kudos to The New Statesman, founded by members of the Fabian Society, and described by its editor as “of the left, for the left”, for covering the unravelling of the Cambridge Analytica hoax and, in the process, debunked another anti-Trump hit piece by Channel 4, which worked with Cadwalladr pushing the Cambridge Analytic hoax, as per the IT Wire article!
15 Oct: New Statesman: How the Cambridge Analytica scandal unravelled
The notion that the contentious British firm played a pivotal role in the Trump and Brexit votes has become ever harder to maintain.
By Laurie Clarke
The CA (Cambridge Analytica) whistleblower Christopher Wylie described it as “Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare mind-f**k tool”...
The story had a seismic effect on political discourse. Two of the most unpredictable events in the recent political past – Donald Trump winning the US presidency and Brexit – were pinned on the company...
Three years since the scandal began to emerge, such ideas endure. CA is still thought by many to have played a key role in influencing both the Trump and Brexit votes...
On 2 October a three-year investigation into Cambridge Analytica by the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) concluded with findings that were underwhelming to many, and devastating to some. After trawling through information including more than 700 terabytes of data seized at Cambridge Analytica’s London offices, the data regulator found no evidence that Cambridge Analytica had misused data to influence Brexit or aid Russian intervention in elections...
More damning was the finding that Cambridge Analytica wasn’t doing anything particularly unique. The information commissioner, Elizabeth Denham, told parliament that “on examination, the methods that SCL (a company that is corporately interlinked with Cambridge Analytica) was using were, in the main, well-recognised processes using commonly available technology”. This assessment jarred with reporting at the time that had imbued CA with Derren Brown-like abilities to tinker with perceptions and sway credulous masses...
Many were sceptical of the true power of Cambridge Analytica at the time, but in parts of the press and political establishment, the company’s supposed democracy-destabilising powers were amplified...
While perhaps shocking to some, the ICO’s findings were in line with what many experts in political science had suspected. “Many social scientists, at least in my sphere, have been saying for a long time that Cambridge Analytica was snake oil,” says assistant professor of political science and social data analytics at Pennsylvania State University, Kevin Munger...
A recent study published in Science Advances, with an enviable sample size of 34,000, found that the effects of political advertising on behavioural outcomes including candidate favourability and vote were small “regardless of sender, receiver, content and context”...
A recent investigation by Channel 4 claims evidence that the Trump campaign tried to “suppress” some voters, who were disproportionately likely to be black, through Facebook micro-targeting. This suppression technique was purportedly delivered through negative advertising that attacked Clinton...
“That it actually worked (and on such a scale as suggested by C4) is highly doubtful and – based on everything we know about (targeted) advertising and attempts at persuasion – most likely pales in comparison to very real voter suppression efforts, which include removing polling stations, gerrymandering, or restrictive voting laws,” says Simon. An application of Occam’s Razor elevates explanations such as Clinton’s unpopularity compared to Barack Obama, and genuine voter suppression tactics above the persuasive power of targeted Facebook ads.
Theories about Cambridge Analytica’s role in the outcome of the 2016 US election or the Brexit vote quickly rose to prominence as a means of explaining two events that seemed shocking to many. “Both challenged the old hegemony which had seemed so stable,” says Simon. “Unfortunately, we are all somewhat prone to mono-causal explanations (‘the big data magic did it’) – it’s simply a bit easier to blame new technologies than to go for the longue durée approach where you accurately weigh the importance of other, long-term, structural factors in these events.”...
https://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/social-media/2020/10/how-cambridge-analytica-scandal-unravelled
like NYT, the rest of the FakeNewsMSM has seemingly ignored the fact the “story” has been exposed as a hoax; and NYT and Cadwalladr have not apologised.
Cadwalladr has a new mission, for which she is well-suited?
15 Oct: New Yorker: The Ad-Hoc Group of Activists and Academics Convening a “Real Facebook Oversight Board”
by Sue Halpern
Two hours before Donald Trump boosted the standing of white supremacists at the last Presidential debate, Facebook told Rashad Robinson, the president of the civil-rights organization Color of Change, that it would not remove a potentially incendiary and racially tinged Trump-campaign post. The message in question showed the President’s eldest son, Donald Trump, Jr., calling upon “an army” of Trump supporters to show up at polls across the country, to “protect” the election...
Robinson recounted the experience at the launch, over Zoom, of the Real Facebook Oversight Board, an international, ad-hoc cadre of activists and academics convened by the British investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr. Cadwalladr was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize last year, for exposing the malpractices of Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, both in the U.S. and abroad. That reporting led her to the realization that “journalism alone is not enough.” Earlier this year, she started a nonprofit called All the Citizens, which is organizing the Real Facebook Oversight Board. “This is an emergency intervention, focussed on the American election,” she told me, a few hours before the launch. Other members include Maria Ressa, a Filipino journalist and leading critic of Facebook’s role in supporting President Rodrigo Duterte’s murderous regime; Derrick Johnson, the president of the N.A.A.C.P.; Shireen Mitchell, the founder of Stop Online Violence Against Women; and Roger McNamee, an early Facebook investor.
“Our group has come together for one purpose,” Shoshana Zuboff, a Harvard Business School professor emerita and the author of “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism,” said on the Zoom call. “We demand comprehensive action to insure that Facebook cannot be weaponized to undermine the vote.” Jonathan Greenblatt, the director of the Anti-Defamation League, which has been tracking hate groups for decades, observed that Facebook “actively and knowingly has facilitated the flow of poison into the population, and enabled waves of anti-Semitism and racism, Holocaust denialism and Islamophobic conspiracies, disinformation and extremism.” The Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe called his participation in the Real Facebook Oversight Board “probably the most important effort in my fifty-year career in the law.”
The Real Facebook Oversight Board is a self-appointed proxy for the official Facebook Oversight Board, which was designed to function as a kind of independent appeals court, adjudicating various challenges to the company’s decisions on whether to remove content...
Facebook Oversight Board’s first twenty members, who were named in May, include Cadwalladr’s former boss at the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger. The body has yet to convene a meeting.
Cadwalladr’s board has embraced a broader definition of oversight than the one championed by Zuckerberg. From now until the election, its members will use their various platforms to expose the many ways in which Facebook’s algorithms promote divisive, inflammatory, and extreme content; amplify disinformation and misinformation; and promote deceitful political advertising. These methods were crucial to Trump’s victory in 2016, and have not abated in the years since.
They’ve contributed to a proliferation of QAnon, white-supremacist militias, anti-vaccine propaganda, and coronavirus falsehoods...
Now, as Trump continues to question, without evidence, the legitimacy of the upcoming election, there is a real danger that his campaign and its followers will use Facebook to sow chaos after the polls close, by challenging the results, posting false information, or inciting Trump’s base to violence. “The most valuable thing this board can do is to inoculate voters, by giving them the facts,” McNamee told me...
The Real Facebook Oversight Board’s inaugural demands are fairly modest: first, Facebook must remove posts that incite violence, even those from public figures, including the President; second, Facebook must ban all advertising that mentions Presidential-election results until one person is definitively declared the winner, and his opponent concedes; and, third, Facebook must label as untrue any post that declares a winner, until the victory is certified and the losing candidate has conceded. A few hours after the group enumerated these demands, it scored its first win: Facebook announced that it would not allow any ads that delegitimized the election’s outcome...
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-ad-hoc-group-of-activists-and-academics-convening-a-real-facebook-oversight-board