Social manipulation - Psychographics

Jack's picture
Submitted by Jack on Tue, 05/29/2018 - 09:39

see also   at Quartz  facebook-and-cambridge-analytica-worked-side-by-side-at-a-trump-campaign-office-in-san-antonio

 

From the New Yorker

 “If you know the personality of the people you’re targeting, you can nuance your messaging to resonate more effectively with those key audience groups.” Alexander Nix

According to Sumner, “Using psychographic targeting, we reached Facebook audiences with significantly different views on surveillance and demonstrated how targeting . . . affected return on marketing investment.” Psychological messaging, they said, worked.

 Most famously, there was its mood-control experiment, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, in 2014, in which the company manipulated its news feed so that seven hundred thousand of its users saw primarily positive or primarily negative content. The goal was to find out if “emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness.” The company found that they could. Even more germane, in 2010, Facebook successfully showed that it could influence voter turnout. These were not purely academic inquiries. The Cook County lawsuit also points out that Facebook is more valuable to both its business and political clients if it can demonstrate that it can be used “to manipulate its users into making decisions that they want them to make."                                           

From: Quartz  facebook-and-cambridge-analytica-worked-side-by-side-at-a-trump-campaign-office-in-san-antonio

In fact, Facebook and Cambridge Analytica worked side-by-side for the 2016 Donald Trump campaign at its digital operation in San Antonio, Texas—a year after the tech giant discovered that Cambridge Analytica had access to the Facebook users’ data in violation of the company’s policies. In a 2017 BBC report, Therese Wong, a “digital guru” for the Trump campaign walks journalist Jamie Bartlett through the San Antonio office, showing him the room out of which Cambridge Analytica operated—”the brain” of the operation, she says. Nearby were desks where Facebook employees sat embedded with the Trump campaign.