Why can't the left learn to spin?
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Monday, December 23, 2019
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Why can't the left learn to spin? - tw
- Wells Tao Spin that wins though...
- Jarad Bryant They spun all sorts of ideas about spending a lot of money very well... though those old enough to remember (ie not the well off woke young labour city kids)... that Tony Blair also spun the idea of spending a lot of money and the money ran out. Once b…See More
- Wells Tao Jarad Bryant they spun poorly
- Jarad Bryant Hopefully they have some spin analysts figuring it out...
- Wells Tao The best movies, films, and documentaries of 2019 ranked by movie experts
Cambridge Analytica stole the data of 87 million Facebook users and then utilized it to target swing voters with political propaganda on behalf of clients like Brexit and the 2016 Trump campaign. And yet somehow, that villainous firm isn’t even the most vile player in The Great Hack, since that goes to Facebook, which not only collaborated with Cambridge Analytica (and failed to control it), but also allowed itself to become the preeminent platform for wide-scale, democracy-undermining disinformation operations. With both dynamism and comprehensiveness, Karim Amer and Jehane Noujaim’s infuriating documentary details the Cambridge Analytica scandal via the work of reporters and whisteblowers intent on exposing the company’s function as a tool of right-wing extremists both in America and abroad. In doing so, it reveals a terrifying digital new world order where data is the most valuable commodity, as well as the key to conducting psychological warfare on a heretofore unheard-of scale. It’s the horror film of the year. - Jarad Bryant Spinning that you will spend 500 billion pounds on green energy might poll well on twitter... though the working class will be saying how about 500 billion on our towns and better job's?
Young Momentum activists are in many ways out of touch with everyday people... so to spin effectivly maybe don't use their ideological talking points. - Wells Tao it's a failure to spin well.
youtube.comSpinning Wool And Flax On My Rebuilt Spinning WheelSpinning Wool And Flax On My Rebuilt Spinning Wheel
- Jarad Bryant Now thats spinning... what amazing and simple technology!
- Jarad Bryant Wells Tao Yes interesting disturbing stuff, though how accurate is it all? This is an interesting review I read when it came out that goes into it a bit...
https://www.economist.com/.../the-great-hack-is-a... 
economist.com“The Great Hack” is a misinformed documentary…“The Great Hack” is a misinformed documentary about misinformation- Wells Tao Jarad Bryant can't access it. As for accuracy.. it's the over all narrative thrust and the money behind it that's accurate.
- Jarad Bryant Wells Tao ...The fleshing out of new domains.
Heres a cut and paste...
"A new film chronicles the fall of Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy that used data to form psychological profiles of voters, without much insight or novelty
A HACK, as it is commonly understood, is when someone stealthily gains access to a computer system using vulnerabilities in the code or by tricking a gullible user into revealing their credentials. Asking a user of a computer or social network to click on an “I agree” button and then harvesting their data in order to influence them is not a hack. It is the business model of the internet.
Cambridge Analytica, the now-defunct political consultancy that was at the heart of an exposé by the New York Times and the Observer of sloppy privacy practices at Facebook, no more hacked into a computer than did this reviewer’s aunt. But, much like said aunt, the company displayed an uncommon interest in people’s personal lives, and was only too happy to share that information with others. Viewers ought to suspect from the title alone that “The Great Hack”, a documentary about Cambridge Analytica and “the dark side of social media”, is likely to be a bit over-the-top. And it is.
The film focuses on three characters. David Carroll (pictured) is an American professor who asked Cambridge Analytica for the information it held on him, exercising a right enshrined in Britain’s Data Protection Act of 1998 and normally understood to be reserved for Europeans. (The Information Commissioner’s Office agreed with his reading of the law that the right applies to anyone whose data are processed in the United Kingdom.) Carole Cadwalladr is a journalist for the Observer in London: her stories on Cambridge Analytica captured the public imagination in 2018 and subsequently led to multiple inquiries and investigations in Britain and America, the eventual demise of the company and the continuing scrutiny of Facebook by both media and governments. Brittany Kaiser is a former business-development director for Cambridge Analytica, as well as a campaigner for Barack Obama turned conservative political operative. Her lack of moral compass and shaded intentions make her the most interesting figure of the lot. Thankfully, she gets the most screen time. Less happily, the makers take everything she—and everyone else—says at face value.
When Mr Carroll says that online advertising is a trillion-dollar industry, he goes unchallenged. (It is much smaller.) When Ms Kaiser claims that “last year data surpassed oil in its value”, the film-makers put that on their website. (No such measure exists.) When Ms Cadwalladr notes that “conducting large-scale analysis of a population and then identifying the triggers that are going to move them from one state to another state...feels very challenging to…the idea of democracy”, nobody points out that that is the definition of advertising. Large chunks of the film are made up of Cambridge Analytica sales decks, which the directors appear to take as gospel truth about how sophisticated and successful the company was. So credulous is “The Great Hack” that if Cambridge Analytica had not shut down, its bosses would be using the movie as a testimonial.
