[FeatureRush]

The main point from this article seems to be that the service was provided for free, without registering it as a donation.

Some details on the actual technology are in this related article:

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/26/robert-merc...

> On its website, Cambridge Analytica makes the astonishing boast that it has psychological profiles based on 5,000 separate pieces of data on 220 million American voters

Then there are some speculation what data could it be and how would it be used. From that, it seems that the difference between other "Better audience targeting" tools used for typical commercial advertising campaigns would be mainly scale and accuracy?

As a side note, does anyone else thinks that this specific photo in article about manipulation was used to manipulate my emotions and invoke negative view of the other side?

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/26/robert-merc...

[chrisan]

> As a side note, does anyone else thinks that this specific photo in article about manipulation was used to manipulate my emotions and invoke negative view of the other side?

Yes, he's either got a crazy face or "laughing all the way to the bank" face. They used fairly "stock" photos of Mercer and perhaps Banon, but Trump has a look of confusion and Farage looks mental. For the record I'm neither pro Trump or pro Brexit. I wish both sides wouldn't participate in behaviors like this.

I wonder how long until your browser or an addon can get the gist of the article's subjects compare with image recognition the facial expressions and let you know if there might be some editorial bias. Just something to put in your subconscious before the editor/author works on your subconscious

[mike_hearn]

Note also the image used to depict Leave voters: young men waving flags and wearing waistcoats. Despite the fact that Leave gets a big chunk of its support from everywhere that isn't London and Leave was more popular with the old than the young, they chose to illustrate it like that because they know it'll cause Guardian readers to puke a little.

You can see that sort of thing everywhere, subtle manipulation through image choice. Here's another example:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/01/06/brussels-punishin...

That article is supposedly about Brexit and Marine Le Pen, but the image chosen for the top of the article claims to be a picture of a Russian journalist (holding up pictures of Trump, Le Pen and Putin). In fact she's not a journalist at all, her name is Maria Katasonova and she is an obscure candidate for a far-right Russian political party. I can only assume the point of doing this is to try and plant the subconscious message that Russian journalism is unreliable.

[adnzzzzZ]

>Then there are some speculation what data could it be and how would it be used. From that, it seems that the difference between other "Better audience targeting" tools used for typical commercial advertising campaigns would be mainly scale and accuracy?

Some of it is explained on this 5 minutes video (ignore the clickbait title). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yo3gOoOSdhY According to this professor one of the things they used for better targetting is a person's Big 5 personality profile that they extract from Facebook likes.

[NPMaxwell]

Great video. Lots to think about. Like personality tests in general, test of big 5 personality traits correlate with behavior at about .2 to .3. For example, they have a correlation of .2 to .3 with GPA (http://www.gwern.net/docs/conscientiousness/2007-noftle.pdf). This is a typical correlation level with behavior for all personality tests. To give you a sense of this, simulate a personality test result with 90 zeros and 10 ones. Then add a column of 90 zeros and 10 ones for the behavior you are predicting. Arrange your behavior ones so that 7 line up with personality zeros (were not predicted) and 3 line up with ones (predicted). That's a correlation of .24. If you picked 10% randomly, you would have found (on average) 1 of the people showing the behavior and you would have mistakenly flagged 9 who would not produce the behavior. With the test, you find 3 and mistakenly flag 7. If the test and behavior are spread 50/50, you find 32, when random selection of 50% would have found 25. Combine that correlation with the problem that the Facebook data is not perfectly correlated with how people would fill out the Big 5 personality instrument. If you insisted that your modelers create a model of the the Big 5 and then insisted that they use the Big 5 scores to predict behavior, chances are that you would have correlations near zero. The opportunity here is in creating models directly from Facebook characteristics to the behavior of interest. The Big 5 theory may help guide which FB characteristics to test, but then you need to set it aside to create working models.

[FeatureRush]

Oh, so it's also a better underlaying model. Looking now at the company website they are using less popular name OCEAN Personality Model for Big 5.

As far as I know Big5 is not the final, definitive model. There is this famous quote about performance of NLP machine learning system going up after firing a linguist, I wonder if we will someday hear similar comment about psychologists?

