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Robert Mercer, the Money behind Brexit/Trump

 
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Kuros



Joined: 27 Apr 2004

PostPosted: Sun Feb 26, 2017 2:59 am    Post subject: Robert Mercer, the Money behind Brexit/Trump Reply with quote

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/26/robert-mercer-breitbart-war-on-media-steve-bannon-donald-trump-nigel-farage

Quote:
[T]here was another reason why I recognised Robert Mercer’s name: because of his connection to Cambridge Analytica, a small data analytics company. He is reported to have a $10m stake in the company, which was spun out of a bigger British company called SCL Group. It specialises in “election management strategies” and “messaging and information operations”, refined over 25 years in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan. In military circles this is known as “psyops” – psychological operations. (Mass propaganda that works by acting on people’s emotions.)

Cambridge Analytica worked for the Trump campaign and, so I’d read, the Leave campaign. When Mercer supported Cruz, Cambridge Analytica worked with Cruz. When Robert Mercer started supporting Trump, Cambridge Analytica came too. And where Mercer’s money is, Steve Bannon is usually close by: it was reported that until recently he had a seat on the board.

Last December, I wrote about Cambridge Analytica in a piece about how Google’s search results on certain subjects were being dominated by rightwing and extremist sites. Jonathan Albright, a professor of communications at Elon University, North Carolina, who had mapped the news ecosystem and found millions of links between rightwing sites “strangling” the mainstream media, told me that trackers from sites like Breitbart could also be used by companies like Cambridge Analytica to follow people around the web and then, via Facebook, target them with ads.

On its website, Cambridge Analytica makes the astonishing boast that it has psychological profiles based on 5,000 separate pieces of data on 220 million American voters – its USP is to use this data to understand people’s deepest emotions and then target them accordingly. The system, according to Albright, amounted to a “propaganda machine”.


Check your "But Obama did it"'s at the door. I am ready to concede he did something similar and that response is boring as piss, anyway.

The moneyman for Trump and Brexit does not simply produce chemicals (i.e. the Kochs). He conducts private psyops as a vocation and enterprise.

I hope you all are using privacy programs on your browsers, by the way.
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candy bar



Joined: 03 Dec 2012

PostPosted: Sun Feb 26, 2017 11:54 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Tinfoil Hat

LOL


Rolling Eyes
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Rteacher



Joined: 23 May 2005
Location: Western MA, USA

PostPosted: Mon Feb 27, 2017 7:31 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

The article linked to by Kuros gives insight into how right-wing conservatives (and Russian criminals?) have made insidious use of cyberscience to manipulate public opinion and discredit fact-based journalism...

...THE war of the bots is one of the wilder and weirder aspects of the elections of 2016. At the Oxford Internet Institute’s Unit for Computational Propaganda, its director, Phil Howard, and director of research, Sam Woolley, show me all the ways public opinion can be massaged and manipulated. But is there a smoking gun, I ask them, evidence of who is doing this? “There’s not a smoking gun,” says Howard. “There are smoking machine guns. There are multiple pieces of evidence.”

Look at this,” he says and shows me how, before the US election, hundreds upon hundreds of websites were set up to blast out just a few links, articles that were all pro-Trump. “This is being done by people who understand information structure, who are bulk buying domain names and then using automation to blast out a certain message. To make Trump look like he’s a consensus.”

And that requires money?

“That requires organisation and money. And if you use enough of them, of bots and people, and cleverly link them together, you are what’s legitimate. You are creating truth.”

You can take an existing trending topic, such as fake news, and then weaponise it. You can turn it against the very media that uncovered it. Viewed in a certain light, fake news is a suicide bomb at the heart of our information system. Strapped to the live body of us – the mainstream media.

One of the things that concerns Howard most is the hundreds of thousands of “sleeper” bots they’ve found. Twitter accounts that have tweeted only once or twice and are now sitting quietly waiting for a trigger: some sort of crisis where they will rise up and come together to drown out all other sources of information.

Like zombies?

