This is a scandal, and we should not blur lines here.
Facebook engages in surveillance capitalism. Cambridge Analytica engages in Orwellian practices of deliberate and targeted mass manipulation, actively deceiving users from the outset about it's intentions, and using lies as a means to an end.
From the Facebook report on the reason CA was suspended:
> Like all app developers, Kogan requested and gained access to information from people after they chose to download his app. His app, “thisisyourdigitallife,” offered a personality prediction, and billed itself on Facebook as “a research app used by psychologists.” [0]
Cambridge Analytica's CEO also espouses complete deceit as a strategy core strategy for using data to manipulate outcomes and advocates for using "behaviorally targeted language" to create an outcome. Like say you have a "private beach." If you really want to keep people out, why not say "sharks sighted" instead?
The scandals for me are two fold. First, we have a data repository (Facebook) that's powerful enough to assist in this type of weaponized manipulation that's entirely unprotected. Even if you think Facebook is some type of benevolent overlord that you trust with your data, it's a scandal that nothing has stopped any number of third-parties from doing what Cambridge Analytica did.
Second, we have a sitting president who actively made use of these "targeted information strategies" during his election in a blatantly unethical fashion. (For the record, so did Ted Cruz.) I for a long time laughed off the Antifa crowd as being an overreaction to Trump, but it's now blatantly clear to me that he deliberately used authoritarian tactics to win the election.
CA sound like a bunch of scumbags and I'm glad people are shining light on these kinds of activities. However, I'm not convinced what they did was really all that new or interesting. This is our modern world and it's terrifying. Call it marketing, propaganda, fake news or disinformation, we're being manipulated constantly by numerous unattributable actors.
The more interesting question to me is why is CA being called out for it? I'm sure there are numerous groups doing this now both privately and funded directly by states. That doesn't make it right, but it changes the question to; What's special about CA?
I've been reading a biography of Allen Dulles called the Devil's Chessboard. Dulles founded the CIA and setup the agency as a prime purveyor of disinformation campaigns. These kinds of Machiavellian tactics likely go back further than The Prince himself. The only thing new here is the level of amplification modern data technology provides, but this is not limited to CA.
> The more interesting question to me is why is CA being called out for it?
I mentioned this in another thread and got immediately downvoted, which I predicted would happen. I will add more context here to perhaps avoid that. What I said was:
"What changed is that an attack vector has been found to take out Cambridge Analytica. The Democrats are in full political warfare with the Trump regime, and this is just another salvo."
To be clear, I am not a Trump supporter, and identify as a far-left progressive, so I'm only stating what I see to be happening, and not attacking the Democrats. Secondly, I used to work at a gaming company that was the largest 3rd party integration with Facebook, and saw that this type of data leakage has been the norm and not the exception for at least 8 years.
Trump has been under a (mostly deserved) multi-pronged attack by various left-wing media, political, corporate, and voter organizations since he got into office. What is happening is that many, if not most, upwellings of public sentiment against his presidency are actually engineered through the very same sorts of PR firms as Cambridge Analytical, even though most people think the that it's organic. There is obviously organic disgust for Trump, but it's being fed and amplified and warped and guided using the same social media techniques that Cambridge Analytica uses, which is ironic.
I believe that many organizations are actively working in opposition to Trump using these kinds of psychographic tools, but I'm not really convinced that the upswellings of public sentiment are mostly, or even largely, the result of their efforts. Just reporting factual information about what his administration is doing works fairly well to alienate large parts of the nation which aren't part of his political base, and their opposition seems like a natural consequence of his administration's decision to govern from the far right. I think you should give people some credit for having good-faith opinions of their own.
There's just a ton more money on the right - the Koch network and GOP billionaire donors dwarf the spending by progressives.
So it's a lot easier for right-wing purchased media and social media and purchased think tanks (Cato/Koch) and foundations (Bradley, DeVos) and right-wing news outlets to spread propaganda. Because they have more money to spend.
So I think rightfully, people feel that the bigger threat is from the right. It's not a coincidence that CA was heavily funded by a GOP billionaire who wants to damage gov't services to cut his own taxes (Mercer is in an $8B dispute with the IRS).
I think the real problem is what Zeynep Tufeksi has been writing about: informed consent. Even if some tiny print says it's ok in a click-contract where they have a majority of the negotiating power, Facebook is releasing data on its uses without their informed consent. That's what we as a society need to re-evaluate.
> There's just a ton more money on the right - the Koch network and GOP billionaire donors dwarf the spending by progressives.
Clinton heavily outspent Trump in the last election.
"Clinton's unsuccessful campaign ($768 million in spending) outspent Trump's successful one ($398 million) by nearly 2 to 1. The Democratic National Committee and left-leaning outside groups also outspent their Republican counterparts by considerable margins."
