> Trump’s conspicuous contradictions and his oft-criticized habit of staking out multiple positions on a single issue result in a gigantic number of resulting messaging options that creates a huge advantage for a firm like Cambridge Analytica: for every voter, a different message. Mathematician Cathy O’Neil had already observed in August that “Trump is like a machine learning algorithm” that adjusts to public reactions. “Pretty much every message that Trump put out was data-driven,” Alexander Nix explained to Das Magazin. On the day of the third presidential debate between Trump and Clinton, Trump’s team blasted out 175,000 distinct test variations on his arguments, mostly via Facebook. The messages varied mostly in their microscopic details, in order to communicate optimally with their recipients: different titles, colors, subtitles, with different images or videos. The granularity of this message tailoring digs all the way down to tiny target groups, Nix told Das Magazin. “We can target specific towns or apartment buildings. Even individual people.”

> In the Miami neighborhood of Little Haiti, Trump’s campaign regaled residents with messages about the failures of the Clinton Foundation after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, in order to dissuade them from turning out for Clinton. This was one of the goals: to get potential but wavering Clinton voters—skeptical leftists, African-Americans, young women—to stay home. To “suppress” their votes, as one Trump campaign staffer bluntly put it. In these so-called dark posts (paid Facebook ads which appear in the timelines only of users with a particular suitable personality profile), African-Americans, for example, were shown the nineties-era video of Hillary Clinton referring to black youth as “super predators.”

And targeting relevant information at wavering voters seems like a common strategy in 2016. House of Cards had both fictional Presidential candidates doing something similar in their fictional election, and Bloomberg once wrote "[Hillary's] campaign is looking to build on the digital engagement strategy devised by the Obama team, customizing the messages e-mailed to the estimated 8.6 million people on its list to make them as personal as possible."

For example, suppose my preferences indicate that I think WaPo is basically a marketing outlet for Amazon at this point. If the powers that be tell Facebook that WaPo produces "Real News", then it's harder for Facebook to show me "Real News" if my preferences say that I think they're full of it.

The surprising thing, for me, is the amount of time they required to change it. It's not like they don't have enough of smart people capable of working on this..

When you consider that the majority of their engagement almost certainly continues to come from the News Feed, this seems more like an effort to simply add in a source of news that is not influenced by any kind of self-selection effect.

http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2017/01/continuing-our-updates-t...

I suppose the good news is that their profiling algorithm has completely the wrong idea about me.

Bet you dollars to donuts those regions will look eerily similar to known voting districts.

http://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/12/the-british-data-cruncher...