I think this whole story is worth the fifteen minute read, but for the less patient folks, I'll select the choicest bits:
The Rise of the Weaponized AI Propaganda Machine
We begin with building the machine that can profile you (and each one of your family, and of your friends, and of your co-workers...) better than a professional psychologist:
When Cambridge spurns an offer from a firm claiming to specialize in manipulating elections, that firm goes on to create its own version, and it's all thanks to Facebook and Twitter:In 2013, Dr. Michal Kosinski, then a PhD. candidate at the University of Cambridge’s Psychometrics Center, released a groundbreaking study announcing a new model he and his colleagues had spent years developing. By correlating subjects’ Facebook Likes with their OCEAN scores -- a standard-bearing personality questionnaire used by psychologists -- the team was able to identify an individual’s gender, sexuality, political beliefs, and personality traits based only on what they had liked on Facebook.
According to Zurich’s Das Magazine, which profiled Kosinski in late 2016, “with a mere ten ‘likes’ as input his model could appraise a person’s character better than an average coworker. With seventy, it could ‘know’ a subject better than a friend; with 150 likes, better than their parents. With 300 likes, Kosinski’s machine could predict a subject’s behavior better than their partner. With even more likes it could exceed what a person thinks they know about themselves.”
But Big Data is not enough. It won the day for Obama, and it could win the day for Hillary. A step further is required: Big AI to act on that giant stockpile of psychological data and actively influence voters on the individual level, en mass:According to a Guardian investigation, in early 2014, just a few months after Kosinski declined their offer, SCL partnered with Kogan instead. As a part of their relationship, Kogan paid Amazon Mechanical Turk workers $1 each to take the OCEAN quiz. There was just one catch: To take the quiz, users were required to provide access to all of their Facebook data. They were told the data would be used for research. The job was reported to Amazon for violating the platform’s Terms of Service. What many of the Turks likely didn’t realize: According to documents reviewed by The Guardian, “Kogan also captured the same data for each person’s unwitting friends.”
The data gathered from Kogan’s study went on to birth Cambridge Analytica, which spun out of SCL Elections soon after. The name, metaphorically at least, was a nod to Kogan’s work -- and a dig at Kosinski.
But that early trove of user data was just the beginning -- just the seed Analytica needed to build its own model for analyzing users personalities without having to rely on the lengthy OCEAN test.
After a successful proof of concept and backed by wealthy conservative investors, Analytica went on a data shopping spree for the ages, snapping up data about your shopping habits, land ownership, where you attend church, what stores you visit, what magazines you subscribe to -- all of which is for sale from a range of data brokers and third party organizations selling information about you. Analytica aggregated this data with voter roles, publicly available online data -- including Facebook likes -- and put it all into its predictive personality model.
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Nix likes to boast that Analytica’s personality model has allowed it to create a personality profile for every adult in the U.S. -- 220 million of them, each with up to 5,000 data points. And those profiles are being continually updated and improved the more data you spew out online.
Albright also believes that your Facebook and Twitter posts are being collected and integrated back into Cambridge Analytica’s personality profiles. “Twitter and also Facebook are being used to collect a lot of responsive data because people are impassioned, they reply, they retweet, but they also include basically their entire argument and their entire background on this topic,” Albright explains.
So, how would individual targeting to, say, tying sympathy for voter id laws to specific candidates work?“Your behavior is driven by your personality and actually the more you can understand about people’s personality as psychological drivers, the more you can actually start to really tap in to why and how they make their decisions,” Nix explained to Bloomberg’s Sasha Issenburg. “We call this behavioral microtargeting and this is really our secret sauce, if you like. This is what we’re bringing to America.”
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“They [the Trump campaign] were using 40-50,000 different variants of ad every day that were continuously measuring responses and then adapting and evolving based on that response,” Martin Moore, director of Kings College’s Centre for the Study of Media, Communication and Power, told The Guardian in early December. “It’s all done completely opaquely and they can spend as much money as they like on particular locations because you can focus on a five-mile radius.”
Where traditional pollsters might ask a person outright how they plan to vote, Analytica relies not on what they say but what they do, tracking their online movements and interests and serving up multivariate ads designed to change a person’s behavior by preying on individual personality traits.
