Seminar 16: Uses and abuses of AI in election campaigns

• Alistair Knott: Uses and abuses of AI in election campaigns

Michal Kosinski's model predicting personality from Facebook Likes

• The original article: Youyou, W., Kosinski, M. and Stillwell, D. Computer-based personality judgments are more accurate than those made by humans

• An online demo (includes prediction from free text, as well as from a Facebook page)

Some relevant articles

• Carole Cadwalladr's Observer article: (Feb 27 2017): Robert Mercer: the big data billionaire waging war on mainstream media

• Motherboard article (Jan 29 2017): The Data That Turned the World Upside Down

• Alexander Nix' talk at the Concordia Summit (Sep 19-20 2016): The power of big data and psychographics

• Scout article (undated): The Rise of the Weaponized AI Propaganda Machine

• Institutional investor article on Renaissance and Mercer (Dec 13 2016): Robert Mercer's trade of the century

• Observer article (4 March 2017): Did Cambridge Analytica influence the Brexit vote and the US election?

• Washington Post article voicing skepticism about the uniqueness of Cambridge Analytica's methods (6 March 2017): Guys, it’s starting to seem like maybe there isn’t a magic bullet for winning campaigns

• A similarly skeptical article from the New York Times (6 March 2017): Data Firm Says ‘Secret Sauce’ Aided Trump; Many Scoff

• Guardian article about Cambridge Analytica's work for the Ted Cruz campaign (11 Dec 2015) Ted Cruz using firm that harvested data on millions of unwitting Facebook users

• An earlier skeptical article from Advertising Age (Aug 8 2016): In D.C., Cambridge Analytica Not Exactly Toast of the Town

• A Spectator article equivocating about Cambridge Analytica's claims (Dec 3 2016): The British data-crunchers who say they helped Donald Trump to win

• An article from Zerohedge about the departure of David Magerman from Renaissance (Feb 24 2017): Mutiny Breaks Out Inside The World's Most Successful Hedge Fund Over Donald Trump

• New Scientist article about the role of Twitter Bots in the Brexit vote (21 June 2016): Beware the Brexit bots: The Twitter spam out to swing your vote

• Bloomberg article on Renaissance Technologies' amazingly profitable hedge fund (21 Nov 2016): Inside a Moneymaking Machine Like No Other

Useful research groups

• The multi-university Project on Algorithms, Computational Propaganda, and Digital Politics (University of Washington, Central European University, University of Oxford)

• The related Computational Propaganda Project at Oxford University