Premier Doug Ford's Ontario

[steveintoronto]

Absolutely not random. Legerweb, Angus Reid, Ipsos, etc all send out surveys to a pre-existing membership.

However, if they are now disqualifying responses based on who you would/would not vote for, they are even less random.

Layer that with this (and The National has a piece on this tonight)

Do you panic easily? Do you often feel blue? Do you have a sharp tongue? Do you get chores done right away? Do you believe in the importance of art?

If ever you’ve answered questions like these on one of the free personality quizzes floating around Facebook, you’ll have learned what’s known as your Ocean score: How you rate according to the big five psychological traits of Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism. You may also be responsible the next time America is shocked by an election upset.

For several years, a data firm eventually hired by the Trump campaign, Cambridge Analytica, has been using Facebook as a tool to build psychological profiles that represent some 230 million adult Americans. A spinoff of a British consulting company and sometime-defense contractor known for its counterterrorism “psy ops” work in Afghanistan, the firm does so by seeding the social network with personality quizzes. Respondents — by now hundreds of thousands of us, mostly female and mostly young but enough male and older for the firm to make inferences about others with similar behaviors and demographics — get a free look at their Ocean scores. Cambridge Analytica also gets a look at their scores and, thanks to Facebook, gains access to their profiles and real names.

Cambridge Analytica worked on the “Leave” side of the Brexit campaign. In the United States it takes only Republicans as clients: Senator Ted Cruz in the primaries, Mr. Trump in the general election. Cambridge is reportedly backed by Robert Mercer, a hedge fund billionaire and a major Republican donor; a key board member is Stephen K. Bannon, the head of Breitbart News who became Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman and is set to be his chief strategist in the White House.

Continue reading the main story

And the date on that?
OPINION
Cambridge Analytica and the Secret Agenda of a Facebook Quiz
By McKENZIE FUNKNOV. 19, 2016
NYTimes

And now the follow-on story (as The National featured tonight)

How Trump Consultants Exploited the Facebook Data of Millions MARCH 17, 2018

• 
  
  Opinion Editorial
  Facebook and the Digital Virus Called Fake News NOV. 19, 2016

In the age of Facebook, it has become far easier for campaigners or marketers to combine our online personas with our offline selves, a process that was once controversial but is now so commonplace that there’s a term for it, “onboarding.” Cambridge Analytica says it has as many as 3,000 to 5,000 data points on each of us, be it voting histories or full-spectrum demographics — age, income, debt, hobbies, criminal histories, purchase histories, religious leanings, health concerns, gun ownership, car ownership, homeownership — from consumer-data giants.

Newsletter Sign Up
Continue reading the main story

Here's the CBC latest print coverage: (via Reuters)

The Observer said Cambridge Analytica used the data to build a software program to predict and influence choices at the ballot box.

The paper quoted Cambridge Analytica whistleblower and Canadian data analytics expert Christopher Wylie, who worked with an academic at Cambridge University to obtain the data, as saying the system could profile individual voters to target them with personalized political advertisements.
[...]

http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/cambridge-analytica-facebook-review-data-users-1.4581847

I'm just so shocked I tell you! Facebook and the mindless minions, getting harvested for the intricacies of their oh so willing tell-alls on-line for all to see.

But now this can be tied to profiling for polling....

This story has legs. See them run for office...

 

[steveintoronto]

The legs ^ are starting into a gallop. Globe is picking up on this, next step is to question "who is manipulating the Ford poll results, why, and from what country?". Don't kid yourself folks, I've had to deal with some of Putin's Little Helpers in other forums, some of them in this nation. And the Kremlin would love nothing less than a Ford calling the shots in Queen's Park.

COLIN FREEZE
PUBLISHED MARCH 18, 2018UPDATED 54 MINUTES AGO
Politicians in the United States and Britain are threatening to haul Facebook executives, including founder Mark Zuckerberg, before legislative committees in the coming months, amid revelations about the private data of tens of millions of users being misused – beginning years ago – to fuel deeply polarizing political campaigns.

The political outcry erupted this weekend after a 28-year-old Canadian political consultant emerged as a whistle-blower. In media reports, Chris Wylie described working with former Donald Trump aide Steve Bannon to mine data, after first finessing a massive dataset from Facebook, drawing upon the personal data of 50 million users.


Facebook now says the political consultants in question should have never had this data. But though the company first learned of these problems in 2015, it didn’t apologize or disclose matters publicly. Instead, three years ago, it quietly asked the parties to destroy the dataset, and took them at their word that it had been done.