“Like zombies.”

Many of the techniques were refined in Russia, he says, and then exported everywhere else. “You have these incredible propaganda tools developed in an authoritarian regime moving into a free market economy with a complete regulatory vacuum. What you get is a firestorm...”


https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/26/robert-mercer-breitbart-war-on-media-steve-bannon-donald-trump-nigel-farage

More on Trump's "unofficial" Russian connections ... http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/01/11/russia-may-not-have-leverage-over-trump-russians-are-another-matter.html
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Kuros



Joined: 27 Apr 2004

PostPosted: Fri Mar 03, 2017 9:36 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

candy bar wrote:
Tinfoil Hat

LOL


Rolling Eyes


It turns out there is a lot here involving the Mercers.

Corrupt Donald:

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/02/the-great-god-trump-and-the-white-working-class/

Quote:
At the same time, Rebekah Mercer, whose family super-PAC had been Cruz’s chief backer, seconded Trump her crack political team: pollster Kellyanne Conway, Citizens United head David Bossie, and Breitbart chair Stephen Bannon. (“It would be difficult to overstate Rebekah’s influence in Trump World right now,” one insider told Politico after the election.) This fusion of the two anti-establishment Republican insurgencies was the crucial event that many election analysts overlooked.


http://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/rebekah-mercer-donald-trump-231693

Quote:
Mercer’s influence in Trump’s transition effort — detailed here for the first time — calls into question Trump’s campaign trail boasts that his own fortune, which he used to partly fund his campaign, would make him independent from deep-pocketed donors and special interests he railed against on the campaign trail. And the entanglement of connections between Trump’s aides and Mercer’s big-money political operation has prompted complaints from campaign finance watchdog groups, and grumbling from Republican operatives who contend that Mercer has too much control over Trump’s GOP.

“It would be difficult to overstate Rebekah’s influence in Trump world right now,” said one GOP fundraiser who has worked with Mercer and people in the campaign. “She is a force of nature. She is aggressive, and she makes her point known.”

Mercer has a coveted seat on the Trump transition team’s 16-member executive committee. Her work, which she does mostly from home, includes collaborating with conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation and Federalist Society — to which she has steered a combined $4.7 million or more — to recruit appointees for positions at the undersecretary level and below, according to a transition team source.

. . .

Mercer, who is known to friends as “Bekah,” is the middle of three daughters born to Robert and Diana Mercer. The Mercer girls were raised middle class in suburban Westchester County, New York, before Robert Mercer, who goes by Bob, became fabulously wealthy while working at — then eventually becoming co-CEO of — Renaissance Technologies, one of the world’s most successful hedge funds.
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Kuros



Joined: 27 Apr 2004

PostPosted: Tue Mar 14, 2017 11:27 pm    Post subject: The Mercers created Trump's Enclave Reply with quote

candy bar wrote:
Tinfoil Hat

LOL



https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/04/kellyannes-alternative-universe/517821/

Quote:
Conway says she recognized early in the 2016 campaign that Trump was connecting with voters. But despite an early overture from Trump, she initially signed on to run a super pac supporting Ted Cruz. The reclusive father-and-daughter megadonors Robert and Rebekah Mercer, whom Conway considers friends, poured more than $10 million into the effort. In that role, she occasionally bashed Trump, such as when she said he had built his fortune “on the backs of the little guy.”

But after Cruz dropped out, the Mercers threw their support behind Trump and got him to hire Conway as a pollster. In August, when the campaign was foundering under the direction of Paul Manafort, Trump made Bannon the campaign’s CEO and promoted Conway to campaign manager, again at the Mercers’ urging.


Anyone who still believes Trump is a champion for the little guy is beyond sense or reason.
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J.Q.A.



Joined: 09 Feb 2017
Location: Seoul

PostPosted: Wed Mar 15, 2017 4:52 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Wow...a couple of you really have nothing else to do?

I'm sorry Sad


Though...seems to be quite a few counterpoints that could be applied to your fools gold analysis. But...it's whatever.

