Throw Out All Your Algorithms.

TheFeedHasBeen
ForcedVille


Nevermind the never ending NYT stories from Maggie Haberman et al. about the mangled machinations behind the mad king's Twittmachine feed.

Because this, from the Guardian's Carol Cadwalldr, is the thing we ALL need to be paying attention to:

The first time I met Christopher Wylie, he didn’t yet have pink hair. That comes later. As does his mission to rewind time. To put the genie back in the bottle.

By the time I met him in person, I’d already been talking to him on a daily basis for hours at a time. On the phone, he was clever, funny, bitchy, profound, intellectually ravenous, compelling. A master storyteller. A politicker. A data science nerd...

{snip}

...Or, as Wylie describes it, he was the gay Canadian vegan who somehow ended up creating “Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare mindfuck tool”...

{snip}

...Last month, Facebook’s UK director of policy, Simon Milner, told British MPs on a select committee inquiry into fake news, chaired by Conservative MP Damian Collins, that Cambridge Analytica did not have Facebook data. The official Hansard extract reads:

Christian Matheson (MP for Chester): “Have you ever passed any user information over to Cambridge Analytica or any of its associated companies?”

Simon Milner: “No.”

Matheson: “But they do hold a large chunk of Facebook’s user data, don’t they?”

Milner: “No. They may have lots of data, but it will not be Facebook user data. It may be data about people who are on Facebook that they have gathered themselves, but it is not data that we have provided.”

Two weeks later, on 27 February, as part of the same parliamentary inquiry, Rebecca Pow, MP for Taunton Deane, asked Cambridge Analytica’s CEO, Alexander Nix: “Does any of the data come from Facebook?” Nix replied: “We do not work with Facebook data and we do not have Facebook data.”

And through it all, Wylie and I, plus a handful of editors and a small, international group of academics and researchers, have known that – at least in 2014 – that certainly wasn’t the case, because Wylie has the paper trail. In our first phone call, he told me he had the receipts, invoices, emails, legal letters – records that showed how, between June and August 2014, the profiles of more than 50 million Facebook users had been harvested. Most damning of all, he had a letter from Facebook’s own lawyers admitting that Cambridge Analytica had acquired the data illegitimately...


Fifty.

Million.

So, what did they do with the profiles?

The young Mr. Wylie explains...

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If you want in-depth  analysis and (mostly, I think) algo-free commentary make sure you read (and bookmark) Marcy Wheeler.
Couldn't happen/hasn't already happened here?....The MoS explains why you might want to think again.
And on that other thing I've been blathering on about recently....If Ontario had prop-rep would the entire country be concerned about the good Mr. Ford's political future at the moment?
Finally, Jody Paterson explains why, for her at least, it is difficult not to wonder about motives and long held beliefs when it comes to the recent change of heart writing of Martyn Brown in the G Straight...It's hard not to conclude that she has a point.


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