Newsweek: Did Russians Target Democratic Voters, With Kushners Help?

[MelissaB]

Did Russians Target Democratic Voters, With Kushner’s Help?

... snip

Last week, new reporting shined a light on one focus of the congressional investigation: determining how the Russians knew which voters to target with their disinformation campaign. A report from TIME’s Massimo Calabresi on Thursday provided new details:

As they dig into the viralizing of such stories, congressional investigations are probing not just Russia’s role but whether Moscow had help from the Trump campaign. Sources familiar with the investigations say they are probing two Trump-linked organizations: Cambridge Analytica … and Breitbart News.

Cambridge Analytica is the data mining firm hired by the Trump campaign to help it collect and use social media information to identify and persuade voters to vote (or not vote), through an activity known as political microtargeting.

The company is principally owned by Robert Mercer, a hedge fund billionaire who supported Trump and was a leading investor in Breitbart.

Stephen Bannon, Trump’s campaign chairman (after Manafort) and now chief strategist at the White House, was the vice president of Cambridge Analytica’s board as well as the executive chairman of Breitbart before joining Trump’s team in August.

More: http://www.newsweek.com/did-russians-target-dem-voters-kushners-help-613612

[american_ideals]

1. Huge. Incredible.

This is going to be the story of the century if it can be proven Trump campaign worked with Russia to use data to target voters.


Newsweek publishing it is a big step towards getting the story public. Newsweek isn't what it once was, though -- when this hits NYT, WaPo, CNN, buckle your helmets because we are going to have a wild few months in America.

[gibraltar72]

2. Mensch has

been on this for a very long time. Mercer is mixed up in so much bad stuff around the world. Jesus I hope it gets to this evil piece of crap.

[Achilleaze]

3. freaking republicans pissing all over America

and American democracy. Sucks hugely. republican traitors must be prosecuted and punished.

[dalton99a]

4. Kick.

[NewJeffCT]

5. Cruz was the first one to use Cambridge Analytica

but, when he dropped out of the race, Trump hired them. While I knew some of the people involved were Russian I was more scared of how easily they can target different demographic groups based on a small handful of Facebook likes than any connections between CA and the Russian government/intelligence services.

[L. Coyote]

14. Facebook is an insidious political tool, using your friends to push fake news.

If anyone on your friends list is suckered into a like of a fake news page, they pop that fact on your news feed. In effect, Facebook is deploying your friends to be your enemies.

We need to start a new social media realm where corporate interests do NOT determine what appears in our news feeds.

[NewJeffCT]

27. Facebook tried to combat it a few years ago

they had an editorial group that they put together to combat "fake news" - however, the Right Wingers howled in pain that this editorial group was going to "unfairly" target Republicans/conservatives because I think one member of the group was known as a liberal. So, Facebook disbanded the editorial group and let the bullshit fly. This was pre-Trump, but Republicans already knew that a lot of the "fake news" out there was targeted towards them.

[L. Coyote]

29. Now they sell stuff using your friend's likes as a basis to insert paid content in the newsfeed.

They call it "sponsored" which means they are getting paid to tell you what you are interested in.

[genxlib]

31. This is the cost of free

So much of what we value in the social media age is "free"

Someone is paying for it and they are doing so to extract value from you.

It was frustrating but tolerable when it was pretty straightforward commerce. It has turned into a much darker and insidious thing

It is a Devil's bargain.

The problem is that "free" is the entry point but there is no way back short of going off the grid. Even agreeing to pay for something does not save you from the invasive nature of this technology. I am old enough to remember the early days of cable TV when we were paying so it could be commercial free. What a laugh.

[TheBlackAdder]

33. While I detest facebook, I pay hefty for Verizon and they are pushing to sell my browser history.

.

AT&T, Comcast and the others are doing the same thing. They are also pushing to end Net Neutrality.

While "free" is the carrot that drives people to use the service. Purchasing does not remove that exposure.

.

[JTFrog]

6. Finally talking about it openly.

Everyday it looks more and more like President Hatch. Everyday I get more and more pissed that we don't have any way to put the people's choice into office where she belongs.

[wildeyed]

7. Fascinating.

Do we believe that the server communication between Trump's business organization and the Russian bank was demographic and targeting data? I know that has not been proved, but it always seemed like a logical explanation.

People are speculating about hacked voting machines, but they hacked our BRAINS, which is way more scary.

[Johnny2X2X]

8. What I've been saying all along

The disinformation campaign was incredibly sophisticated. This was target marketing at it's peak. You cannot conduct a target marketing campaign like this without providing detailed lists and profiles of susceptible targets.

Now they could have simply hinted to the Russians how they could research and generate their own lists, but it would have been about 100 times easier to just send them the GOP's lists of voters with the research they had on each voter.

It was likely a combo of that, they likely shared lists with Russians, and the Russians likely stole the Dem's lists and shared them with the Trump campaign for direction on how to best target people.

All of it could have been done without collusion, but it would have been about a thousand times easier and more efficient to collude. The average consumer still has no idea how sophisticated online marketing is. Advertisers have an incredibly detailed profile of you, they know exactly what will sway you into browsing and buying. The Trump/Russian campaign knew exactly what types of fake stories would sway particular voters.

[KewlKat]

9. thanks for thw post

[BootinUp]

10. Marking this to read later. Nt

[N_E_1 for Tennis]

11. K & R

[ffr]

12. Proving that the majority of voter numbers who got it right on election day should have been

higher and should have been the necessary landslide HRC needed for her expected victory.

