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Sophie Germain @veritasta
, 12 tweets, 8 min read Read on Twitter
Wow. Look at the targeted ads run on FB by Aggregate IQ for Vote Leave in 2016.

Does this look like political advertising to you?

The vote swung from Remain to Leave on the last day. Why did they spend hundreds of thousands on these if they didn't work?

parliament.uk/documents/comm…
Dominic Cummings described this campaign as an exercise in data harvesting. Emails, voting preferences -- apparently so that they'd know how best to target people for persuasion.

How is anyone to know that from the ads above, appearing on their FB?

metro.co.uk/2018/05/20/vot…
Here's a range of disinformation about Turkey that Aggregate IQ put on Facebook on behalf of Vote Leave.

How is anyone supposed to know it's false?
Support flood defences? If you clicked this, you'd be in line to see more Vote Leave ads. Not that you had any way to know.
It gets better.

Support steel? Save the whales? Vote Leave!

Oh, except for how you have no way to know these ads are from Vote Leave: you just get fed more of their stuff after clicking.
The Vote Leave £350m/wk myth covered way more than the NHS.

Yorkshire flooding, UK steel…is there anything it can't do?

There are over 100 pages of misleading Vote Leave Facebook ads in the report 👇
parliament.uk/documents/comm…

cc @WendySiegelman @mrjamesob @MikeH_PR @sturdyAlex
Update: I missed the ads for the app! This thing got ppl to spam their friends & family w texts. You know, without consent

Based on Cam Analytica's work w Cruz, messages had a 98% delivery and open rate, bc they were from trusted contacts.

Read more:
medium.com/@uCampaignCEO/…
Finally -- let's talk about playing both sides.

Here's an anti-Corbyn Vote Leave ad -- and here's one targeting ppl sympathetic to unions & labour rights. How can it be both?

You'd only ever see whichever ad fit w your Facebook likes.

Whatever it took to win.
An update from @tombarton : the flood defence pictures seen here were accompanied by text which DID include Vote Leave's name. (See his tweet for how the text looked).

However, the '50 million' ads above did *not* include references to Vote Leave.
So here's a mini-breakdown. Four out of 10 '50 million' ads had no reference Vote Leave. Here's what both looked like.

The text accompanying Turkey ads above mentioned Vote Leave at the end, like this:
Steel! Its text implies it would be £350m a week to support Midlands steel apparently.

Take the whale text by contrast, and you can see how targeted these ads are, according to your likes as a user.
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Vote Leave director Dominic Cummings has blogged on the VL ads.

And there's at least one thing that seems potentially misleading here: 'the VL ads ... are clearly labelled as VL.'

cc @jimwaterson @carolecadwalla @hugorifkind
He misses out that four out of ten ads for 50millionUK, made for Vote Leave to harvest emails & voting prefs for targeting, *weren't labelled Vote Leave*.

These were posted via a page called 50millionUK.

So nowhere does it say Vote Leave. Not the pic, page title, or text.
So, put another way, VL ads may have had a title and accompanying text w references to them.

But four out of ten 50millionUK ads made for VL apparently didn't. VL wasn't even on the 50millionUK website splash.

Cummings has left this out of his blog. Why?
Read 3 tweets
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If what @matthew_elliott says below is true, how could BrexitCentral post FB adverts for BeLeave from 16-22 June?

(See addresses at: parliament.uk/documents/comm… )

cc @hugorifkind @carolecadwalla @mrjamesob @DamianCollins

Some insight here, though I want to make sure that this report doesn't show the posting addresses as they were in 2016 (which is kind of unhelpful, on FB's part) :

So BeLeave's page was changed to BrexitCentral, but then possibly the current BrexitCentral page was created in August, alongside it? Why was this so complicated?

Read 3 tweets
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WOW. AIQ posted ads for Vote Leave right after Jo Cox's murder, when both sides agreed to stop campaigning 16-19 June.

Not for Vote Leave.

These ads were *designed* to run from 17-23 June. One reached up to half a million.

@hugorifkind @mrjamesob @carolecadwalla @sturdyAlex
Posted for Vote Leave on:

16 June (no timestamp or end date): 4 ads. Reach: over half a million

17 June: 23 ads, including 6 that ran 17-23 June. Reach: *over 4 million*

18 June: 26 ads (no end date). Reach: *over 5 million*

19 June: 3 ads. Reach: 3000.

Ads like this.
What was so important, that Vote Leave would break a campaign suspension set to mourn the murder of an MP?

Vote Leave to save polar bears, 17 June. Reach: 100,000.

