The twenty sixteen u. S. President ial election was one of the most contentious in american history. Critics say donald trump and his supporters didnt play fair. Many say that trump overstepped the traditional rules of political contests often playing fast and loose with the troops. Trump was elected without a political majority and he was supported by a group who wanted to impose a reactionary world vision on america. This group quietly mapped trumps path to power influencing the race in ways of which many people are still not aware. How was this possible. How did a political. With extreme views and a tenuous relationship to the truth achieved this incredible victory. Was the American Public tricked into opening the doors of the white house to donald trump was the u. S. Election and unfair game. All the lies and think news came from golf clubs can. You get in there and knew this was happening they would be out. This is democracy taking place in the states not democracy. To try to. Take over we go over the United States and destroy the us. I woke presenting the facts plainly at coniston. Like all politicians trump contends that the facts are on his side but distortions of the facts played a central role in his election. Staten island new york in a mostly Democratic State this place is an exception most people here voted for donald trump. Skibo bio is one of them hes a conservative a patriotic artist and above all a big supporter of the new president. Fed up with traditional media scott now gets his information on the internet it all spent like al. I said before i go to sleep ill have my phone on and you know ill go from this to that then all trouble is featured in here today and here and now i made it and sometimes its i dont even honestly i dont look like whos giving it away. Like millions of trump voters scott believes much of what he sees on the web. For example this article trump believes millions voted illegally. Or this one that Hillary Clinton received over eight hundred thousand illegal votes. Im not saying all three million are but im sure a lot of them are absolutely you should not be able to vote if you are in the league if youre not a legal citizen that im sorry but thats outworks and then they want to change that like no thats not how it works. In fact Illegal Immigrants cannot vote in the United States it would be nearly impossible for them to do so. These sorts of reports are what people originally meant by the term fake news. Scott is far from being the only one to believe lies like this. Millions have gobble them up and certain news outlets specialize in them. Breitbart is the most famous example. On breitbart you can find articles like does feminism make women ugly. Or would you rather your child had feminism or cancer or. Breitbart is also obsessed with islam the west versus islam is the new cold war heres how we win. For Political Correctness protects muslim rape culture. Right bart is a real french publication its the representative of what they call the old right you know people who want to take on the status quo politics but do so in a very divisive way theyre they rail against immigrants to this country they rail against people of muslim faith they you know devout use taxes to divide people on the basis of gender on the basis of race in just a few months breitbart became the main source of information for Many American conservatives its the sensually served as an organ for sort of the trap of man. Trump seems to have instinctively sensed that the vision of the world breitbart projected would touch a nerve with broad segments of the american electorate. Was anxiety. People wanted to describe the trump voters as angry im not sure they were angry i think they were more fearful worried concerned scared about about the future in the spring of two thousand and sixteen if we looked at the people who were voting in republican primaries these people were very concerned about terrorism very concerned about immigration they they saw the two of them working together as creating a threat an exodus an accidental threat to the to the United States and this was something that was. Being spoken about by donald trump and not necessarily by other of republican candidates. During the campaign often took to social media to feed public anxieties. Conspiracy theories essentially become weapons of mass manipulation hard to believe. An independent Fact Checking website only four percent of donald trump statements during the campaign were completely true. Supporters passed on the candidates many fanciful statements and out right false words. You have to look at our media landscape and how americans get their news nowadays conservatives get their news only from fox news or alternative sites like breitbart so thats the only news they see and they view the manged what they call the liberal media the Mainstream Media with distrust and they dont belief the kind of c. N. N. New York Times Washington post so they are only getting their news or law most of their news from very slanted sources and so. What trump will say trump picks up his information from the same news sources these voters hear something Conspiracy Theory and Breitbart News or something on fox trump here is a two says it and the viruses eye for eye for a die hard on the news and i heard that from President Trump so he must be telling the truth if theyre in a silo and its really hard to break out silos so its a self reinforcing cycle of mr. With Many Americans utterly distrust in the established media there was little the press could do to counter the mimes. Sort of a way that these campaigns have you know traditionally been covered and. And that model of Campaign Coverage was not sort of created with donald trump in my hands trumps disregard for making true statements is something that a lot of reporters have had trouble dealing with as were not used to it were not used to politicians or press people just sort of straight out lie and. The Mainstream Media is disrupted and because the Mainstream Media is disrupted truth is disrupted and if truth is disrupted you can just spread your own version of it. I dont know that corruption has reached a level like never ever before in our country. But. Eighty three eighty three wilshire boulevard a stylish address in los angeles in this nondescript Building People work behind the scenes to elect donald trump