Comparing the campaign spending does not capture the (vast) amounts of money spent by PACs. Indeed, one would expect Democrats to have more small-money, campaign donors, as opposed to large-dollar PAC donors.
I'm not satisfied with the off-hand dismissal of outside spending from the linked article. Since 2010, this has (arguably) been the more interesting area to scrutinize, and deserves more than a sentence.
I also recall the heavy domination of social media like Reddit by Clinton supporters. CNN was solidly in the Clinton advocacy camp, too. Despite all that, she still had to manipulate the DNC party rules to get the nomination. Trump was nominated despite the rather intense opposition from the GOP establishment.
The polls all predicted an easy coast to victory for Clinton. Even Trump on election night appeared shocked that he won, and seemed to have made no plans in case he won.
How do you reconcile that with the claim that the Trump supporters vastly outspent the Clinton supporters? Do you have any figures?
I tried not to discuss my political views in my comment - I'm sorry if you feel that I lent support to one candidate or the other.
> Despite all that, she still had to manipulate the DNC party rules to get the nomination
I don't think this is true. Irrespective of whether there was impropriety at any particular election, there was no way Clinton would have lost the nomination by the time that Sanders was in his stride. The superdelegates all but assured this.
Incidentally, the Sanders campaign went from decrying the presence of superdelegates to courting them - they may be an unreasonable mechanism for elections, but both groups tried to use them to their advantage.
> claim that the Trump supporters vastly outspent the Clinton supporters
I made no such claim. I suspect that it's true, but my point is that looking at campaign donations (and Reddit activity) highlights the activity of low-dollar donors.
Finally, to put into perspective the numbers from the article you cited, it seems that PACs spent 4 billion USD (across all races) in 2016[1] - around four times the spending of the two presidential campaigns.
It seems complicated to total super-PAC spending. Many websites state that there was more money supporting Clinton/Democrats, but this may ignore Republican PACs that do not declare a party preference[2].
And not just PACs - there is 'deep spending', on propaganda media: Breitbart, IJR, NY Post, WSJ, and on foundations: Jud Watch (has spent $500M in last decade to attack Bill and Hillary), ALEC, SPN, Cit U (that Supreme Court decision was planned by billionaires).
There is a huge incentive for billionaires to spend money on propaganda, because they need votes for their pro-wealthy policies, which almost no voter would support without propaganda.
Ironically, that was CNN, etc., giving Trump airtime in the mistaken belief that he'd hang himself on his own words. It wasn't due to media billionaires trying to get Trump elected.
That is the money spent in normal campaigning. If Trump spent money on CA, or if he received help from Putin's troll farms, do you really think those contributions would be accounted for in the official contributions/spending reports?
By the way, the same thing would be valid if H. Clinton used them. But for now we only have proof he did.
It's not just about money, but the appropriate application of money. Sure the Dems may have bought some likes and upvotes, while CA applied information warfare technique normally reserved for military activity.
From the Guardian:
>He had recently been exposed to a new discipline: “information operations”, which ranks alongside land, sea, air and space in the US military’s doctrine of the “five-dimensional battle space”.
This is a fatal vulnerability to the ideal of democracy. The only way to beat this game is to play it, and whoever can play it faster, smarter, and harder wins.
The only limitation is when these actions cross the line and cost you support by alienating your base, but I don't think that line exists for Trump.
Did the gaming company you work for represent themselves in inaccurate ways? This seems to be what CA did - fraudulent identities, putting out news that they knew was not truthful, and not identifying their ads and output as part of a political campaign.
That's one of the problems for me in all of this; a group that is lying, or perhaps breaking campaign disclosure laws, is acting wildly different than a gaming company.
They aren't just scumbags they are snake oil salesmen. No one in the political world thinks of them as anything but snake oil salesmen. Their company is about tricking people into buying their service and never delivering any results. Look at their track record. A lot of people will point to them and say "see, this is how Trump won the election" but that's just not even remotely close to the truth, and honestly just melds their marketing of snake oil with their shadiness. Many political people have paid them and subsequently dropped them because they didn't deliver. This was no different.
The abuse of Facebook's API/Graph is much less of a story about a secret genius agency (far from the truth) and more about how Facebook policies are lax on privacy of users. Facebook knew about this for a while, and sat on it. Facebook also acknowledge it was not a "breach" it was just exploiting things Facebook had already allowed through their shifting privacy policies and permissions.
Yes, you've put your finger on the core of it - the way Facebook compromises privacy. It's about informed consent on sharing data - we need companies to get informed consent.
Trump didn't win by a slim margin at all, he lost the popular vote, but only largely because of California. He had early calls in several states that Hillary was supposed to win. Hillary lost states she never stepped foot in, she was just not a strong candidate, she didn't campaign, she had little ground game and conceded states simply because they were a "firewall." Trump should have never been within spitting distance of any Democratic candidate, especially after Obama who was fairly popular among moderates.
