SW That Elected Trump Based On SW That Elected Obama

[Karl]

> “political correctness” that was preventing them from speaking these “truths” in public. It was through the process of reading these forums that Bannon realized he could harness them and their anonymous swarms of resentment and harassment.
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> This was especially true after Gamergate, in the late summer of 2014, right before Bannon was introduced to SCL. In many ways, Gamergate created a conceptual framework for Bannon’s alt-right movement, as he knew there was an undercurrent populated by millions of intense and angry young men. Trolling and cyberbullying became key tools of the alt-right. But Bannon went deeper and had Cambridge Analytica scale and deploy many of the same tactics that domestic abusers and bullies use to erode stress resilience in their victims. Bannon transformed CA into a tool for automated bullying and scaled psychological abuse. The firm started this journey by identifying a series of cognitive biases that it hypothesized would interact with latent racial bias. Over the course of many experiments, we concocted an arsenal of psychological tools that could be deployed systematically via social media, blogs, groups, and forums.
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> Bannon’s first request of our team was to study who felt oppressed by political correctness. Cambridge Analytica found that, because people often overestimate how much others notice them, spotlighting socially uncomfortable situations was an effective prime for eliciting bias in target cohorts, such as when you get in trouble for mispronouncing a foreign-sounding name. One of the most effective messages the firm tested was getting subjects to “imagine an America where you can’t pronounce anyone’s name.” Subjects would be shown a series of uncommon names and then asked, “How hard is it to pronounce this name? Can you recall a time where people were laughing at someone who messed up an ethnic name? Do some people use political correctness to make others feel dumb or to get ahead? ”
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> People reacted strongly to the notion that “liberals” were seeking new ways to mock and shame them, along with the idea that political correctness was a method of persecution. An effective Cambridge Analytica technique was to show subjects blogs that made fun of white people like them, such as People of Walmart . Bannon had been observing online communities on places like 4chan and Reddit for years, and he knew how often subgroups of angry young white men would share content of “liberal elites” mocking “regular” Americans. There had always been publications that parodied the “hicks” of flyover country, but social media represented an extraordinary opportunity to rub “regular” Americans’ noses in the snobbery of coastal elites.

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> attitudinal research on American citizens.
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> Soon enough, weird questions began popping up in our research. One day I was in my London office, checking reports from the field, when I noticed a project involving Russia-oriented message testing in America. The U.S. operation was growing rapidly, and several new people had been brought in to manage the surge in assignments, so it was hard to keep track of every research stream. I thought that maybe someone had started exploring Americans’ views on international topics. But when I searched our repository of questions and data, I could only find data being collected on Russia. Our team in Oregon had started asking people, “Is Russia entitled to Crimea?” and “What do you think about Vladimir Putin as a leader?” Focus group leaders were circulating various photos of Putin and asking people to indicate where he looked strongest. I started watching video recordings of some of the focus groups—and they were strange. Photos of Vladimir Putin and Russian narratives were projected on the wall, and the interviewer was asking groups of American voters how it made them feel to see a strong leader.
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> What was interesting was that even though Russia had been a U.S. adversary for decades, Putin was admired for his strength as a leader.
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> “He has a right to protect his country and do what he thinks is best for his country,” said one participant as others nodded in agreement. Another told us that Crimea was Russia’s Mexico, but that, unlike Obama, Putin was taking action. As I sat alone in the now dark office, watching bizarre clips of Americans discussing Putin’s claim to Crimea, I wanted answers. Gettleson was in America at the time. When he answered the phone, I asked if he could enlighten me about who had authorized a research stream on Putin. He had no idea. “It just showed up,” he said, “so I assumed it was approved by someone.”
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> Patten’s interest in Eastern European politics crossed my mind, but I didn’t give it a lot of thought. In August 2014, a Palantir staff member sent an email to the data science team with a link to an article about Russians stealing millions of Internet browsing records. “Talk about acquiring data!” they joked. Two minutes later, one of our engineers responded, “We can exploit similar methods.” Maybe he was joking, maybe he wasn’t, but the firm had already contracted former Russian

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> Analytica set up camp, Israeli, Russian, British, and French “civic engagement” projects operated behind fig-leaf cover stories. The unspoken belief shared by all: Foreign interference in elections does not matter if those elections are African.
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> The company was working nominally in support of Goodluck Jonathan, who was running for reelection as the president of Nigeria. Jonathan, a Christian, was running against Muhammadu Buhari, who was a moderate Muslim. Cambridge Analytica had been hired by a group of Nigerian billionaires who were worried that if Buhari won the election, he would revoke their oil and mineral exploration rights, decimating a major source of their income.
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> True to form, Cambridge Analytica focused not on how to promote Goodluck Jonathan’s candidacy but on how to destroy Buhari’s. The billionaires did not really care who won, so long as the victor understood loud and clear what they were capable of, and what they were willing to do. In December, Cambridge Analytica had hired a woman named Brittany Kaiser to become “director of business development.” Kaiser had the kind of pedigree that Nix drooled over. In their first meeting,

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> U.K. authorities seized Cambridge Analytica’s servers, the Information Commissioner’s Office subsequently stated that “some of the systems linked to the investigation were accessed from IP addresses that resolve to Russia and other areas of the CIS.”
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> It’s eye-opening to summarize what was going on over those final months of my tenure. Our research was being seeded with questions about Putin and Russia. The head psychologist who had access to Facebook data was also working for a Russian-funded project in St. Petersburg, giving presentations in Russian and describing Cambridge Analytica’s efforts to build a psychological profiling database of American voters. We had Palantir executives coming in and out of the office. We had a major Russian company with ties to the FSB probing for information about our American data assets. We had Nix giving the Russians a presentation about how good we were at spreading fake news and rumors. And then there were the internal memos outlining how Cambridge Analytica was developing new hacking capacity in concert with former Russian intelligence officers.
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> In the year after Steve Bannon became vice president,

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> By this time, the political climate in Britain had become extremely toxic.  Threats were being sent to both Remain- and Leave-supporting MPs (mostly to the Remain side), there was a disproportionate increase in race-based violence, and social media was blowing up every day.  No one was passive or nonchalant about what was going on in British politics anymore.  People were awake and people were angry.  Very angry.
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> A lot of the messaging from the Leave side during this time was targeted toward "metropolitan elites," as the politicians called them, as well as people of color and European migrants.  Vote Leave eschewed responsibility, but it was apparent that they had left the race-baiting to Leave.EU, which gladly (and proudly) took up the cause.  A few days before Jo Cox was murdered, Leave.EU's Farage unveiled a campaign poster showing a caravan of brown-skinned migrants beneath the words "BREAKING POINT".  The move drew comparisons to Nazi propaganda from the 1930s showing lines of Jewish people flooding into Europe.
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> As I sat in Canada watching the drama unfold, I told myself that Vote Leave was not the same as Leave.EU, as many of my friends were working for Vote Leave.  Farage's campaign is the racist one using Cambridge Analytica, I thought.  Vote Leave couldn't possibly be pandering to that kind of rhetoric.  I was wrong.

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> campaign advisers not wanting to take on the personal risk of breaking election laws would find someone inexperienced, often an eager young volunteer, and nominate them as the campaign's "agent," which would make that person legally liable for the campaign.  That way, if and when wrongdoing was uncovered, a fall guy was in place and the true perptrators could walk off scot-free, continuing to enjoy their proximity to power while leaving behind the betrayed volunteers and broken lives.