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SoylentNews is people

posted by cmn32480 on Sunday December 13 2015, @11:38PM   Printer-friendly
from the social-media-is-a-tool-of-the-devil dept.

The single largest donor to any super-pacs or other outside groups so far in this political season is Robert Mercer, owner of the Big Data firm Cambridge Analytica. Besides donating cash, Mercer has donated analysis work. He paid mechanical turk workers for access to their facebook accounts and by association access to data about anyone who had unwittingly friended those mturk workers.

The goal seems to be the gathering of detailed psychological profiles to enable "micro-targeting" of campaign advertisements. In a reversal from typical claims about targeted advertising, political micro-targeting is not about showing you candidates you might like to vote for but instead figuring out how to social-engineer you into liking the candidate that paid for the advertising. They are looking to press people's buttons and hope to figure out which buttons each of us are most sensitive to and then tell each voter exactly what they want to hear and only what they want to hear, leaving out anything that might inconveniently cause them to be skeptical.


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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by undefinedvalue on Monday December 14 2015, @01:53AM

    by undefinedvalue (1755) on Monday December 14 2015, @01:53AM (#275957)

    It's also against Mechanical Turk's policies:
    https://www.mturk.com/mturk/help?helpPage=policies [mturk.com]

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +3  
       Insightful=1, Informative=2, Total=3
    Extra 'Informative' Modifier   0  

    Total Score:   4  
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 14 2015, @02:07AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 14 2015, @02:07AM (#275969)

    LOL! There are 11 prohibited things and this hits about 8 of them.