Trump may have won on a slim margin, but he was supposed to lose on a huge one, by most predictions. If CA merely granted a net positive, then it likely paled in comparison to whatever else substantially affected results.
>>However, I'm not convinced what they did was really all that new or interesting.
You say that as someone who frequents HN. Collectively we are probably the top 0.2% of the population in terms of technology awareness and know-how, to the point where we probably easily recognize this type of propaganda (then again, maybe not!) and understand how it works.
The same cannot be said for the overwhelming majority of the population though. In fact, I'd go so far as to claim that the majority of Facebook users don't even understand how Facebook makes money (even though the answer is so obvious to us).
I was around on the internet back in the 90's and the stuff that came out in the Snowden revelations wasn't that suprising (Echelon was widely known back then but unconfirmed), We (meaning techies) have had the suspicion that they where doing this shit under the "just because they could, they would" approach.
Where Snowden was incredibly useful was that it confirmed it in a way that was hard to deny since it was straight from the horses mouth.
We might suspect that CA was doing shady shit but stuff like the C4 investigation confirms it and the confirmation is a valuable thing.
"We're smart enough to not fall for it but the proles stand no chance" doesn't pass the smell test as anecdotal evidence.
What they are doing is what marketing people have done for years, only we know from years of data and experience that these "profile and target" ad campaigns are barely above baseline for RoI.
The classic one is people who move house are more likely to go on to buy a new car in 12-24 months so they buy house sale data and target you with car info.
Supermarkets do tons of profiling based on your CC and purchase history.
None of this is to say that trying isn't scummy, but we shouldn't lose sight of the possibility that CA could be peddling snake oil.
Of course. But there's also the possibility that in this case the snake oil actually delivered an election result.
RoI is actually irrelevant. The two bigger issues are that this shouldn't be being attempted, and - more importantly in a genuine democracy - it shouldn't even be possible.
>>"We're smart enough to not fall for it but the proles stand no chance" doesn't pass the smell test as anecdotal evidence.
That's why I said "then again, maybe not".
>>What they are doing is what marketing people have done for years, only we know from years of data and experience that these "profile and target" ad campaigns are barely above baseline for RoI.
This is completely irrelevant in the current context, because for people with deep pockets, the ROI of a single project doesn't matter if it leads to huge gains further down the line.
Case in point: CA is owned by the Mercers, who just got a huge tax cut thanks to Trump.
> Call it marketing, propaganda, fake news or disinformation, we're being manipulated constantly by numerous unattributable actors.
“The democratic method is that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote.”
Joseph Schumpeter —Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1947)
I'm not sure whether the statement "Facebook engages in surveillance capitalism" is intended as a defense of Facebook in this context or something else.
The rest of your post makes it sound like the former, so I'll assume that's what you meant. In that case, I think you're giving Facebook far too much credit. What you describe in your post re: CA is accurate and scandalous, but I think it's naïve to think Facebook was not only aware and complicit, but rather that they actively encouraged and have essentially based their business on this exact system. Their decision to suspend CA is topical PR spin, an opportunity for them to be momentarily seen as enforcers amongst so many other negative headlines related to Facebook, data and voter manipulation.
Apps and services not being forthright about what they do with your data is (unfortunately) the status quo. Facebook is the broker for this data in this case, and you'd be a fool to allot them any trust with it given their history. The Cambridge Analytica "scandal" is the system working as intended, but now with unpopular consequences.
Who could have imagined that a suite of tools used to manipulate and target users through commercial advertising and spam could also be used for political means.
Okay so one thing I'm interested in is why is CA so evil, and is the role they played any different to what Obama used in his midterms campaign?
> The Obama 2012 campaign used data analytics and the experimental method to assemble a winning coalition vote by vote. In doing so, it overturned the long dominance of TV advertising in U.S. politics and created something new in the world: a national campaign run like a local ward election, where the interests of individual voters were known and addressed.
Cambridge Analytica got their data through a paid quiz that didn't fully disclose to the user what their friends and own data were going to be used for.
Some examples: they admit in interviews to lying to obtain votes. They propose entrapping their client's opponents by bringing girls to them, or by giving them an offer 'too good to be true'. They give the impression there isn't much they won't do.
They're well beyond that. Once upon a time, there was no "news feed." Then they made one, and people were not happy, but at least it was strictly chronological. Then they made it subject to an opaque and ever-changing "news feed algorithm," which makes it possible to control what you see. Those creepy studies a few years ago about emotional manipulation weren't an accident. Facebook is in the Skinner Box business now.
>but it's now blatantly clear to me that he deliberately used authoritarian tactics to win the election.