and. This is the location of several companies that would seem to have no connection. To. The first is Breitbart News the fake news website that supports trump. The second is called glittering steel its a small audio visual production company. But these companies have one thing in common. They are linked to a man that the public has never heard. The man behind trumps wind is Robert Mercer a computer engineer turned billionaire. Robert mercer is seventy one years old the only recently stepped down as the c. E. O. Of a Hedge Fund FirmRenaissance Technologies whose ranks he had been climbing since one nine hundred ninety three. Carol has been investigating him for the last year so. He is an absolutely brilliant scientists. Did really pioneering work. In the sixtys and in the field of natural language processing which is the base of ai basically. In the early one nine hundred ninety s. Mercer left i. B. M. To join a new york based hedge fund Renaissance Technologies there he applied his methods of calculation to the Stock Exchange in order to predict its fluctuations. In Essence Technology he pioneered Algorithmic Trading which now is a massive field and how much trading its down. By applying his mathematical tools mercer revolutionized Renaissance Technologies investment methods making it the worlds most Profitable Fund in ten years. Became very rich. Because the performance of the fund which he had his own money year. Was extraordinary i mean if it goes up thirty percent thirty five percent every year then pretty quickly you become very. As a billionaire mercer might have chosen to quietly enjoy his new fortune however the former engineer also heads. Strong ideas about how the country should be run he decided to invest money to promote his ideas and translate them into political reality. The political system in america is so broken right now because of the special interest money which floods campaigns i mean what happens is when the special interests have an agenda or if youre annoyed company for example and youd like to continue you know drilling for fossil fuel you know or your polluter and you want to make sure you can continue to pollute you go in and you support politicians who believe in your agenda politicians who will say for example that you know Climate Change is not happening because of bad wave activities you know they will they will promote that publicly because that protects the special interests who fund their campaigns. Robert mercer had his own Charitable Foundation the Mercer Family foundation headed by his daughter rebecca. But what exactly are the ideas he wanted to promote hard to say because Robert Mercer never expresses his opinions publicly. Anyway youll never know whats going on in this is brian said just look thats what is funding follow the money that way and i think that on a bill for the paycheck. Tax documents and declarations of the foundations fiscal allocations for the years twenty twelve to twenty fifteen show that mercer financed a reactionary right wing institutes and lobbies. The Heritage Foundation an anti tax and economic regulation lobby got one point five Million Dollars the Media Research center which fights leftist media bias twelve Million Dollars. The governor. And Accountability Institute which tracks government corruption and published books critical of Hillary Clinton three point seven Million Dollars. The Heartland Institute which defends Climate Change skeptics two point eight Million Dollars. In new york even paid for an ad announcing the construction of a mosque near ground zero in just two years Robert Mercer became one of the ten most influential billionaires in politics according to the washington post. But even if the billionaire was able to spend money to support his causes he still faced an obstacle his ideas were too extreme for the Mainstream Media to get them across he needed his own journalistic outlet. In twenty eleven Breitbart News a small right wing online newspaper was in great financial difficulty Robert Mercer saw an opportunity he bought breitbart for ten Million Dollars at its head he placed his right hand man a man who cropped up at all stages of trying to lection campaign stephen k. Bannon. A former Goldman Sachs trader steve bannon became a hollywood producer in the late one nine hundred ninety s. He wanted to make films and t. V. Series to promote his political ideas ultra conservative ideas at a conference then and was introduced to Robert Mercer. The two men hit it off immediately ben and quickly became mercers eminence craziness. In a few months ben and would make Breitbart News an attack machine dedicated to reactionary i. D. s you see that with all of the breitbart publications over the course of many years it was someone like bannan who just proclaims this publicly that theyre going to take on these as situations and theyre going to try to deconstruct the government of the United States to pursue the agenda that they have which is to you know fundamentally chases they shouldnt try to then through you know a place where people experience a level of division that i dont think weve seen since you know going back to the civil war. Mercer now had his media outlet all he needed to make his ideas reality was a candidate. In twenty fifteen mercer started out by supporting texas senator ted cruz the hero of the american far right but after donald trump surprise victory in several republican primaries mercer switched his bets. Robert mercer created a pro Trump Action Committee called make america number one in doubt with fifteen Million Dollars. And the billionaire didnt stop there he would totally take over Donald Trumps campaign. In july twenty sixth seen the dinner was held in a big hotel in new york it brought together among others Rebecca Mercer and donald trump face to face that evening Rebecca Mercer pulled no punches Trumps Campaign she said was chaotic and unprofessional if he wanted to win everything had to change she offered him financial and Media Support in return she for. The republican candidate to replace his Campaign Manager by the familys right hand man steve benen. At the end of this dinner everything was decided then and became Donald Trumps campaign director. Kellyanne conway who headed the mercer political Action Committee for ted cruz became number two. David bossie a Mercer Family stalwart became number three. Robert mercers