstanding that the Times may be motivated to discredit Cambridge, the article seems balanced with several direct quotations from both sides. What exactly makes it bs in your mind?

Its scientists and eggheads who use AI to map how social media and communications create a picture of an elections race.

Are you saying Cambridge is merely a polling outfit?

 
sudden 2017-07-17 12:40:34 

In reply to Walco

My friend what's up.


you know when i was watching the elections, i remember one of Trump's people saying that Trump told them that he will win in Penn, Mich, Wiscon etc.. and it struck me as odd

later i was sent some messages where some highly qualified mates were saying that certain voting machines were hacked in states that Trump was told to canvass in specifically.

that is the next part of this saga.

 
Walco 2017-07-18 14:10:32 

In reply to sudden

Saga is the word indeed. If voting machine hacking occurred, that would explain a lot. That, and the propagation of anti-Clinton fake news in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan.

 
Walco 2017-07-20 10:03:43 

My entry point into this story began, as so many things do, with a late-night Google. Last December, I took an unsettling tumble into a wormhole of Google autocomplete suggestions that ended with “did the holocaust happen”. And an entire page of results that claimed it didn’t.

Google’s algorithm had been gamed by extremist sites and it was Jonathan Albright, a professor of communications at Elon University, North Carolina, who helped me get to grips with what I was seeing. He was the first person to map and uncover an entire “alt-right” news and information ecosystem and he was the one who first introduced me to Cambridge Analytica.

He called the company a central point in the right’s “propaganda machine”, a line I quoted in reference to its work for the Trump election campaign and the referendum Leave campaign. That led to the second article featuring Cambridge Analytica – as a central node in the alternative news and information network that I believed Robert Mercer and Steve Bannon, the key Trump aide who is now his chief strategist, were creating. I found evidence suggesting they were on a strategic mission to smash the mainstream media and replace it with one comprising alternative facts, fake history and rightwing propaganda.

 
Walco 2017-07-20 10:07:05 

Then I meet Paul, the first of two sources formerly employed by Cambridge Analytica. He is in his late 20s and bears mental scars from his time there. “It’s almost like post-traumatic shock. It was so… messed up. It happened so fast. I just woke up one morning and found we’d turned into the Republican fascist party. I still can’t get my head around it.”

He laughed when I told him the frustrating mystery that was AggregateIQ. “Find Chris Wylie,” he said.

Who’s Chris Wylie?

“He’s the one who brought data and micro-targeting [individualised political messages] to Cambridge Analytica. And he’s from west Canada. It’s only because of him that AggregateIQ exist. They’re his friends. He’s the one who brought them in.”

There wasn’t just a relationship between Cambridge Analytica and AggregateIQ, Paul told me. They were intimately entwined, key nodes in Robert Mercer’s distributed empire. “The Canadians were our back office. They built our software for us. They held our database. If AggregateIQ is involved then Cambridge Analytica is involved. And if Cambridge Analytica is involved, then Robert Mercer and Steve Bannon are involved. You need to find Chris Wylie.”

 
carl0002 2017-07-20 10:24:34 

Maybe Cambridge behind the hacking and privy to Russian meddling that's why they were able to predict a win for Trump and turned it into a business model.

lol lol lol

From reading some of the stuff Walco post Maybe "alternate facts" was not a term coined by Kelly Conway but was in the republican lexicon a long long time
lol lol lol