Facebook said on the weekend that it was conducting a “comprehensive internal and external review” to determine whether any third parties still had this data. “We will take whatever steps are required to ensure that the data is destroyed once and for all.” The statement also said that the company should not have taken the word of the parties concerned. “We trusted those statements to be true.”


After recent revelations about social-media meddling by Russian government agents in the U.S. presidential election, the California social-media giant had already been facing questions about whether it can shield its two billion active users from political manipulations and privacy invasions.

The latest revelations add fuel to that fire. Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar of the judiciary committee publicly demanded that Mr. Zuckerberg appear before her group to explain “what Facebook knew about misusing data from 50 million Americans in order to target political advertising and manipulate voters.”

In Britain, Conservative lawmaker Damian Collins made similar demands – even though Facebook executives recently testified before his committee exploring so-called “fake news.” [...]

Facebook under fire after Canadian whistle-blower Chris Wylie reveals abuse of data of tens of millions of users
You think it isn't happening here? Do you believe in fairy dust?

Late Addendum, no shortage of in-depth examinations on-line, if any of you can get past the paywall this is very revealing and prescient:
http://www.philly.com/philly/column...p-mercer-bannon-stolen-election-20180318.html

No paywall Guardian: (Be sure to read the Cdn political background of Wylie, and then his UK ones. If anyone thinks these methods aren't being applied to Ford, then you're kidding yourselves. It's already been used by the FedLibs)
https://www.theguardian.com/news/20...er-christopher-wylie-faceook-nix-bannon-trump

And as an extrapolation to how Facebook was 'played' (I think a different story will come out later, they were paid-off) watch for Google's Quayside in the Portlands to crash and burn. Even the Globe is now asking questions on it, as of a week ago. Financial Times has a whole series on Google's...errr...'indiscretions' with 'truth'.

Canada needs a Mueller....

 

[JGHali]

Absolutely not random. Legerweb, Angus Reid, Ipsos, etc all send out surveys to a pre-existing membership.

However, if they are now disqualifying responses based on who you would/would not vote for, they are even less random.

It’s all BS. They even are reporting something called a “credibility interval”, which is a pretend margin of error based on the purely “what if” scenario of a random sample. It means nothing. These polls have all the statistical validity of a radio call-in poll.

 

[animatronic]

I talked to someone else who received what sounds like the same poll, and they complained that they were kicked out after saying they weren't concerned about a set of "very rude" (as they put it) statements about Doug Ford.

Maybe that's all there was to the survey? It could have just been some focus group testing on behalf of one of the campaigns. It wasn't necessarily push polling.

 

[steveintoronto]

It’s all BS. They even are reporting something called a “credibility interval”, which is a pretend margin of error based on the purely “what if” scenario of a random sample. It means nothing. These polls have all the statistical validity of a radio call-in poll.

Margin of Sampling Error/Credibility Interval
https://www.aapor.org/Education-Res...n-of-Sampling-Error-Credibility-Interval.aspx

 

[John_Dee]

Well, we all know the Fords fight dirty. That's just stating a fact.

 

[steveintoronto]

Just digging a bit more on the named "Dr Spectre" (Mike Myers alert!) in the Cambridge Analytical story, and this has now been pulled down from the University of Cambridge website, but the wonders of Google (digital records aren't just for profiling!) renders "cache" results:
There's more than one "Canadian Connection" on this story:

[...]
Biography:
Dr. Aleksandr Spectre received his undergraduate training at the University of California, Berkeley, and completed his Ph.D. at the University of Hong Kong. He was then a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto before joining the department at Cambridge. Dr. Spectre works closely with researchers around the world, including at UC Berkeley, University of Toronto, University of Denver, Yale University, Harvard University, Oxford University, UC: San Diego, UC: Santa Barbara, York University, and The University of Hong Kong.

[...]

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:wDcfKDu70e8J:https://www.psychol.cam.ac.uk/people/ak823%40cam.ac.uk+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ca&client=ubuntu

Note University of Toronto and York University.
Curiously missing is any reference to his lecturing and research at St Petersburg State University, taking Russian government grants to fund other research into social media.

Read more on UNIAN: https://www.unian.info/world/100467...-firm-and-st-petersburg-university-media.html

Globe and Mail are seriously onto the story.

 

[AlvinofDiaspar]

Just look up AggregateIQ

AoD

 

[steveintoronto]

Just look up AggregateIQ

AoD

Excellent lead! If nothing else, (and it's got to be a lot more than this) it's indicative of 'common practice' albeit in 'sanitized forms'. Cambridge Analytics have claimed everything they did was "legal". Ditto Facebook.