We're beginning to see what a coup this was, in America. And it was perpetrated by Republicans who only see elections as a means to grab power at whatever cost.

[TomVilmer]

13. Thankfully, Cambridge Analytica is mostly a scam

Their results are wildly exaggerated - the customers are just wasting money on hot air.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/06/us/politics/cambridge-analytica.html

[L. Coyote]

17. Cambridge Analytica may be subject of criminal investigatoin by the FBI.

Way worse than a scam, they are likely targets in the #TrumpRussia investigations.

Link to tweet

Link to tweet

Link to tweet

[MelissaB]

21. By any chance, have you saved bookmarks for Cambridge Analytica?

I think it would be good to have a thread with all the info we can find about them.

[Raster]

19. The company is heavily funded by the family of Robert Mercer, an American hedge-fund billionaire.

[MelissaB]

22. Mostly a scam? They've has tremendous success w/ Brexit and the presidential election here...

[deurbano]

15. Also implicated in Brexit vote, as per a previous DU discussion about a recent Guardian expose:

The Observer

The great British Brexit robbery: how our democracy was hijacked

A shadowy global operation involving big data, billionaire friends of Trump and the disparate forces of the Leave campaign influenced the result of the EU referendum. As Britain heads to the polls again, is our electoral process still fit for purpose?

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/07/the-great-british-brexit-robbery-hijacked-democracy


https://www.democraticunderground.com/1016184638

[red dog 1]

16. K&R

Mercer & his daughter are as evil as the Koch brothers and all the other billionaires who's large campaign contributions helped put Trump in the White House.

[Raster]

20. Just as evil, and perhaps even more so.

[maltzmax]

18. What happens next?

If Trump is not removed within two years, the next president can serve up to 2 years, and then still run for two more terms. Certainly the Republicans will be trying to delay long enough so they can have 10 years of a republican president. I hear so much about Trumps problems, but very little about the election being invalid. Even if trump is impeached, we still have an illigetimate president in power, and still get a horrible supreme court, cabinet appointments, and policies. Plus the potential of this going on for 10 years.

[MelissaB]

23. Welcome to DU!

I don't know the answer to your question, but it feels like it's going to be a bumpy ride.

[brush]

26. Not sure if a new pres. replacing trump after 2 yrs would be able to run twice

Anyone know for sure?

[pamela]

30. Yes

If the remainder of the term the V.P takes over is less than 2 years, it doesn't count towards the two term limit.

[turbo_satan]

24. Yes they did

As usual, the mainstream media is a good three or four months behind the news. This has been talked about ad nauseam on the Twitter and blog machines for months now.

[mahigan]

25. Cambridge Analytica

Cambridge Analytica appears to be a major player in the Russia political interference story. They figured prominently in a post by Louise Mensch [link:https://patribotics.blog/2017/04/01/alfa-bank-trump-tower-and-a-social-media-impeachment/|

The firm also figured prominently in the Guardian's analysis of interference in the Brexit vote, This is mentioned in the Newsweek story. Here are a couple of links to the Guardian stories in case anyone missed them. ]https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/mar/04/nigel-oakes-cambridge-analytica-what-role-brexit-trump and [link:https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/07/the-great-british-brexit-robbery-hijacked-democracy|

[TomVilmer]

28. Cambridge is happily taking this free advertising about their supposedly big global impact, but...

"... These ideas have been around for decades. ... As for Cambridge Analytica's work for Donald Trump,
Michal Kosinski, co-inventor of the Cambridge method, and now not affiliated with it, says: 'I think people are getting upset about it because they need a scapegoat. Back when Obama used similar methods just calling them different names, no liberals were losing their sleep. They also did not care when Hillary was spending way more money on personalised political marketing delivered by people way more competent than those working for Trump.' ..."
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/07/cambridge_analytica_dystopianism/

"... Its data products were considered for Mr. Trump’s critical get-out-the-vote operation. But tests showed Cambridge’s data and models were slightly less effective than the existing Republican National Committee system, according to three former Trump campaign aides. ..."
"... Mr. Bannon at one point agreed to expand the company’s role, according to the aides, authorizing Cambridge to oversee a $5 million purchase of television ads. But after some of them appeared on cable channels in Washington, D.C. — hardly an election battleground — Cambridge’s involvement in television targeting ended. ..."
"... At the moment, according to former employees, Cambridge has relatively few well-known corporate clients in the United States. Among them are ECI New York, a clothing company, and Goldline, which sells gold coins and markets heavily to listeners of conservative talk radio. ..."
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/06/us/politics/cambridge-analytica.html

Don't get too exited about this scam. Cambridge cannot do what they say, and their supposed work on Brexit was not a turning point.

[OnDoutside]

32. They don't say "Cambridge+Facebook+Hacked Voter Rolls Criminal" It's not one piece in isolation.

[rainbow4321]

34. Cambridge Analytica had a 2nd office---people embedded w/ Kushner's data TX data center

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/how-our-likes-helped-trump-win


Bloomberg journalist Sasha Issenberg was surprised to note on a visit to San Antonio—where Trump's digital campaign was based—that a "second headquarters" was being created. The embedded Cambridge Analytica team, apparently only a dozen people, received $100,000 from Trump in July, $250,000 in August, and $5 million in September. According to Nix, the company earned over $15 million overall


-----------

Yet Kushner told Forbes magazine that the group helping him in the San Antonio data center were working pro-bono and from "nontraditional backgrounds". He never mentioned CA being down there....