How on earth is such a baseless comment voted to the top of this thread? The truth is that this is a scandal, only because it involves Trump.
Pretty much all of what you've described is run-of-the-mill marketing, that has been used by all political parties for years. You also described some astroturfing, which is also widely used by all political parties (though perhaps some more than others).
How is any of that authoritarianism?
>favouring or enforcing strict obedience to authority at the expense of personal freedom.
I agree. It seems like the 360-degree camera work they've done in addition to all their work in VR seems more surveillance-related than people are willing to admit but whatever.
“practices of deliberate and targeted mass manipulation, actively deceiving users from the outset about it's intentions, and using lies as a means to an end”
Just because it's new technology doesn't make it bad. Hitler used PA speakers and radio advertisements to win the election. Politicians since then have all done the same. Then there was TV advertising, then Obama's targeted intelligent internet advertising, now this. Are you opposed to all political advertising? In that case, this is not the moment that it became bad. It started, well, with the beginning of human politics.
Of course, technology doesn't kill people. I never said it did. Right now I'm pointing fingers at people for what they're doing, not the underlying technology.
A wise man once said, "Drain the swamp." It's my civic duty to point out swampiness unabashedly and impartially.
Since CAs behavior, and by extension CAs customers, is inexcusable, swampy human behavior, I will stand against it. In the same way the DNCs actions against Bernie Sanders was inexcusable, the way the DNCs actions against Bernie Sanders was inexcusable, union corruption is inexcusable, corporate negligence is inexcusable, product misrepresentation is inexcusable, bullshit ICOs are inexcusable, authoritarian communism is inexcusable, the same way that history has been full of lying and deceitful politicians, priests, businessmen, lawyers, activists, messiahs I will stand against it.
The Trump election and the Brexit campaign are often named as the two most high profile successes of CA-backed campaigns. Since they both won by such small margins, one could wonder if it wasn't thst that gave them the final edge...
Is it really that different from the 2012 campaign?
"But the Obama team had a solution in place: a Facebook application that will transform the way campaigns are conducted in the future. For supporters, the app appeared to be just another way to digitally connect to the campaign....
That’s because the more than 1 million Obama backers who signed up for the app gave the campaign permission to look at their Facebook friend lists. In an instant, the campaign had a way to see the hidden young voters. Roughly 85% of those without a listed phone number could be found in the uploaded friend lists....in those final weeks of the campaign, the team blitzed the supporters who had signed up for the app with requests to share specific online content with specific friends simply by clicking a button."
This is completely different. Cambridge Analytica deliberately lied and deceived users about the intention of the application they created to harvest information about users:
> Like all app developers, Kogan requested and gained access to information from people after they chose to download his app. His app, “thisisyourdigitallife,” offered a personality prediction, and billed itself on Facebook as “a research app used by psychologists.” [0]
Cambridge Analytica is also in the business of using manipulation and psychological techniques to convince users of an outcome. And this isn't something I'm making up, the CEO of Cambridge Analytica peddles this as the potential of his platform: https://youtu.be/n8Dd5aVXLCc
The most damning aspect is his naked promotion of misinformation under the newspeak of "Behavioral Communication" where he suggests comparing the effectiveness of using "Private Beach" vs "Sharks Sighted" as a deterrent.[1]
He also continued to revel in his company's ability to manipulate after the election.[2]
The application is different, but not 'completely different". The use of friend lists harvested from an application to target ads was not known by users. Much of political campaigning, and advertising in general, is exactly as you describe, "using manipulation and psychological techniques to convince".
I would agree with you that the purpose of the application was deceptive, but don't most applications that use Facebook logins attempt to monetize this data?
This is political weaponization of data and information for the purpose of putting an individual in power. It's not me trying to sell you a pug plushie or get you to use my accounting software.
It's deliberately lying to seed fear, distrust, division, and hate between citizens. It's deliberate manipulation to create distrust of government institutions. It's the destruction of civil society and civil discourse for the purpose of winning an election.
This should not be tolerated of anyone, particularly of our own head of state.
My point was not that it was good. My point was that it was very similar, but still a little different in terms of the app, to what the Obama campaign, and to a lesser effective extent, the Romney campaign did in 2012.
My second point is that advertising, to include political advertising tends to be manipulative. So many ads are deceptive, so many play on fear. I do agree that populist messages around the world tend to be simplistic, but that is more of a criticism of political advertising in general than anything specific to this campaign.
I am not convinced this use of Facebook was more effective than a typical ad targeting operation. While the people involved may have had other aspects of the operation that were more sinister, the surprise at how Facebook and ad targeting works has been widely reported in the last election. The extreme response to these events seems to be more about who was elected than how.
> It's deliberately lying to seed fear, distrust, division, and hate between citizens. It's deliberate manipulation to create distrust of government institutions. It's the destruction of civil society and civil discourse for the purpose of winning an election.