It remains to be seen. In case the relevance of all of this discussion seems abstract to some posters as that relates to Doug Ford, just take a rearward glimpse over the last few months. How in hell did he get to where he is now? Polls, as suspect as they are, indicate he's a very unliked person.

Without raising the "Wynne is Worse" rationale for Ford's present stature, one has to wonder on how he (or other persons) managed to clamber over the other far more suitable candidates in the PC race.

This may eventually all backfire, I'm praying that it does...just as Christopher Wylie is not trustworthy with his claimed rationale for "whistleblowing" (he knows the ship is about to sink), the machinations behind Ford are going to go down too.

On a side note, and 'disappearing web-pages' etc: (some associates I've emailed article links to claim they could access them yesterday, today they've gone dead)

Whistleblower Christopher Wylie says he's now been blocked by Facebook

• Wylie claims to have been suspended by Facebook, according to a tweet.
• He's the co-founder of Cambridge Analytica, a firm that worked on Facebook ads for President Trump during the 2016 election
• Cambridge Analytica denies Wylie's claims that the firm held on to data obtained illegally from millions of Facebook users.

Christina Farr | @chrissyfarr
Published 22 Hours Ago Updated 13 Hours Ago

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/18/whi...ie-says-hes-now-been-blocked-by-facebook.html

See Zuckerberg crash too. And Trump frantically Twitting (sic) again on Mueller's 'vacation'.

Market futures on shredders just skyrocketed...

Addendum:
CBC (via CP newswire) now reporting:

[...]
Another article published May 2017 by The Guardian quoted a source that connected Wylie to a web analytics company in Victoria, B.C., called AggregateIQ. The firm has come under scrutiny in Britain for its possible role in helping the Leave campaign win the Brexit referendum.

Asked about Wylie, Canada's Liberal Party said in a statement Sunday that protecting the information of Canadians it engages with is a "foremost priority."
[...]

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/christopher-wylie-canada-libeals-cambridge-analytica-1.4582190

So let's play 'Spy vs Spy vs Spy' for a moment (apologies to MAD magazine):

Are the Libs actually behind Dougie's ascension to the PC Throne? There's an irony in that, as Wynne's campaign manager has stated (gist) "He's the worst case scenario for Wynne to go up against". lol! And everyone else says he's the easiest to slap down! She's already started on him, and as much as I also harbour deep resentment to Wynne, she's doing an excellent job so far. And she's just warming up...

To put it bluntly, as if it isn't already bog obvious, the man is a (...insert derogative here...).

All Wynne has to do to gain a thin majority (or a close enough minority to form a coalition with the NDP) is allow Ford the rope he needs to hang himself with.

 

[PinkLucy]

I talked to someone else who received what sounds like the same poll, and they complained that they were kicked out after saying they weren't concerned about a set of "very rude" (as they put it) statements about Doug Ford.

Maybe that's all there was to the survey? It could have just been some focus group testing on behalf of one of the campaigns. It wasn't necessarily push polling.

It said I didn’t meet the criteria and I didn’t get the payout that accompanies the survey so I think there may have been more. Fortunately before that there was an open write in where I was able to express just what I think about Doug

 

[steveintoronto]

@AlvinofDiaspar may have already been to this blog, (there's a lot online) but here's where things tie back to provincial elections:

[...]
And, just in case you have any doubt about how AggregateIQ meddles in elections, look how it inadvertently backfired on Stone's Liberal leadership campaign. I'm sure they won't make the same mistake next time.

A former provincial cabinet minister running to lead the BC Liberal Party has lost nearly 1,400 new memberships ahead of this weekend's convention, after irregularities that were linked to a Canadian company under investigation for its role in helping the Leave side win the Brexit campaign.Todd Stone's campaign said on Friday that 1,349 party memberships – out of the party's roughly 60,000 registered members – had been disqualified after the party discovered missing e-mail addresses. His campaign confirmed the memberships were connected to consultancy AggregateIQ.CAmpaign co-chair Peter Fassbender said the memberships involved people whose first language is not English."They were having problems in terms of the process," Mr. Fassbender said in a Friday interview with Radio NL in Kamloops.Mr. Fassbender, who did not respond to requests for an interview, told the radio station that the sign-ups violated party rules and were due to an "individual in the company [AggregateIQ] who was trying to find a method to assist these people."
[...]

http://the-mound-of-sound.blogspot.ca/

Sound familiar? I can't tie that into the Dougie Doo-Doo, and what transpired prior, but it might be a matter of time until an intrepid reporter does.

