Make Facebook Great Again
Just over a year ago I wrote, "
Did Donald Trump Use Artificial Intelligence To Win The Election?", which was an article about
Cambridge Analytica.
If you haven't been paying attention lately, Facebook just
banned Cambridge Analytica from their platform, including the whistleblower that
blew the whistle on how Cambridge Analytica was potentially misusing data. Meanwhile, the mainstream media has gone into a frenzy,
crashing Facebook's stock, forcing executives
out of the company, and calling for social media reform.
This story is seriously a year old, and although I was not the first journalist to write about this, I did bring it to the attention of about 6,300+ readers. While it is new that we have a whistleblower, and the number "50 million accounts", what the media isn't telling you is how Cambridge Analytica actually pulled this off.
The fact of the matter is the data that Cambridge Analytica acquired from Facebook,
much of which they obtained legally and as Facebook intended them to, was entirely useless without machine learning. Machine learning is one of the baby steps required for building artificial intelligence, it is a field of computer science that gives computer systems the ability to "learn" with data without being programmed by a person. It was this technology that Cambridge Analytica used to analyze tens of millions of users profiles using data they acquired from Facebook, and put together psychological profiles of users. They then used Facebook's targeted advertising system to display ads and content at those users geared towards their own psychological profile. Think of it as persuasive arguing on steroids hyper-targeted by your own beliefs about the world.
Comment: In the 'land of the free', all is up for grabs, whether you want to be or not. If the media can use you for their ratings, they will. And now it appears that Gonzalez is taking a page from their book.