The problem here, as is the root of almost all the problems we face in society isn't Cambridge Analytica. The problem is people lack basic critical thinking skills and the capacity to make good decisions.
> It's deliberate manipulation to create distrust of government institutions.
Nobody with any knowledge of history or good sense trusts any government institution.
>It's the destruction of civil society and civil discourse for the purpose of winning an election.
This would require having a civil society filled with civil discourse to start out with, which we didn't (and don't) have.
The simple, irrefutable truth is that governments and those in other centers of power have been using propaganda to control feeble minds and society at large since Woodrow Wilson founded the first official state-run propaganda machine (the CPI) over a hundred years ago.
Everyone is trying to find a "reason" that people rejected "traditional American institutions" and the establishment candidate (Hillary Clinton) in favor of a classless, boorish carnival barker in Donald Trump. They point to the evil Russians, or the dastardly villains at Cambridge Analytics, because they don't want to accept that "traditional American institutions" have been utter garbage for decades. They don't want to accept that many, many Americans are simply rejecting the status quo. Americans may not be smart or informed enough to know exactly what is wrong with "the system", but they know its horribly broken, it doesn't work in their interests, and many of them are reflexively rejecting that system. They aren't rejecting it because of the Russians, or because of some Twitter trolls, or some facebook ads - they are rejecting it because they have seen their standards of living plummet over the last few decades while those at the upper echelon of society have gotten fabulously wealthy. They are rejecting it because so many people are one illness or accident or lost job away from being homeless. They are rejecting it because they have seen (and continue to see) a race to the bottom for working people while the "elites" push for open borders and a massive influx of cheap labor that will make their lives even more difficult.
So keep on crying about the evil Trump and the dastardly Russians, and whatever other phantoms you invent to explain away the growing national discontent while keeping your head in the sand about the real problems we have.
I personally think the news on this is rather "noisy" right now (we'll see what emerges later). But from what I see of the Channel 4 expose (https://www.channel4.com/news/cambridge-analytica-revealed-t...), this story potentially involves far more than the United States election... and may actually involve flat out illegal activity.
Either way, I agree with you that the election of Donald Trump was more than just "the Russians". However, just because some of the elements were home-grown doesn't IMHO mean that we dismiss the degeneration of social media that has come about of late. Both from Facebook (and others, but they are the big offender)'s tendency to over-spy into your personal life (of which Cambridge Analytica is a symptom of this). And the extremely poor safeguards on API abuse on too many social media platforms (Russian and other Twitter political propaganda bots are but a symbol of the bot problem on Twitter and elsewhere in general).
I don't disagree with you about at all about the ground truth of American polity. (I have a lot of family that voted for Trump.) From my perspective, the election sent the right message but through a profoundly dangerous messenger.
For me, Russia and Cambridge Analytica are not scapegoats: they are other problems that need to be addressed which are not orthogonal to addressing the economic inequalities aggravated by the current system.
It worth remembering though, that this messenger was deliberately picked from the crowd of 16 (!) people during primaries. Voters spoke when they abandoned Kasich, Jeb and the rest. It's not like they had no choice. They had.
There was an interval of about 3 months where if Cruz, Rubio, and Kasich had agreed to draw straws and support the winner, Trump could have been stopped relatively easily. But instead they all assumed Trump could never win, and thus spent a lot of resources attacking each other and splitting the traditional Republican vote.
And that was due to two insane factors: first, that we use primaries rather than caucuses; second, that many of them define the winner as the one with the most votes.
On the first point, a representative democratic republic really shouldn't be choosing its candidates by popular vote. A caucus system empowers parties to moderate & modulate the voices of their voters. As horrifically corrupt as Clinton, Inc. were in the 2016 election, in general it's a good thing for party insiders to seek a more electable candidate.
On the second point, it simply makes no sense at all for a 40-30-30 split to go to the fellow with 40% of the vote. Instant runoff voting or a similar method would be far preferable to the current way we count votes.
What's most damning is that the money involved in our political process gave us those 16 candidates.
They were all establishment candidates who've historically played the game that's lead us to the discontent we face today. They never really cared about the people either. Trump at least talked the talk in ways from an economic perspective (in unfortunately misogynistic and racist terms...) But I still believed that maybe he actually gave a damn at some level about the working class and genuine creation of opportunity and happiness.
Now I'm thinking he just really wanted to win an election at any cost and has turned the executive branch into a complete swamp... I mean... if this was supposed to be a referendum on corporate hegemony and cronyism, what the hell are all these millionaires, billionaires, and family members doing in government?
You’ve thumbnailed elements of the problem, and left out the heart of the matter: The cabalistic forces of uber-rich conservatives (reactionaries) marshaled these propaganda tools to convince justifiably agreived voters to vote for a candidate who is letting them “run wild in the candy store.”
