My point was not that it was good. My point was that it was very similar, but still a little different in terms of the app, to what the Obama campaign, and to a lesser effective extent, the Romney campaign did in 2012.

My second point is that advertising, to include political advertising tends to be manipulative. So many ads are deceptive, so many play on fear. I do agree that populist messages around the world tend to be simplistic, but that is more of a criticism of political advertising in general than anything specific to this campaign.

I am not convinced this use of Facebook was more effective than a typical ad targeting operation. While the people involved may have had other aspects of the operation that were more sinister, the surprise at how Facebook and ad targeting works has been widely reported in the last election. The extreme response to these events seems to be more about who was elected than how.

> It's deliberately lying to seed fear, distrust, division, and hate between citizens. It's deliberate manipulation to create distrust of government institutions. It's the destruction of civil society and civil discourse for the purpose of winning an election.

So...politics?

The problem here, as is the root of almost all the problems we face in society isn't Cambridge Analytica. The problem is people lack basic critical thinking skills and the capacity to make good decisions.

> It's deliberate manipulation to create distrust of government institutions.

Nobody with any knowledge of history or good sense trusts any government institution.

>It's the destruction of civil society and civil discourse for the purpose of winning an election.

This would require having a civil society filled with civil discourse to start out with, which we didn't (and don't) have.

The simple, irrefutable truth is that governments and those in other centers of power have been using propaganda to control feeble minds and society at large since Woodrow Wilson founded the first official state-run propaganda machine (the CPI) over a hundred years ago.

Everyone is trying to find a "reason" that people rejected "traditional American institutions" and the establishment candidate (Hillary Clinton) in favor of a classless, boorish carnival barker in Donald Trump. They point to the evil Russians, or the dastardly villains at Cambridge Analytics, because they don't want to accept that "traditional American institutions" have been utter garbage for decades. They don't want to accept that many, many Americans are simply rejecting the status quo. Americans may not be smart or informed enough to know exactly what is wrong with "the system", but they know its horribly broken, it doesn't work in their interests, and many of them are reflexively rejecting that system. They aren't rejecting it because of the Russians, or because of some Twitter trolls, or some facebook ads - they are rejecting it because they have seen their standards of living plummet over the last few decades while those at the upper echelon of society have gotten fabulously wealthy. They are rejecting it because so many people are one illness or accident or lost job away from being homeless. They are rejecting it because they have seen (and continue to see) a race to the bottom for working people while the "elites" push for open borders and a massive influx of cheap labor that will make their lives even more difficult.

So keep on crying about the evil Trump and the dastardly Russians, and whatever other phantoms you invent to explain away the growing national discontent while keeping your head in the sand about the real problems we have.

I personally think the news on this is rather "noisy" right now (we'll see what emerges later). But from what I see of the Channel 4 expose (https://www.channel4.com/news/cambridge-analytica-revealed-t...), this story potentially involves far more than the United States election... and may actually involve flat out illegal activity.

Either way, I agree with you that the election of Donald Trump was more than just "the Russians". However, just because some of the elements were home-grown doesn't IMHO mean that we dismiss the degeneration of social media that has come about of late. Both from Facebook (and others, but they are the big offender)'s tendency to over-spy into your personal life (of which Cambridge Analytica is a symptom of this). And the extremely poor safeguards on API abuse on too many social media platforms (Russian and other Twitter political propaganda bots are but a symbol of the bot problem on Twitter and elsewhere in general).

I don't disagree with you about at all about the ground truth of American polity. (I have a lot of family that voted for Trump.) From my perspective, the election sent the right message but through a profoundly dangerous messenger.

For me, Russia and Cambridge Analytica are not scapegoats: they are other problems that need to be addressed which are not orthogonal to addressing the economic inequalities aggravated by the current system.

It worth remembering though, that this messenger was deliberately picked from the crowd of 16 (!) people during primaries. Voters spoke when they abandoned Kasich, Jeb and the rest. It's not like they had no choice. They had.

There was an interval of about 3 months where if Cruz, Rubio, and Kasich had agreed to draw straws and support the winner, Trump could have been stopped relatively easily. But instead they all assumed Trump could never win, and thus spent a lot of resources attacking each other and splitting the traditional Republican vote.

And that was due to two insane factors: first, that we use primaries rather than caucuses; second, that many of them define the winner as the one with the most votes.

On the first point, a representative democratic republic really shouldn't be choosing its candidates by popular vote. A caucus system empowers parties to moderate & modulate the voices of their voters. As horrifically corrupt as Clinton, Inc. were in the 2016 election, in general it's a good thing for party insiders to seek a more electable candidate.

On the second point, it simply makes no sense at all for a 40-30-30 split to go to the fellow with 40% of the vote. Instant runoff voting or a similar method would be far preferable to the current way we count votes.

What's most damning is that the money involved in our political process gave us those 16 candidates.

They were all establishment candidates who've historically played the game that's lead us to the discontent we face today. They never really cared about the people either. Trump at least talked the talk in ways from an economic perspective (in unfortunately misogynistic and racist terms...) But I still believed that maybe he actually gave a damn at some level about the working class and genuine creation of opportunity and happiness.

Now I'm thinking he just really wanted to win an election at any cost and has turned the executive branch into a complete swamp... I mean... if this was supposed to be a referendum on corporate hegemony and cronyism, what the hell are all these millionaires, billionaires, and family members doing in government?

You’ve thumbnailed elements of the problem, and left out the heart of the matter: The cabalistic forces of uber-rich conservatives (reactionaries) marshaled these propaganda tools to convince justifiably agreived voters to vote for a candidate who is letting them “run wild in the candy store.”

The interests and ideology of the Mercers and the Koch are diametrically opposed to any practical solution to the problem of growing inequality in the US.

They, most of the Republicans, practice a “take no prisoners” form of politics, in which they care little how either the ends or the means of their campaign affect lower class people.

The deceptive elements, and the use of sleazy propaganda, by these neo-reactionary King makers, is of a piece, whether they use modern data mining techniques or not.

If it wasn’t so sad, it would be hilarious. The joke is on all of us.

> The cabalistic forces of uber-rich conservatives (reactionaries) marshaled these propaganda tools to convince justifiably agreived voters to vote for a candidate

Most of the über rich conservatives were anti-Trump.

> are diametrically opposed to any practical solution to the problem of growing inequality in the US.

Trumps policies are incredibly practical and if implemented will go a long way towards solving inequality in the US.

Again, it's why most of the über rich conservatives are anti-Trump.

This. A thousand times.

People lack very basic critical thinking skills.