takeover had succeeded from this point on his handpicked trio would steer the republican candidate strategy. When the merc versus decide to support a candidate they expect the candidates to be responsive to their needs both in terms of how the candidate runs their campaign it also also after if the kid is successful and there are and they are elected as an Office Holder its reasonable to presume that the mercers expect that the Office Holder will be responsive to the bursars needs needs as well and their policies prefer. The there will be no lies we will ask the American People with it truth and nothing else. It was on the banks of the thames that the last american president ial election was partly decided in the heart of london at the headquarters of a firm unknown to the general public called s. C. L. Group Strategic Communication laboratories. In these office. Scientists compile and analyze billions of pieces of data about individuals in order to understand them their objective to determine what motivates Human Behavior the better to influence them. The Strategic Communication of s. C. L. As a company that was founded twenty five years ago they have several branches of Literary Branch a commercial branch an analytical branch and an election project and what they really do is psychology so they try to use psychology to influence people who are from sedition. On their website the firm is very clear about it Services Behavioral influence planning and evaluation is ideal for clients who wish to use influence to treat a problem. People without them being aware and it can and has been used by authoritarian regimes. Critics say that s. C. L. Is in the business of manipulating Public Opinion the Company Boasts for example about organizing protests in nigeria in two thousand and seven to influence the elections. S. C. L. Also intervened during an election on the island of st vincent in the caribbean in a rather surprising way. Extraterrestrial elections helped get a candidate elected hiring people to put graffiti on the walls creating a problem with us in this country because their candidate had prepared an answer to the problem for them so they really created a problem just so they could then solve it. In short s. C. L. Sets up ultra targeted political influence strategies. And then suddenly what happened i think in around two thousand and twelve is they discovered data. And. They discovered it what you could do with data. To position themselves in this new market as c. E. O. Group would create a new subsidiary in the us called Cambridge Analytical. Except i wanted the idea is to hide behind another structure presenting themselves as an English Company newly arrived in the us Cambridge Analytic who will offer roughly the same services. In creating Cambridge Analytic s. C. L. Partnered with an american billionaire and not just any old one a mathematician specializing in data Robert Mercer the Vice President of the firm of his faithful stalwart steve bannon before he joined the trump campaign. From the outset the objective was clear nothing less than a revolution in the way election campaigns were conducted despite multiple interview requests Cambridge Analytical has always refused to speak with us so to understand exactly what they do we did something very simple we watched their ads. Political campaigns have changed theyre no longer about running the most t. V. Spots sending out the most direct mail or spending the most money theyre about to spend the smartest money in todays political world the campaigns are getting more expensive and elections are won by small but crucial numbers of votes putting the right message in front of the right person at the right moment is more important than ever this is where Cambridge Analytical in our revolutionary data modeling techniques can help. Put that way winning in an election seems easy the reality is more complicated and above all much murkier than Cambridge Analytical is willing to admit. Since coming to the u. S. The firm has embarked on an unprecedented operation to compile millions of pieces. Of data on American Voters without their knowledge. Heres how it works. Imagine that inside this car is mr x. Mike anyone he needs thousands of pieces of personal information on the internet without realizing his address his age his income his hobbies his purchases and also his religion and whether or not he owns a gun. Cambridge analytical bought this data from Credit Card Companies banks and Health Care Providers as well as from web giants like Facebook Google or twitter the practice is completely legal although none of these companies wants to talk about the data they sound in total Cambridge Analytical ended up with four to five thousand pieces of data for each of the two hundred thirty million adults living in the United States an enormous amount to see how they plan to use this information just watch the rest of the at traditional political campaigns use geography and demographics like age and gender to break down voters in the target groups this can work up to a point but it misses the important personal details that really drive voter behavior we combine geographic and demographic information with up to five thousand data points of National Political consumer and lifestyle behavior for every voter in the United States then we add a unique extra layer of data about personality decisionmaking and motivation. This creates an unparalleled rich and detailed view of voters in the issues they care about so you know exactly who to target with exactly what type of message we call this behavioral micro targeting our team of data scientists psychologists and Campaign Experts can show you which individual voters you need to win over in order to secure a victory. This is not Science Fiction the idea is. To test people psychologically and then to compare the results with the data to know what motivates people so as to influence their vote. Its a technique that only ready exists. One of its inventors teaches psychometrics at Stanford University california. His name is michelle kosinski. Metrics is basically a science of psychological measurements so basically have not is that instead of using question to ask you about your thoughts feelings experiences and past behavior such as are you a well organized person you can basically look at you with Digital Footprints and see what are you