The interests and ideology of the Mercers and the Koch are diametrically opposed to any practical solution to the problem of growing inequality in the US.
They, most of the Republicans, practice a “take no prisoners” form of politics, in which they care little how either the ends or the means of their campaign affect lower class people.
The deceptive elements, and the use of sleazy propaganda, by these neo-reactionary King makers, is of a piece, whether they use modern data mining techniques or not.
If it wasn’t so sad, it would be hilarious. The joke is on all of us.
> The cabalistic forces of uber-rich conservatives (reactionaries) marshaled these propaganda tools to convince justifiably agreived voters to vote for a candidate
Most of the über rich conservatives were anti-Trump.
> are diametrically opposed to any practical solution to the problem of growing inequality in the US.
Trumps policies are incredibly practical and if implemented will go a long way towards solving inequality in the US.
Again, it's why most of the über rich conservatives are anti-Trump.
> Much of political campaigning, and advertising in general, is exactly as you describe, "using manipulation and psychological techniques to convince".
Please, just call it what it is: propaganda.
Whether you're selling a product, a service or an idea, you're still doing your best to manipulate your target audience. The techniques are the same.
And I use the term in a purely clinical sense: manipulation at scale, the subtler the better.
> This is completely different. Cambridge Analytica deliberately lied and deceived users about the intention of the application they created to harvest information about users:
Yes, but lots of apps are deceptive about what they do with data.
> Cambridge Analytica is also in the business of using manipulation and psychological techniques to convince users of an outcome. And this isn't something I'm making up, the CEO of Cambridge Analytica peddles this as the potential of his platform: https://youtu.be/n8Dd5aVXLCc
That's called advertising. Obama's campaign did the same thing (and so did every other modern political campaign).
> The most damning aspect is his naked promotion of misinformation under the newspeak of "Behavioral Communication" where he suggests comparing the effectiveness of using "Private Beach" vs "Sharks Sighted" as a deterrent.
That one is actually somewhat significant, although it's not clear that lying is exactly a novelty in politics.
A former Obama campaign official is claiming that Facebook knowingly allowed them to mine massive amounts of Facebook data — more than they would’ve allowed someone else to do — because they were supportive of the campaign.
In a Sunday tweet thread, Carol Davidsen, former director of integration and media analytics for Obama for America, said the 2012 campaign led Facebook to “suck out the whole social graph” and target potential voters. They would then use that data to do things like append their email lists.
When Facebook found out what they were doing, they were “surprised,” she said. But she also claimed they didn’t stop them once they found out:
"claiming that Facebook knowingly allowed them to mine massive amounts of Facebook data — more than they would’ve allowed someone else to do — because they were supportive of the campaign."
Right. That’s what this boils down to. Facebook was backing Hillary, and their candidate lost. Now they need a scapegoat to deflect the blame for failing to deliver.
Yes, because the Obama backers signed up for an app that was clearly affiliated with the Obama campaign. Were these backers assholes for knowingly wanting to spam their friends with Obama propaganda? Sure, because everyone hates spamming.
Cambridge Analytics is accused of using data that was harvested from a quiz app that was purportedly the creation of a Cambridge professor. I think that CA is being accused of something different than just spamming, but part of the overall problem is the subterfuge involved, which is generally a frowned upon thing in U.S. election regulations.
For example, it's not shady if Clinton buys up all the ad space during your favorite shows to spread her liberal indoctrination. It is problematic if those commercials run without a "This ad funded by the Hillary Clinton for President campaign" disclaimer.
It sounds like they are being alleged of lying and not identifying themselves as having been affiliated with either a PAC or a campaign. By doing that, that's breaking the law.
Additionally, the CEO has basically admitted - under hidden camera - that they are fine with blackmail and lying. Is blackmail and lying technically illegal? I'm not sure. But if you lie and blackmail as part of a political campaign, but do not let people know you are a political campaign, you have broken the law.
I haven’t been reading all the latest CA coverage, but from what I’ve seen from the Guardian’s and Observer’s latest deep dive, there’s an issue of violating UK data privacy laws, since CA is alleged to have been involved in Brexit related campaigns. In these stories, it’s not alleged that Trump’s campaign did anything illegal.
> Yes, because the Obama backers signed up for an app that was clearly affiliated with the Obama campaign
The Obama app was misleading - it was not at all clear about how the users Facebook data would be used - the key difference is at least they knew the app was political in nature and they likely supported Obama.
I would argue the difference there was that was an explicitly political app where from what I understand the app that leaked this data wasn't political in any way.
Either way it's great to see some light shined on FB, this is exactly the reason I don't use their services.
Facebook sure was political, though. From Davidsen:
> They came to office in the days following election recruiting & were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side.