Globe and Mail
MIKE HAGER AND ANDREA WOO
VANCOUVER
PUBLISHED FEBRUARY 2, 2018UPDATED FEBRUARY 3, 2018
[...]
Mr. Fassbender, who did not respond to requests for an interview, told the radio station that the sign-ups violated party rules and were due to an "individual in the company [AggregateIQ] who was trying to find a method to assist these people."

The new leader will be announced on Saturday after three days of voting. The party said "thousands" of new memberships were disqualified in the lead-up to the vote, but would not provide an exact number or a breakdown of which campaigns they were connected to.

Mr. Stone drew criticism from some of his five leadership rivals last month when news broke that his campaign had hired AggregateIQ for the race to replace former leader Christy Clark.

Britain's Information Commissioner is looking into AggregateIQ's role in the Brexit campaign after the country's Electoral Commission revealed that the Leave side paid the equivalent of $4.6-million to the Canadian company for political work. No specific allegations of wrongdoing have been made, but commissioner Elizabeth Denham has said that she is particularly concerned with how personal information was analyzed to target voters.

B.C.'s Privacy Commissioner confirmed it is working with the British probe while also investigating whether AggregateIQ is compliant with privacy legislation in its home province. A representative from that office declined to comment on Friday on either investigation.
[...]
( Former attorney-general Geoff Plant, who is overseeing the integrity of the leadership vote) said an investigation into allegations of irregularities in Mr. Stone's sign-ups led the party to reject those membership applications, many of which had already been cancelled because of a "problem with the email address on the paper form." He did not say how many of the disqualified memberships originated from digital applications, which are approved immediately after the registration fee is processed.

"We've done everything we can to ensure the membership base, the voting, has integrity," he said.

"Don't assume that there is wrongdoing when there is no evidence that, to my knowledge, there was."

In an internal party statement issued late Friday afternoon, he assured Liberals that all memberships were vetted rigorously and that the party machinery "acted appropriately and effectively in setting and enforcing the rules of this process."
[...]

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/new...berships-after-investigation/article37847071/

 

[christiesplits]

One disadvantage for the Liberals in having an early June election is that dozens of their Ottawa colleagues will be in Parliamentary sessions through April, May and June.

It is well known that MPs and their local staff often work around the clock when their provincial counterpart is running in their riding, and visa versa.

 

[John_Dee]

Steve, with all due respect, I wouldn't get too mired in the current anti-Russian hysteria that's sweeping the western world if I were you, nor would I attempt to tie it to Ford's (hopefully temporary) political upswing. Without getting into too many details - seeing as they're hardly on-topic for this forum - most of the crap happening across the globe right now is entirely the fault of our corrupt and not-overly competent elites, and the new McCarthyism is their way of deflecting blame. That's certainly the case with Hillary Clinton and the brain trust she staffed her campaign with, losing to a clownish, cartoonish game show host, fer Chrissakes. Brexit too.

And we have the people supposedly leading the provincial PC party to thank for Ford's current rise in the party ranks, IMO.

It remains to be seen. In case the relevance of all of this discussion seems abstract to some posters as that relates to Doug Ford, just take a rearward glimpse over the last few months. How in hell did he get to where he is now? Polls, as suspect as they are, indicate he's a very unliked person.

Oh, he's a hateful pig, all right. I out-and-out despise him, as you can probably tell from my posts. But looking back, yeah, it's fairly obvious why things went down the way they did...but hindsight is 20/20, and all that: I think they intended for Elliott to win, but - with astonishing stupidity - they also allowed Mulroney to campaign and split the anti-Ford vote. The crazy anti-sex lady wasn't an issue, natch, and poor old Brown was a complete non-starter. But the fact that they'd allow him to enter the race under such a cloud speaks to their incredibly poor judgement. Brown single-handedly made the entire spectacle into a 3-ring circus, and the other weird bits of nonsense that occurred - like the double-booking with the wedding at the very end - points to a very clear, fumbling incompetence at work. If the rumors are to be believed, and a faction within the party wanted to push it away from more respectable faces like Elliott and towards a more hard right agenda, who better to pick as your candidate than a vicious bully boy like Dofo? The more moderate faction got caught completely flat-footed.

 

[toaster29]

I am hopeful that my riding (Etobicoke - Lakeshore) will get a ton of infrastructure (transit?) promises from the Liberals so as to prevent a PC sweep of Etobicoke, and not give Doug that satisfaction.

 

[narduch]

I am hopeful that my riding (Etobicoke - Lakeshore) will get a ton of infrastructure (transit?) promises from the Liberals so as to prevent a PC sweep of Etobicoke, and not give Doug that satisfaction.

I don't think they are making transit promises. Just social program promises. Pharmacare, etc.