It is all the Washington District of Criminals.


Oh...Maddog Maddow sure ate some humble pie, eh?
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Kuros



Joined: 27 Apr 2004

PostPosted: Sat Mar 18, 2017 4:08 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/27/the-reclusive-hedge-fund-tycoon-behind-the-trump-presidency

Quote:
Another onetime senior employee at Renaissance recalls hearing Mercer downplay the dangers posed by nuclear war. Mercer, speaking of the atomic bombs that the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, argued that, outside of the immediate blast zones, the radiation actually made Japanese citizens healthier. The National Academy of Sciences has found no evidence to support this notion. Nevertheless, according to the onetime employee, Mercer, who is a proponent of nuclear power, “was very excited about the idea, and felt that it meant nuclear accidents weren’t such a big deal.”
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Kuros



Joined: 27 Apr 2004

PostPosted: Mon Mar 19, 2018 3:28 am    Post subject: Adjusts Tin Foil hat . . . Reply with quote

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/03/facebook-cambridge-analytica/555866/

Quote:
On Friday night, Facebook suspended the account of Cambridge Analytica, the political-data company backed by the billionaire Robert Mercer that consulted on both the Brexit and Trump campaigns.

The action came just before The Guardian and The New York Times dropped major reports in which the whistle-blower Christopher Wylie alleged that Cambridge Analytica had used data that an academic had allegedly improperly exfiltrated from the social network. These new stories, backed by Wylie’s account and internal documents, followed years of reporting by The Guardian and The Intercept about the possible problem.

. . .

The app, built by Global Science Research, requested an unusual (but not unheard-of) amount of data about users themselves and their friends. That’s how 270,000 Turkers ended up yielding 30 million profiles of American Facebook users that could be matched with other data sets.


That is a major violation of privacy.

Quote:
Kogan violated Facebook’s terms of service in saying he was using the data for academic research, but then selling it to Strategic Communications Laboratories. That’s what got Cambridge Analytica and Kogan in trouble. (Cambridge Analytica told The Guardian that they do not have possession of the data nor did they use any of this data in the 2016 election. An anonymous source in the Times story disputes this.)

There’s a lot about Cambridge Analytica that doesn’t quite add up. Are they data geniuses who swung the Brexit vote and got Trump elected, or pretenders bluffing their way to fat marketing contracts? Right after the election, several stories pointed to their psychological profiles of voters as a crucial piece of the Trump digital machine. As time has gone on, their role has come to be seen as less important, more in line with the tiny slice of the Trump campaign treasury that they got, roughly $6 million.


Get off Facebook. A free service still costs you.
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Kuros



Joined: 27 Apr 2004

PostPosted: Wed Mar 21, 2018 7:56 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

candy bar wrote:
Tinfoil Hat

LOL


Rolling Eyes



J.Q.A. wrote:
Though...seems to be quite a few counterpoints that could be applied to your fools gold analysis. But...it's whatever.


$50 billion in market value. Gone. In two days.

That's 50,000,000,000 dollars. That is seven dollars for every human on the planet.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-cambridge-analytica-lawsuits/facebook-cambridge-analytica-sued-in-u-s-by-users-over-data-harvesting-idUSKBN1GX1XK

Quote:
The proposed class-action complaint filed late Tuesday night by Lauren Price, a Maryland resident, is the first of what could be many lawsuits seeking damages over Facebook’s ability to protect user data, and Cambridge Analytica’s exploitation of that data to benefit President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign.

“Every Facebook user has an interest in this lawsuit, and the enforcement of their privacy rights,” John Yanchunis, a lawyer for Price, said in a phone interview on Wednesday.

The complaint was filed in the U.S. District Court in San Jose, California, several hours after Facebook was blamed in a shareholder lawsuit filed in nearby San Francisco for the drop in its stock price after the data harvesting was revealed. Nearly $50 billion of market value was wiped out in two days.


Every user of facebook is a member of this class.
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