That the app's purpose was disguised is definitely true. I would suggest that there a large number of applications that use Facebook logins are primarily designed to monetize the information gathered from the access that provides. I would also suggest that the users of the Obama campaign application were not aware that the purpose was to gather information on from their friend lists in order to support targeting advertisements at people they couldn't get phone numbers for.
The Cambridge Analytica users also signed up for the app, and also gave up their friend lists. You are correct though in that the nature of the application Cambridge Analytica used was more deceptive as it was not identified as having a political purpose.
Wow, the CEO of the company openly admitted to sending Ukranian hookers to opposition candidates' houses and hotel rooms and recording the interactions...
I read elsewhere that the UK is now planning to raid Cambridge Analytica office/servers in light of this report and that Facebook was also somehow in house with them?
Three key parts of Facebook’s model come into play: gathering data from people in order to profile them, designing systems that allow that data to be used to target people, then allowing third parties to use the data and those targeting systems for their own purposes
Back in Nov 2017, when the senate was questioning Facebook, Google, and Twitter about the Russian ads during the election...
Burr issued a warning to the sites, saying they are on the front lines of defense for the security of the country's future, urging the representatives: "Don't let nation states disrupt our future."
I sleep better knowing The Zuck is on the frontline keeping us safe. /s
Facebook treats people's volunteered information as goods-for trade. And business is booming!!
Politics aside, I wonder how this will affect the "Russian intervention in US and UK politics" search for "truth".
I am also expecting that UK authorities will be paying a visit to "Cambridge Analytica" and I hope we will find out the truth on what exactly they did for the UK Referendum, US Elections, and wherever else they "helped people decide".
Something tells me though that we won't ever be told the truth. E.g. let's say that there was no Russian interventios to US election and it was all Cambridge Analytica's doing. With Theresa May driving the attention away from the actual problems and into a "UK-Russia" debate about the death of a spy, it would NOT serve her political agenda of smoke-and-mirrors to clear Russia's name (just theorising - I don't take sides).
Ps: I remember a saying "live by the sword - die by the sword". How do people expect a spy (who has been uncovered) to die? In his bed on his 90s?
Let’s say that all the extensive evidence of these people doing this thing doesn’t exist... no thanks.
>How do people expect a spy.... to die?
Pretty sure the guy’s daughter and the British police officer incapacitated in hospital, by a military nerve agent with no cure, weren’t expecting to end up this way. I think you’ve been watching too many Bond movies.
Personally, I'm waiting on the indictments of the US citizens, including high-level federal employees/politicians that have done the much same thing for decades in other countries.
You're in luck. The company this article is talking about was part owned by an American, and had an American high-level federal employeee as Vice President and their CEO has just been captured on tape talking about having done much the same thing in several other countries. Maybe you'll get your wish.
I find it so hard to believe that everyone at Facebook is just shocked now to learn the realities of what they do. Their naivety and ignorance would have to be off the charts for it to be genuine.
Maybe it's a lot of young people fresh from college and they hear about the big five or whatever, and choose Facebook because they think of it as a social networking company and big, famous, and cool. Just an old guy's opinion - would not want to work there.
That explains the actions of (some of) Facebook's "rockstar" developers. That does not explain the actions of Facebook's data scientists, psychologists, product managers, and execs.
Occam's razor - They knew, and perhaps they cared, but they cared far more about their salary and climbing the industry ladder to say no or blow the whistle.
You cannot really expect people who have to work for a living and do work for a vertically structured corporation to be ethical and to go against their bosses. The problem is inherent to capitalism and it can make people do far worse things than this, like killing people or promoting and making wars.
Yes you can. Doing the right thing at the expense of a comfortable lifestyle is a problem every generation has faced. Washing one's hands of responsibility in such a way is a rather lazy argument.
The conscious and deliberate decision to put a system in place that manipulates and exploits people who have to work for a living and makes them do things with no questions asked is not created by employees themselves. But it is a decision nevertheless and it is unfair to expect employees, who are victims of such system, to do the right thing as they usually fear the consequences of the dissent. Which can literally mean not just losing a job, but life and death kind of choices, never being able to afford a medical care, lack of place to live, prison and so on.
For execs sure it's about managing the product, i.e. the users, especially in what we've seen in public statements from Zuckerberg and Sanders.
For the data scientists and psychologists, it's a chance to work on large scale data/populations and test all sort of theories and hypotheses on a large scale, probably unavailable anywhere else except Google and Amazon as postulated here.
I imagine it's a dream job in that respect, where one gets so caught up in the work the consequences don't matter to the worker until the 2016 US election (Trump got about 25% of the vote in the Bay Area) or Brexit referendum and now these investigative reports.
