2016 POTUS Election Thread

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Cotton

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Jiggyfly

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Ted Cruz Bought Personal Data on Tens of Millions of Americans and He Still Can't Make People Like Him

http://gawker.com/ted-cruz-bought-pe...m_content=link

Ted Cruz’s campaign, ostensibly speaking, has a major leg up on most of the other candidates: An in-house team of data scientists, funded by a billionaire supporter, analyzing the data of tens of millions of unwitting American Facebook users. And yet, people still find him deeply unlikeable.

(“I would rather have anybody else be the president of the United States. Anyone. I would rather pick somebody from the phone book,” Cruz’s freshman year roommate has said. “Stop asking us stupid questions and do something productive with your time,” say my parents.)

That kind of data isn’t cheap. The company spearheading Cruz’s data analysis, Cambridge Analytica, is owned in part by Robert Mercer—a Cruz supporter who threw $11 million at the pro-Cruz SuperPac, Keep the Promise I. Not that it’s all charity—according to the Guardian, Cruz SuperPacs supported by Mercer and his family have paid the company at least $2.5 million this election season. And so far, Cruz’s campaign has reportedly pitched in an additional $750,000.

And they’ve given the Cruz campaign a lot to work with: According to the Guardian, the British company has information on millions of Facebook-using Americans, thanks to a process called data seeding. But it seems not all of it was above board, informed consent-wise.

The academic used Amazon’s crowdsourcing marketplace Mechanical Turk (MTurk) to access a large pool of Facebook profiles, hoovering up tens of thousands of individuals’ demographic data – names, locations, birthdays, genders – as well as their Facebook “likes”, which offer a range of personal insights.

This was achieved by recruiting MTurk users by paying them about one dollar to take a personality questionnaire that gave access to their Facebook profiles. This raised the alarm among some participants, who flagged Kogan for violating MTurk’s terms of service. “They want you to log into Facebook and then download a bunch of your information,” complained one user at the time.

Crucially, Kogan also captured the same data for each person’s unwitting friends. For every individual recruited on MTurk, he harvested information about their friends, meaning the dataset ballooned significantly in size. Research shows that in 2014, Facebook users had an average of around 340 friends

By summer 2014, Kogan’s company had created an expansive and powerful dataset. His business partner boasted on LinkedIn that their private outfit, Global Science Research (GSR), “owns a massive data pool of 40+ million individuals across the United States – for each of whom we have generated detailed characteristic and trait profiles”.
The Cruz campaign reportedly used that data to build models of voters using “six key personality types,” some of whom, presumably, could be persuaded to vote for Cruz.

That a company figured out a way to harvest our information freely posted on Facebook is unsettling, though hardly remarkable. But the surprising outcome is this: Despite what the Guardian terms “an intensified collision of billionaire financing and digital targeting on the campaign trail,” Ted Cruz is still a deeply unappealing candidate.
 

boozeman

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Egads, Marco Rubio has extremely large ears. Never noticed them before.
 

townsend

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It's weird how military service is no longer sought after from presidential candidates. Of course the last guy who had a shot from that category his a bunch of classified documents at his mistress's house.

But I'm not sure why the Republicans have come to favor Lawyers, Doctors, and Business men, considering how yeehaw war crazy they are.
 

Cowboysrock55

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But I'm not sure why the Republicans have come to favor Lawyers, Doctors, and Business men, considering how yeehaw war crazy they are.
Does that mean Democrats should favor welfare queens to run for president?
 

L.T. Fan

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This is a stupid war. No one or no country will change the mindset or the crusade of the religious extremists nor will they be able to destroy them. They have been this way for centuries and will continue to do so. Attacking them is futile. All you can really do is defend against them and minimize their ability to come to this country to inflict their hatred on the citizen here. You won't convince the political leaders to take this course though.
 

townsend

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Nope. You earned that.
I'd like to think so, although the point I was making that my benefits were courtesy of the Democratic Party (plus W's signature, I have a lot of criticism for him, but he wasn't shitty to the armed forces) so if the people the Democratic Party fought for are welfare queens, I'd count myself among them.
 

Cowboysrock55

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I'd like to think so, although the point I was making that my benefits were courtesy of the Democratic Party (plus W's signature, I have a lot of criticism for him, but he wasn't shitty to the armed forces) so if the people the Democratic Party fought for are welfare queens, I'd count myself among them.
Wellfare queens aren't the exclussive thing that democrats sign bills for. Plus like you mentioned, ole Bush a Republican signed it too. Just like Wars aren't the only things Republicans support.
 

townsend

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Wellfare queens aren't the exclussive thing that democrats sign bills for. Plus like you mentioned, ole Bush a Republican signed it too. Just like Wars aren't the only things Republicans support.
Actually I researched Bush's involvement since the post. Apparently he was afraid it would be too good and discourage people from going career military, so the Dems agreed to sign his NDAA to grease the wheels. Which is to say the democrats made a deal, to talk the president into helping veterans. So eff him.

The "Welfare Queen" is a tired propaganda tool, analogous to the refugee terrorist or rapist immigrant that Trump speaks of. Oddly enough the original "welfare queen" that Reagan spoke of was committing dozens of cases of identity fraud, and was eventually arrested for kidnapping. As far as I know the Democrats have never jockeyed for her vote, especially now that she's a felon.
 

L.T. Fan

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I'd like to think so, although the point I was making that my benefits were courtesy of the Democratic Party (plus W's signature, I have a lot of criticism for him, but he wasn't shitty to the armed forces) so if the people the Democratic Party fought for are welfare queens, I'd count myself among them.
Good and bad legislation comes from both sides of the aisle. There are many Republicans that supported the bill.
 

townsend

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Good and bad legislation comes from both sides of the aisle. There are many Republicans that supported the bill.
the bill had two republican cosponsors, both veterans. Which, as I mentioned, are a dying breed among republican politicians. Didn't realize it was Jim "I killed a man" Webb that wrote the bill.
 

VA Cowboy

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It's weird how military service is no longer sought after from presidential candidates. Of course the last guy who had a shot from that category his a bunch of classified documents at his mistress's house.
The younger candidates were too young for Vietnam. No real conflicts in mid 70's - '80's. Desert Storm in early '90's but draft was long gone and it was all enlisted and National Guard. Not a lot made the military then a profession.

But I'm not sure why the Republicans have come to favor Lawyers, Doctors, and Business men, considering how yeehaw war crazy they are.
I don't think they are 'war crazy'. Many just still believe in Reagan's philosophy of peace through strength. And they are still better than the Dem candidates of former President wife and bat crazy self-proclaimed socialist.
 
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