New report by @amnadler @mediated1 @BostonJoan for @datasociety on Weaponizing the Digital Influence Machine (adtech weaponized for “vulnerability over relevance”) datasociety.net/output/weaponi…
A few excerpts of this excellent, timely report follow as I work my through it and you should too datasociety.net/wp-content/upl… 
Psy Group, WikiStrat, Cambridge Analytica/SCL, AggregateIQ, VizSense and many others come to mind
extremely here for this (the DIM: Digital Influence Machine aka the Lumascape in the industry)
You may even need to go to court in another country to exercise fundamental human rights to study this crazy political technology machine.
Bet you didn’t know the British advertising agency association called for a moratorium on microtargeting for political ads? Articulations like this in the Weaponizing the Digital Influence Machine report help you understand why. datasociety.net/output/weaponi…
Always down for a good SCL reference in a report on exploiting adtech to divide and conquer an electorate against itself. Here’s CA being awarded by the Advertising Research Foundation a year before its servers were seized under criminal warrant in UK. prnewswire.com/news-releases/…
Key recommendation of this new @datasociety report is requiring platforms to get explicit, non-coercive consent to subject users to split-tests (A/B tests). This is Parscale’s favorite trick btw.
Re-identify pseudonymous IDs to voter registration files and you’ve got yourself a Digital Influence Machine Privacy Death Star that makes a mockery of every privacy policy and the sanctity of the ballot booth.
Here’s a thread with SCL/CA’s Github for job applicants (how well can you match voter files to commercial data?) and visualizations of the Lumascape/DIM on misinfo/disinfo/hyper-partisan sites, where cookies get matched to voters and vice versa
Even though they’ve attempted liquidation in UK courts, their Github for job applicants is still up. Write an scheme to de-anonymize voters. Get a job with one of the sketchiest companies ever. At least until they “folded.” github.com/SCLElections/C…
Brittany Kaiser, former CA/SCL employee, described to UK Parliament committee how Cambridge Analytica had exclusive Breitbart data matching opportunities. Imagine being able to target voters by name (+lookalikes) who love Breitbart on Facebook, web and TV.
Notable that the rolling charges against Russian agents by USA, including today’s against KHUSYAYNOVA, tend to center on FARA and FECA violations and reveal DOJ/FBI capabilities to gather detailed evidence of advertising transactions and shell companies. documentcloud.org/documents/5009…
Notable that today the UN Special Rapporteur, European Council of Data Protection issued this on Convention 108. Take a closer look at the definition of pseudonymization here and how it prohibits matching to voter files, for example. coe.int/web/data-prote…
Cogent analysis of today’s criminal complaint and affidavit identifying the accountant for Putin’s troll factory oligarch allegedly waging “information war” in a conspiracy to defraud USA in violation of FARA and FECA…that asks if the target in custody? lawfareblog.com/russian-electo…