[bamboozled]

Thanks for sharing that, he raises some really good points!!!

[algesten]

Another point is that the election of Trump, Brexit and Breitbart News are linked by common corporate interests.

[FeatureRush]

You are right, although at least this article presented it more as a personal agenda thing than corporate interest, but it's getting hard to tell where the difference lies between them.

[tomp]

As opposed to CNN, WaPo, Bremain and Clinton's campaign?!

[facetube]

Which one of those runs stories that argue against observed scientific fact? Which one of those repeatedly stokes religious intolerance and anti-immigrant sentiments, to the detriment of a nation built on immigration and tolerance? There is no moral equivalence here.

[FeatureRush]

Coming from Poland, where recently we struggle with news authenticity it took me less than 60 seconds to finds this:

www.cnn.com/2017/02/23/world/pope-atheists-again/

> Pope: It's better to be an atheist than a bad Christian - CNN.com

How this is not a fake news and misrepresentation of what the Pope have said? It's so bad that the story was removed from HN and even pro-atheist reddit didn't bough it...

[literallycancer]

The title is usually chosen by someone else than the author of the article. Other than the clickbait title, the article seems fairly normal?

[FeatureRush]

So it's OK to have fake title that exposes people that did not read the article to false news, especially when most of the people will not click on the story and the untrue title will be everything they will ever see?

EDIT: I do not mean to start a war here, I've read facetube's comment above as "our side is always provably right and other side spreads misinformation" and it seemed as naive and untrue view to me. Here in Poland none of 2 major powers represents my views and both manipulate news, and I assume situation is similar in US. I may have read it wrong, but situations where HN-trusted media spreads propaganda definitely do happen.

[mcintyre1994]

Wait, where's the link between the remain campaign and Clinton's campaign? Did US news sites even care much about Brexit? Also AFAIK there's no monetary or commercial relationship between the UK government and any non-BBC domestic or foreign news network - am I wrong?

[quirkafleeg]

Here's a Google image search for Farage:

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=nigel+farage&tbm=isch

He's not exactly known for looking Churchillian.

[LeifCarrotson]

So he's clearly very expressive and not particularly photogenic.

What problems does that actually expose about his platform, or how does it show that his opponents are correct? It is barely even an ad-hominem attack - am attack on his character or reputation might lead me to believe that his viewpoint is held by untrustworthy people, but his face? It means nothing.

And yet it does have a small subconscious impact, causing a bias in my thinking.

[timrichard]

He does look a bit ridiculous when photographed with the trademark pint of beer, and is often mocked accordingly.

Milliband was also mocked for looking silly when eating a bacon sandwich, but that was reframed as shallow media shenanigans.

Depends on the agenda, I guess.

[ptaipale]

But of course choosing well-timed pictures, also known as "photojournalism", is a long-established method of applying political influence of media. It was done to Hillary Clinton, it's done to Trump.

[ascorbic]

The photos he tweets himself are no better. It's just him. https://twitter.com/Nigel_Farage/media

[quirkafleeg]

Here are some images of Farage in the (right-wing) Daily Mail for contrast:

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2014/10/21/1413910453638_Imag...

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2012/12/15/article-2248755-16...

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2016/10/02/01/39022CC20000057...

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2014/09/06/1409965807387_wps_...

In fact if you search on farage site:dailymail.co.uk vs farage site:theguardian.com it seems that, if anything, the latter tends to use fewer ridiculous images of him.

The Daily Mail also sometimes uses images of (left-wing) Jeremy Corbyn, such as this:

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2017/02/05/01/3CD6941A0000057...

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2016/05/15/00/33DD38440000057...

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2015/09/15/23/2C5822330000057...

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2016/06/09/18/351879870000057...

Sometimes it's bias and sometimes it's just poking fun at or ridiculing public figures, but it's everywhere. We're all biased.

[FeatureRush]

At least after clicking on some of the more "expressive" photos it does seem that they are being used by media stories that are more "against" than "about" him, like how he refuted the claim that he had promised that £350 million pounds of money...