And attacking Hillary, a more broad subject?“For example,” Nix wrote in an op-ed last year about Analytica’s work on the Cruz campaign, ”our issues model identified that there was a small pocket of voters in Iowa who felt strongly that citizens should be required by law to show photo ID at polling stations.”
“Leveraging our other data models, we were able to advise the campaign on how to approach this issue with specific individuals based on their unique profiles in order to use this relatively niche issue as a political pressure point to motivate them to go out and vote for Cruz. For people in the ‘Temperamental’ personality group, who tend to dislike commitment, messaging on the issue should take the line that showing your ID to vote is ‘as easy as buying a case of beer’. Whereas the right message for people in the ‘Stoic Traditionalist’ group, who have strongly held conventional views, is that showing your ID in order to vote is simply part of the privilege of living in a democracy.”
That explains a lot: the pollsters didn't even know this existed, much less would have known how to account for this activity in their models. It also explains how Trump was able to win on the margins like he did:For Analytica, the feedback is instant and the response automated: Did this specific swing voter in Pennsylvania click on the ad attacking Clinton’s negligence over her email server? Yes? Serve her more content that emphasizes failures of personal responsibility. No? The automated script will try a different headline, perhaps one that plays on a different personality trait -- say the voter’s tendency to be agreeable toward authority figures. Perhaps: “Top Intelligence Officials Agree: Clinton’s Emails Jeopardized National Security.”
Much of this is done through Facebook dark posts, which are only visible to those being targeted.
And those pesky hard Democrat voters, like the much vaunted black vote? Good ol' Big AI had a plan to keep them from the polls as well:Based on users’ response to these posts, Cambridge Analytica was able to identify which of Trump’s messages were resonating and where. That information was also used to shape Trump’s campaign travel schedule. If 73 percent of targeted voters in Kent County, Mich. clicked on one of three articles about bringing back jobs? Schedule a Trump rally in Grand Rapids that focuses on economic recovery.
Political analysts in the Clinton campaign, who were basing their tactics on traditional polling methods, laughed when Trump scheduled campaign events in the so-called blue wall -- a group of states that includes Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin and has traditionally fallen to Democrats. But Cambridge Analytica saw they had an opening based on measured engagement with their Facebook posts. It was the small margins in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin that won Trump the election.
There's a lot more to the article, like how Trump's team was lapping Hillary's with 5:1 in sheer bot numbers and being able to adjust more dynamically to the shifting political weather. But the big takeaway is this: this isn't over.Dark posts were also used to depress voter turnout among key groups of democratic voters. “In this election, dark posts were used to try to suppress the African-American vote,” wrote journalist and Open Society fellow McKenzie Funk in a New York Times editorial. “According to Bloomberg, the Trump campaign sent ads reminding certain selected black voters of Hillary Clinton’s infamous ‘super predator’ line. It targeted Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood with messages about the Clinton Foundation’s troubles in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake.’”
Begun, the Propaganda AI Wars have:
One last note, I like this little possible prediction at the very end:The 2016 U.S. election is over, but the Weaponized AI Propaganda Machine is just warming up. And while each of its components would be worrying on its own, together, they represent the arrival of a new era in political messaging -- a steel wall between campaign winners and losers that can only be mounted by gathering more data, creating better personality analyses, rapid development of engagement AI, and hiring more trolls.
At the moment, Trump and Cambridge Analytica are lapping their opponents. The more data they gather about individuals, the more Analytica and, by extension, Trump’s presidency will benefit from the network effects of their work -- and the harder it will become to counter or fight back against their messaging in the court of public opinion.
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The future of politics will not be a war of candidates or even cash on hand. And it’s not even about big data, as some have argued. Everyone will have access to big data -- as Hillary did in the 2016 election.
From now on, the distinguishing factor between those who win elections and those who lose them will be how a candidate uses that data to refine their machine learning algorithms and automated engagement tactics. Elections in 2018 and 2020 won’t be a contest of ideas, but a battle of automated behavior change.
The fight for the future will be a proxy war of machine learning. It will be waged online, in secret, and with the unwitting help of all of you.
Hmmm, a nation of Digital Solipsists? Interesting.Implication #3:
Not Just a Bubble, But Trapped in Your Own Ideological Matrix
Imagine that in 2020 you found out that your favorite politics page or group on Facebook didn’t actually have any other human members, but was filled with dozens or hundreds of bots that made you feel at home and your opinions validated? Is it possible that you might never find out?
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