in fox i well organized person in real life. Tests to determine a persons psychological traits are called ocean tests. They measure personality based on five criteria openness conscientiousness extroversion agreeableness and eroticism. These tests operate with seemingly innocuous questionnaires that can be completed on line like these which superhero are you which wizard of oz character are you. What movie are you. In two thousand and eight mccullagh kosinski created the most famous of these tests on facebook called my personality a questionnaire allowing users to learn more about them seems. Really popular we had over six Million People to take the question there and a large fraction of these people donated their facebook Profile Information to us and from this information you can use. Algorithms to transform this information into a very detailed and. I curate intimate profiles as a result because in ski has the largest psychometric database in the world a database he can cross reference at will with the facebook profiles of the six Million People who responded enough data to know a lot about you. So basically you can turn your facebook likes into an actor its a prediction of your political views religious views your personality intelligence happiness sexual information or even what are your parents were divorced or not people often ask me how accurate those algorithms are predicting our intimate traits and i think that a great example comes from our recent study where we have compared the accuracy of this with accuracy of other people so what we did we took friends and family members of our participants and we asked these friends and family members to feel in personality question as in the name of our participants now we would provide algorithm with a set of facebook likes and have it do the same thing so based on your facebook likes trying to predict your personality. The results of this experiment are staggering by studying ten of your likes on facebook the algorithm knows you better than your colleagues do with one hundred likes it knows you better than your family does and with two hundred thirty likes it knows better than your partner. Computers that combine personal data and psychological tests to predict Human Behavior can Something Like this possibly work. The answer is yes. David carroll is a media professor at Parsons University in new york he battled for months to retrieve the data that Cambridge Analytical has on him and he was amazed at what he discovered. This is the excel spreadsheet that they provided it is broken into three tabs core data election returns and models the model on the one hand there were dozens of personal data items the firm gathered from the web registered now this is all the voter data here and this is what would normally be public in voter records but it its all accurate it has the day i registered to vote and it has figured out my birthday my address zip code down to you know all of my address its connected to census information its connected to all the different kinds of elections so u. S. Congressional state Senate State House state legislative then you have some Consumer Information here like the designated mark information and f. I. P. S. It is another kind of consumer voter code on the other hand was the psychometric interpretation of his personality thats how you can really zero in and target the model is my profile so you can see the different topics were ranked in order of importance my registered partisanship my own richard partisanship you clearly see who their client was it didnt measure me as a democrat or republican just a very unlikely republican and you can also see sort of the model itself is in the interest of sort of finding. Conservative voters especially conservative voters who might be registered as a democrat but are actually going to vote republican and so being able to go down to the zip code level and then reus sociate that to all other election districts allows you to geo target. So precisely and thats how youre going to move the needle in u. S. Elections i think if americans knew this was happening and happening internationally they would be outraged. Funded by robert moore. And headed by steve benen Cambridge Analytical offered its services to candidate donald trump. By late june twenty sixth seen the partnership was a done deal and on july twenty ninth the first payment was sent to the English Company you can find it in the campaign accounts in four payments between july and october twenty sixth teen Cambridge Analytical would receive nearly six Million Dollars. At the same time the political Action Committee for donald trump funded by Robert Mercer would also pay over five million to cambridge and only the cut. The english firm would receive eleven Million Dollars to work with the trump campaign. From aug twenty sixth the Robert Mercer election winning machine was running full speed ahead for trump all that was needed now was a strategy to put it to use in the american elections. Certainly be some camp which includes cables that will take us saw something in the american electorate that the Clinton Campaign and the media certainly did not see. Thanks to Cambridge Analytic is no knowledge of the electorate trumps advisors would devise a highly targeted strategy based on the particularities of the us electoral system in the United States the president is not elected directly by the people but by the Electoral College appointed in each of the fifty states. Not all the states have the same number of electors that makes some states more important than others. The trump camp suspected that they would not win the National Vote so its trying to just decided to concentrate on key swing states. Knowing that they would lose the National Popular vote. How do you win well you win by capturing the Electoral College how do you do that you try and figure out a way of where you can go to appeal to relatively small numbers of people he was going to places that a lot of people thought why is he doing that he shouldnt be doing that he should be going someplace someplace else we didnt there was a strategy of looking at places that had been thought of as consistently Democratic States states like michigan wisconsin and pennsylvania all three of which mr trump carried on in november. This was the strategy recommended by Cambridge Analytical rather than trying to