Video about Turkey joining the EU, 18 June. Reach: 999,000.
Read 6 tweets

Related threads

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A while since tweeted abt #fakenews, but LSE Truth Trust & Technology Commission (@LSEmediapolicy) published long-awaited report: “Structural causes of media misinformation & set out a new framework for strategic policy” lse.ac.uk/media-and-comm…

WARNING: Going 2b LONG thread 1/
First, report is timely, and is healthy reminder of problems associated w/ fake news and harm to the 'infosphere'. Report does not (thankfully!) fall back on data/consumer protection as the be all end all remedy for fixing damage coming from disinformation campaigns. 2/
However, issues w/ recommendations, which I will try & tackle below. Report discusses 5 giant evils associated w/ information crisis. From here, this sets out framework for tackling problems – and in many ways, goes over old ground – defining mis-, dis- and mal-information. 3/
Read 25 tweets
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This all started because the #MetPolice & #LBRUT couldn't do their day jobs properly & decided to take the law into their own hands. It started as a small cover up 12 years ago but has turned into British State Persecution.

#Skynews #BBCNews #DailyMail #Guardian #Euronews
My company was raided. It should have been a straightforward matter. But the #MetPolice & #LBRUT forgot to seize my computer & came back to do a 2nd raid. The search warrant didn't permit a second entry, however, #LBRUT entered unlawfully

#Guardian #Telegraph #DailyMail #GMB #UK
Complaints were then made to my MP #VinceCable. He liaised with the #Metpolice & #LBRUT. And then weeks later, the search warrant was completely changed & was passed off as the search warrant executed on the day of the raids.

#DailyPolitics #Libdems #Conservatives #labour #bbcdp
Read 147 tweets
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#VOTE like you remember family separation.

#Vote like you remember Kavanaugh.

#Vote like you remember “Fine people on both sides.”
#Vote like you remember Helsinki.

#Vote like you remember Khizr and Ghazala Khan.

#Vote like you remember the fake Blind Trust.

#Vote like you remember their vow to take away your health care.
#Vote like you remember “alternative Facts.”

#Vote like you remember his tax returns.

#Vote like you remember the dismantling of the EPA.

#Vote LIKE YOU REMEMBER EVERY MEMBER OF THE GOP CONGRESS WHO ALLOWED ALL OF THIS TO HAPPEN.
Read 33 tweets
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This all started because the #MetPolice & #LBRUT couldn't do their jobs properly & then decided to take the law into their own hands. The result of this decision has led to events stranger than fiction

#BBCNews #Skynews #Itvnews #Channel4News #ThisMorning #TheresaMay #UKGov #LBC
My company was raided. It should have been a straightforward matter. But the #MetPolice & #LBRUT forgot to seize my computer & came back to do a 2nd raid. The search warrant didn't permit a second entry, however, #LBRUT entered unlawfully

#Guardian #Telegraph #DailyMail #GMB #UK
Complaints were then made to my MP #VinceCable. He liaised with the #Metpolice & #LBRUT. And then weeks later, the search warrant was completely changed & was passed off as the search warrant executed on the day of the raids.

#DailyPolitics #Libdems #Conservatives #labour #bbcdp
Read 145 tweets
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#Remain voted for:

A say in whether the EU enlarges or not.
A say in if the EU federalises or remains a union of independent states.
A say in if there is an EU army.
Being the financial capital through which the majority of € is traded while still keeping the £.

#BrexitReality
#EnlargedEurope

The UK has taken the lead in efforts for EU enlargement. It pushed for the inclusion of Eastern European states. It pushed for Turkey to get its shit together so that it could join (which it made very slow progress with, and has largely been undone by Erdogan)
After #Brexit, the UK will have no influence on EU enlargement. In fact, as setting the EU as a rival, every country that joins the EU will a) strengthen the EU, and b) unravels any trade deals that the UK will have made with that country, isolating it further.
Read 25 tweets
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the logic of ad targeting works is not persuasion; the ads aren't meant to change your mind but unobtrusively confirm your sense of who you are
If the targets are convinced of anything, it's that they are immune to persuasion, that their identity is already realized
the ads posit the targeted self as already persuaded, already possessed of its specific beliefs and desires (the ones that data analysis revealed)
Read 11 tweets

Trending hashtags

#ofcom #huffpost #businessnews #Criminalbar #worldnews #Fox #manchester #banking #postofficetrial #Investigator #Careers #dublin #barnes #thetelegraph #Leave #trial #finalsayforall #liverpool #Insuranceclaims #falsewitness #cityam #Legalweek #Conservatives #Vermont #TrumpTreason

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