It is unclear, to this reviewer at least, what the point is of “The Great Hack”. If it is to use Cambridge Analytica to bring to a wider audience the reality that tech companies exploit their users’ data and are often indiscriminate in the ways in which they go about it, then it is merely beating a severely ill horse. This much is, by the middle of 2019, common currency, thanks in large part to Ms Cadwalladr’s reporting. Even lay citizens today are familiar with misinformation and clickbait on social networks. Among more involved observers, it is facial recognition and artificial intelligence that now elicit the most worry.
The film’s near-exclusive focus on Cambridge Analytica is strange, too. It may make for a neat narrative arc, with a clear end point when the company folds, but that means “The Great Hack” is barely able to address the problems of the broader ad ecosystem, or why the web today is such a wretched place. When it does, eventually, broaden out, it does so using innuendo and conflating different things, spookily intoning about Russians or populists. Propaganda campaigns on Whatsapp in Brazil may be a problem, but they have little to do with the data-mining, ad-serving or algorithmic content recommendations that plague Facebook and its ilk.
That Cambridge Analytica gained access to the Facebook data of tens of millions of Americans through sneaky means, did not delete the information when asked, was able to create detailed profiles and glean insights that informed political strategy for election-winning candidates, and, moreover, that it was just one small part of an online ad industry that surveils everybody on the planet through questionable consent is a story worth telling. It would have been worth telling well, too.
Perhaps “The Great Hack” is the documentary the Facebook era deserves. Like an argument on the social network, it is tedious, seemingly complicated but intellectually underdeveloped, crammed with false facts and exaggerated statistics and features several blowhards who veer between self-righteous and self-congratulatory. Like one of those arguments, nobody comes out looking good in the end." - Paul Gilbert It's not failure to spin. It's what narrative gets repeated, how gets reported.
So in NZ, National's Key/English policies were reported in their own words "National is commiting XXX to infrastructure which will bring xx $ jobs." This runs the headline…See More - Wells Tao it's a failure to spin
- Wells Tao The best movies, films, and documentaries of 2019 ranked by movie experts
Cambridge Analytica stole the data of 87 million Facebook users and then utilized it to target swing voters with political propaganda on behalf of clients like Brexit and the 2016 Trump campaign. And yet somehow, that villainous firm isn’t even the most vile player in The Great Hack, since that goes to Facebook, which not only collaborated with Cambridge Analytica (and failed to control it), but also allowed itself to become the preeminent platform for wide-scale, democracy-undermining disinformation operations. With both dynamism and comprehensiveness, Karim Amer and Jehane Noujaim’s infuriating documentary details the Cambridge Analytica scandal via the work of reporters and whisteblowers intent on exposing the company’s function as a tool of right-wing extremists both in America and abroad. In doing so, it reveals a terrifying digital new world order where data is the most valuable commodity, as well as the key to conducting psychological warfare on a heretofore unheard-of scale. It’s the horror film of the year. - Robyn Conway When spin means lying, distorting and manipulating to get the results you believe you're entitled to? Labour's campaign in the UK elections was truthful. Too many just didn't care about the hundreds of lies the Tories told them, they preferred simple Tory slogans like, "Get Brexit Done!"
- Wells Tao Spinning isn't always about lying as far as I understand it. But it does successfully fuck with the dominant narrative. It appears Labour failed to engage
- Robyn Conway Labour didn't "fail to engage" as much as present their excellent manifesto to the people who needed it most but who'd lost any ability to trust the word of politicians yet were willing to listen to the pro-Tory propaganda of the far right tabloids and…See More
- Wells Tao Robyn Conway that's a total fail to engage, you have to lead the narrative not follow it. This is PR 101, but wtf
- Paul Gilbert Wells Tao lol. no good engaging on a battlefield tilted hard against you.
- Wells Tao Paul Gilbert then shift the goal posts. Where is the imagination instead of the excuses..
- Paul Gilbert Wells Tao My point exactly. which is a concession that it is not a failure to spin. as I said at the outset.
you gotta play a different game, can't win on their terms. - Wells Tao Paul Gilbert ugh, what are you trying to spin! Give up on the win, here it was a huge loss. There is only one game, and the left here in NZ could show Labour how to avoid some basic errors. But Yes! You DO need to change the terms, you need to sell them and win at selling the terms or your fucked. It's that easy.
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