Russia Investigation Heating Up

[time4fun]

For Android:

The Guardian Reported

Aleksandr Kogan, the Cambridge University academic who orchestrated the harvesting of Facebook data, had previously unreported ties to a Russian university, including a teaching position and grants for research into the social media network, the Observer has discovered.

But while he was helping turn Facebook profiles into a political tool he was also an associate professor at St Petersburg State University, taking Russian government grants to fund other research into social media. “Stress, health, and psychological wellbeing in social networks: cross-cultural investigation” was the title of one piece of research. Online posts showed Kogan lecturing in Russian. One talk was called: “New methods of communication as an effective political instrument”.

There has been this overarching question for some time now- how did the Russians know enough about American voting patterns and demographics to target the electorate with such precision? Tada.


The thing that really caught my attention in this whole saga though is the fact that Bannon had Cambridge Analytica focus group testing Trump's main slogans in 2014. They also focus group tested exactly one foreign concept (everything else was domestic): American reactions to Vladimir Putin.

“The only foreign thing we tested was Putin,” Wylie said. “It turns out, there’s a lot of Americans who really like this idea of a really strong authoritarian leader, and people were quite defensive in focus groups of Putin’s invasion of Crimea.”

Congratulations Trump supporters- your candidate was the product of a bunch of focus group testing. And Bannon and the Mercers clearly understood that this was a joint-venture with Russia from the very beginning.