Hacker News Reader

Comment by coryfklein | Hacker News Reader

The article specifically claims that Cambridge Analytica's techniques _didn't_ sway opinion, merely that they allowed them to locate specific voters. The wikipedia section you linked says much the same:

> Research discussed by Brendan Nyhan of Dartmouth College showed that it is extremely hard to alter voters' preferences, because many likely voters are already committed partisans; as a result, it is easier to simply mobilize partisan voters.

View on HN

Yup, you don't need to change peoples' minds to affect election outcomes, you just need to encourage the right people to vote. Send messages about hot-button issues to people who are already likely to be enraged by them, and you'll get more of them turning out to the polls.

A friend of mine volunteered on the Clinton campaign in the months before the election. The strategy wasn't to knock on random doors and convince people to vote for Hillary, it was to find people who are already likely to lean left (but maybe aren't likely voters), and remind them of the upcoming election and where to vote, etc. Online ads take the same approach, just subconsciously.

So is there any evidence for that hypothesis? Namely that Cambridge Analytica's campaigns resulted in a higher turn out of Trump voters?

Finding swing voters is what a lot of these companies really want. I worked at a company about six or seven years ago that had a Conservative pollster as a client who badly wanted to identify the swing voter. They told us they didn’t care about anyone else because those people were going to vote with their team regardless. So they wanted to find the people they could sway.

And how did they want us to locate them? Through Facebook.

I think Doctorow's analysis makes more sense than the typical rhetoric about Facebook and CA. But I still default to thinking that CA was largely ineffective. How many "latent klansmen" were there unaware that Trump was more their candidate than Clinton? Trump's stances were completely public, hugely well-known. What more did CA provide? I just don't really buy it. (Political advertising is very ineffective from what I've read and I just need some reason to expect CA to be more successful.)

I'm worried about the surveillance system for other reasons, like finding targets for censorship, discrimination, and hatred.

I think the proposed theory is that there is a rather broad class of could-be voters that typically don't engage in politics or vote. One example of a small category of people would be klansmen, I imagine for a group that is often sidelined they probably think their vote is wasted and therefore don't typically show up at the ballot on election day.

If your party can identify and connect with those individuals and spark a sense of outrage in them, you are likely to be able to get some portion of them to the ballot on election day.

So it is more meta than educating somebody on Trump/Clinton's politics; it is more about behavioral manipulation via outrage, fake news, etc. The goal isn't to change knowledge or opinions (which is extremely difficult), it is to fan the flame of targeted groups' collective outrage enough to bump election day participation. In many places getting just a 1-3% edge is the difference between winning and losing the election.

My personal takeaway from this is that improving general access to the ballot by making it easier to participate and vote should obviate the effectiveness of this strategy. Each step approaching 100% voter participation forces smaller and smaller returns on the strategy of motivating extremist voters.

that doesnt explain anything though, it just kicks the can a bit further down. He's not clear whether the problem is facebook, the fact that majority of voters are gullible idiots, or democracy itself?

There's a distinction between changing someone else's political views and inflaming their existing views via outrage, fake news, etc.

If one is easier than the other, then this article does indeed explain things. Cambridge Analytica may be unable to change political views, but it may have been capable of mobilizing a select group of disenfranchised voters that it carefully selected.

Given low voter turnouts, you can increase chances of your candidate winning by merely improving turnout for a select group.

> via outrage, fake news, etc

Also via politicizing their identity, their gender etc. Taken to the extreme, anything that has emotional impact can manipulate people. Taken to further extreme, such an argument means that democracy is useless and based on very flimsy and wrong assumptions about human nature. But we can be reasonable instead of extreme.

I didn't mean to imply a stance about whether they were swaying opinion vs galvanizing extremists vs discouraging their opposition. All of those I would consider "being effective". It's just that the only people who seem to claim CA was effective are journalists sensationalizing the scandal, and CA themselves.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com