In the Guardian, Carole Cadwalladr talks to the young developer at Cambridge Analytica who says he’s the one who created the tools that the Trump campaign used to sway opinions their way:
The first time I met Christopher Wylie, he didn’t yet have pink hair. That comes later. As does his mission to rewind time. To put the genie back in the bottle.
By the time I met him in person, I’d already been talking to him on a daily basis for hours at a time. On the phone, he was clever, funny, bitchy, profound, intellectually ravenous, compelling. A master storyteller. A politicker. A data science nerd.
Two months later, when he arrived in London from Canada, he was all those things in the flesh. And yet the flesh was impossibly young. He was 27 then (he’s 28 now), a fact that has always seemed glaringly at odds with what he has done. He may have played a pivotal role in the momentous political upheavals of 2016. At the very least, he played a consequential role. At 24, he came up with an idea that led to the foundation of a company called Cambridge Analytica, a data analytics firm that went on to claim a major role in the Leave campaign for Britain’s EU membership referendum, and later became a key figure in digital operations during Donald Trump’s election campaign.
Or, as Wylie describes it, he was the gay Canadian vegan who somehow ended up creating “Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare mindfuck tool”.
In 2014, Steve Bannon – then executive chairman of the “alt-right” news network Breitbart – was Wylie’s boss. And Robert Mercer, the secretive US hedge-fund billionaire and Republican donor, was Cambridge Analytica’s investor. And the idea they bought into was to bring big data and social media to an established military methodology – “information operations” – then turn it on the US electorate.
I trust nothing in print anymore. The article reads in a way that tries to invalidate results that the press didn’t like. And a single source that is disputed by Facebook now, well, that reeks of a narrative rather than reporting. Stupid people, being tricked to vote against their betters advice! Only by manipulation can conservatives win, eh?
Funny though, no one complains when Facebook data is used by progressives in the same manner. It is only the evil conservatives that steal data and twist the minds of the electorate. The “progressives” are pure as driven snow, and expect we contrarians should see their point of view as the only one that is correct.
Comment by Dwayne — March 19, 2018 @ 13:32
Well, in the same way that freedom of speech is perfectly okay, except for Nazi scum. And anyone who doesn’t agree with us is by definition Nazi scum.
Comment by Nicholas — March 19, 2018 @ 13:51
And now that the lid is off more and more is pouring out it seems.
https://ijr.com/2018/03/1077083-ex-obama-campaign-director-fb/
Comment by Dwayne — March 19, 2018 @ 16:11