Comments by "No One" (@joermundgand) on "Obama Data Mined Facebook Before Cambridge Analytica" video.
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YTPartyTonight. Another piece of the NYT article, does this methodology seem familiar...
"The campaign didn’t go into much detail, at the time, about exactly how it used Facebook. But St. Clair put it in fairly stark terms when I talked to him at A.M.G.’s temporary offices in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in April. They started with a list that grew to a million people who had signed into the campaign Web site through Facebook. When people opted to do so, they were met with a prompt asking to grant the campaign permission to scan their Facebook friends lists, their photos and other personal information. In another prompt, the campaign asked for access to the users’ Facebook news feeds, which 25 percent declined, St. Clair said.
Once permission was granted, the campaign had access to millions of names and faces they could match against their lists of persuadable voters, potential donors, unregistered voters and so on. “It would take us 5 to 10 seconds to get a friends list and match it against the voter list,” St. Clair said. They found matches about 50 percent of the time, he said. But the campaign’s ultimate goal was to deputize the closest Obama-supporting friends of voters who were wavering in their affections for the president. “We would grab the top 50 you were most active with and then crawl their wall” to figure out who were most likely to be their real-life friends, not just casual Facebook acquaintances. St. Clair, a former high-school marching-band member who now wears a leather Diesel jacket, explained: “We asked to see photos but really we were looking for who were tagged in photos with you, which was a really great way to dredge up old college friends — and ex-girlfriends,” he said."
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Plant Powered. Come on, you know B12 can only come from two sources, meat or shit, yet you claim moral supriority by calling yourself plant powered, it's okay, you're just a good little neo puritan who doesn't like fun, christmas, jokes and wants to feel elevated above the dirty plebs, I perfectly know meat contains shit, I never clamed it didn't, in fact we walk on shit, grow our food using shit, we burn dinosaur shit to keep the house and hearth going, we are all partially shit powered...
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YTPartyTonight. Pasted from NYT article.
"To understand how it works, you must first understand the vast technological engine that powered the campaign but remained largely out of view of the public and the press. Messina, the campaign manager, often boasted about how the Obama 2012 effort would be “the most data-driven campaign ever.” But what that truly meant — the extent to which the campaign used the newest tech tools to look into people’s lives and the sheer amount of personal data its vast servers were crunching — remained largely shrouded. The secrecy around the operation was partly because the president’s strategists wanted to maintain their competitive edge. But it was also no doubt because they worried that practices like “data mining” and “analytics” could make voters uncomfortable.
Using data wasn’t new for the Obama strategists. The 2008 campaign developed the most sophisticated system to date to identify tens of millions of voters and place them into useful categories: those most likely to vote Republican, who would be ignored; those supporting Obama — and how likely they were to vote. That system — based on a complicated scoring method that relied on the processing of reams of data — was first devised by an outside consultant, Ken Strasma. But it was partly managed inside the campaign by an economics forecaster, Dan Wagner, who, at 24, helped perfect it for the campaign’s use. Wagner, who was recruited by A.M.G. but decided to start his own venture instead, seems to exist in two realms. One is digital, where he operates like a Dungeons and Dragons dungeon master, trying to shape the rules to the reality he is creating (“I was a Level 14 wizard or something,” he jokes of the fantasy role-playing game). The other is corporeal, where he is self-deprecating about things like his romantic life. (“Hey, I do ‘Big Data,’ ” he says.) His work on the 2008 campaign has been portrayed in a book, “The Victory Lab,” by Sasha Issenberg. “Here’s where I am in the ‘Victory Lab’ — blah, blah, blah,” he said dryly while turning to his chapter in the copy I was carrying when we met for breakfast at the Ace Hotel in Manhattan one day in May.
Wagner dismisses the notion of “romantic war rooms” operating on political gut instinct as outdated and misguided. His is a hard-data system that rejects anything that is not definitively quantifiable. In the Bush era, strategists boasted about how they could predict voter behavior based upon car and sport preferences, a well-publicized bit of political magic that captured the imaginations of politicians and journalists alike. Wagner’s approach, part of a broader move in politics, cut all of that out; why engage in such divination when you have the time and money to just call voters and ask them about their leanings directly? “We’re trying to predict political preference; we’re not trying to predict whether you buy a car,” Wagner says dismissively."
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YTPartyTonight. Bragging about circumventing privacy, from the same NYT article.
"Responsibility for building the optimizer was handed off to Wagner. “We took over in January and then had to build it from scratch, completely from scratch,” he said. Fortunately, there happened to be a rare expert in set-top-box data, named Carol Davidsen, working in the cave. Davidsen looks younger than her 37 years — “no kids,” she says — and she speaks in a rapid, elliptical manner, as if her thoughts are running too fast for her sentences to keep pace. Before joining the campaign, she had a successful career as a forward-thinking data engineer. But she had become fed up with corporate life by the time she received an unsolicited e-mail from Wagner’s analytics department, which recruited employees by searching the 2008 online-donor list for those who listed themselves as programmers. “I’m a huge supporter of Barack Obama,” she said a few weeks ago at Think Coffee in Greenwich Village. “But I also was kind of at a time in my life where I needed to be part of a perfect team, and I knew that was possible in a world where people weren’t worried about getting a raise or people weren’t worried about getting a promotion.”
Her previous employer, Navic Networks, was a very early pioneer in the field of set-top-box data collection. And she was one of the early programmers to figure out how to make a television, designed as a one-way path for sending programming into American homes, relay information back about what exactly a viewer was watching.
Davidsen determined that Rentrak could roughly do what Grisolano wanted it to do: produce data that could be checked against Wagner’s list of most-persuadable voters to find matches. Rentrak had access to the set-top boxes in the homes of thousands of the targeted voters in every competitive market of every swing state. (For instance, Rentrak had 100,000 people in its Denver sample, some 20,000 of whom were on the Obama list; Nielsen had a total of 600 people in Denver.)
But there was the potentially politically explosive matter of privacy. Unlike Facebook, where users were at least giving the campaign explicit permission to collect personal data even if they had not read the fine print, television watchers were making no such agreement. To address this, the campaign and Rentrak hired a third party to “anonymize” the data so that they would only know that the information was coming from a set-top box of somebody on the persuadable list; identifying information would be stripped away.
The optimizer software would then comb advertising price and viewership data to figure out the top-rated time slots among those on the Obama persuadable list — which could vary from market to market — and then rank them based on which produced the highest concentration of the Obama swing voters at the best rates. The results were striking. The campaign determined that two of the top shows to buy were 1 a.m. repeats of “The Insider” and afternoon episodes of “Judge Joe Brown” — shows that were far cheaper than the evening news or anything being shown on the networks in prime time. “When you’re talking about ‘The Insider,’ that might be shift workers in a state like Ohio, folks who are working class and aren’t getting home until midnight,” said Daniel Jester, the head GMMB buyer, who was aggressively locking in low rates early. “The person watching ‘Judge Joe Brown’ in the afternoon also may be the same viewer watching ‘The Insider’ at 1 a.m.”"
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