convince millions of voters across the entire nation to vote for trump the campaign targeted tens of thousands that the firm knew through its analyses were on the fence. If you are somebody whos. Clever as any edge that you have of your competitors that you can leverage and make a massive difference and thats why you make loads of money and i think this idea of using data and the potential manipulation through a platform facebook is stacked in just enough to give you that edge that then you can exploit through things like faith and all these other techniques and tactics. Heres the technique set in motion by the scientists at Cambridge Analytical using the information they had on the electorate they defined thirty two types of personalities throughout the country they sent thousands of individual messages targeting those considered to be the most neurotic or worried and therefore susceptible to Donald Trumps messages. The Firm Identified many such voters in three states wisconsin michigan and pencil. These three states they believed could swing in favor of trump. In a press release Cambridge Analytic openly explained its strategy. When in the final weeks of the race the firms data scientists recalculated voter turnout and recalibrated their models to show how donald trump could win the g. O. P. Candidate revisited states like michigan and wisconsin. But there is one question that the english firm did not address how did they reach these targeted voters they did it without their knowledge using a little known facebook feature dark post. It is an idea is that a company or a Facebook Page can put out a message for a specific population than that this message is only visible to that group of it because it will not appear on their own page in an electoral context it means that candidates can target individuals on facebook with negative messages against the other candidate without journalists being aware because these messages will not appear publicly. Discuss a result of. The might have to pick. From so dark posts are very personalized messages visible only to the person for whom they are intended how does it work exactly. Lets go back to mr x. Thanks to Cambridge Analytical Trumps Campaign knows hes in favor of carrying firearms so it will create a message just for him. For example did you know that Hillary Clinton wants to take your gun away and hell receive this message in his Facebook News feed at a specific time according to his habits and digital fingerprints no one. But him will see the targeted at and it will disappear a few hours later. Theres no record of them youve got no way of investigating that you have no idea who saw what and this is democracy taking place in darkness its not democracy if you cant have a political debate have you out in the open know who is all going what and heres being told what and the idea of just sort of like sneakily targeting people with who know whats on their phones and on their computer as with anything i mean i think they could have been saying anything well never know because thats gone well its on facebook seven its this interesting thing but then not giving up. This digital onslaught focused on the last few weeks of the campaign on nov eighth twenty sixteen against all odds trump took wisconsin by twenty three thousand votes michigan by eleven thousand. And pennsylvania by forty three thousand in total seventy seven thousand votes in these three key states carried trump to victory even though he got three million votes fewer than Hillary Clinton in the country as a whole Cambridge Analytical strategy seems to have worked. We can see that approximately seventy thousand voters made the decision for everyone else because they were the ones in the districts that ended up deciding also where they think this highlights as well our Electoral College system is a vulnerability that if software and data allows the most important voters to be easily found it ends up diminishing the vote of everyone else effectively. Politics and democracy was the next industry to for we knew that technology interrupted newspapers and journalism and music and it was like actually here its been talking all this time about how great you know technology is it disrupting things like oh yeah were the next Disruptive Technology and i was actually this is tell you know its you disrupting politics and and its not just politics its democracy and donald trump its the great disruptor. Donald trump election was not a fair fight. Never has a candidate relied so much on misinformation and secret voter targeting Cambridge Analytical continues to pursue its political work after the United Kingdom and the u. S. Psychometric firm has begun to work with other clients for instance in africa its methods are always the same to micro target segments of the public and influence the vote without people knowing about it so following the example of what happened in the us the use of personal data could now disrupt politics in many other countries. Abbas law abiders Football Player summer. The colors of true love are black and yellow at least according to fans a person told me we visited them a man in the club and asked what makes him to inspire such emotion. The bugs d. W. Are you up to speed on the latest technology. Though. May be time for an upgrade this becoming part of the future. Become a cyborg i must say works so ive created a new sense the new organ and of design my perception of reality implants that make every day life easier. I use my you can see on a daily basis that optimize the human body and connect people more effectively. I hope to this would make a smirk ethical persons what would life be like as a cyborg because most folks who are at the end of the day these technologies can be used against us what do you think will happen society does this human race creed think its only the beginning of this sidelocks human machines starting february first on t w. This is d w news live from berlin that line for a deal here in germany we are expecting word at any moment tonight on new government negotiations political leaders have just a few more hours left to reach a deal on starting talks to form a new government well they meet the deadline and what happens if they fail well have the latest also coming out. Thousands rally in pakistan to protest against the rape and murder of an eight Year Old Girl demanding to know why