CA did not rely on facebook’s ad platform-at least not for the part of their business now under scrutiny. They used the app API to gain acess to individual users’ data, something not possible with their ad targeting platform.
Some regulation I'd like to see for social network ads, at least for political ads:
- Make all ads publicly viewable along with the targeting demographics. So everybody can see, for example, that a politician is pushing xenophobia to older people.
- Some kind of ad "fake news" score associated with a campaign. This one is difficult, but I could imagine a score based on a mixture of "fake news scoring providers" from across the ideological divide and news orgs.
The point is to give voters some transparency into what a politician is actually campaigning on.
Whenever someone says "simply do X" or "why not just do X", it indicates they don't understand the implications. If it was simple, they would have already done it. In this case, you want to ban billboards because they target drivers, and radio ads on the oldies station because they target old people, and TV ads because they target the demographic watching whatever show.
Remember when Google was proud of how its ads were targeted so you'd see actual useful things instead of endless shoes and cars? Internet ads really are much better now than in the late 90's.
I like showing the targeting demographics if it forced you to see the words that the advertiser used to find you. Part of the frustration with targetted ads is when you disagree with the targetting, when the algorithm thinks you're part of a group you don't want to be associated with.
An 'I'm not in this group' button would be powerful feedback mechanism.
I think Facebook may already have done the first one. That's probably not going to stop someone like Trump, though; his campaign staff mainly seem to see clever targetting techniques in terms of cost optimisation, as a way of not wasting money on showing people messages that are less likely to convince them. If people want to spread the other ads for free, that just saves them some money. It's not even clear that sleazy tricks with microtargeting are actually a winning strategy; people really don't like finding out they're being tricked and social media is pretty optimized for spreading that kind of discovery.
In addition to making all ads, along with their targeting criteria, bought by any one actor, we'd need something more still. The second level.
For all political ads, why not aggregate and publish the demographic's preferences too? "People who liked this ad also liked $these_things." That way you could see what kinds or subgroups the ads are trying to engage.
Facebook isn't unhappy because CA used user data to manipulate people. Facebook is unhappy because CA got the date through a third party, instead of paying for it directly.
The real test will be whether Facebook sues CA for a billion dollars over what it did, or just gives it a slap on the wrist.
I'm not much of a social network user. A few forums and a barely-used Google account are as close as I've been willing to go. But it seems to me that they're just crying out to be regulated as a utility, if they're going to be allowed as a for-profit company at all.
This whole thing is just a convenient excuse for people to explain how Trump got into office.
People uploaded their whole shitty lifes onto Facebook while everyone out there warns you to not do that. Yet people argued that they need a place to connect to their friends and all the other crap that FB-users come up with to explain this shitty move (much like cigarette-addicts). Also it is pretty clear how that data is sold. And how intelligence uses it. Snowden? Anyone?
Now that the masses need it they come up with this bullshit story. There have been companies like this before, Democratic and Republican (e.g. Targeted Victory helped Romney, Obama had his Team). The lemmings out there just used the past 4 years to fill Facebook with all the data they could eventually sell to Cambridge Analytica and their friends.
You are perhaps over-reacting. It's not a bullshit story, it's real. Yes, it is just more of the same but that doesn't make it any less real. We shouldn't allow one instance of evil to slide just because other instances have gotten away with it.
Anyway from a tech standpoint this might be exciting times. It could very well be the end of $FB. I doubt on its own it would be enough, but if someone has been working on a social network for the past few years now would be a good time to do a big publicity push? G+ are you listening!!
I am not overreacting. I don't care for Facebook or CA. But people knew this could happen.
> We shouldn't allow one instance of evil to slide just because other instances have gotten away with it.
What evil exactly? People gave their data to FB and decided not to listen to everyone warning them. It's in FB's ToS that they will sell your data and they did. What evil did happen here? People may didn't like what was done here but seriously they could have avoided it.
> G+ are you listening!!
So the next big headline will be G+ sold data to CA?
Facebook engages in surveillance capitalism. Cambridge Analytica engages in Orwellian practices of deliberate and targeted mass manipulation, actively deceiving users from the outset about it's intentions, and using lies as a means to an end.
From the Facebook report on the reason CA was suspended:
> Like all app developers, Kogan requested and gained access to information from people after they chose to download his app. His app, “thisisyourdigitallife,” offered a personality prediction, and billed itself on Facebook as “a research app used by psychologists.” [0]
Cambridge Analytica's CEO also espouses complete deceit as a strategy core strategy for using data to manipulate outcomes and advocates for using "behaviorally targeted language" to create an outcome. Like say you have a "private beach." If you really want to keep people out, why not say "sharks sighted" instead?
His example, not mine: https://imgur.com/a/q1zYP, https://youtu.be/n8Dd5aVXLCc, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bG5ps5KdDo
The scandals for me are two fold. First, we have a data repository (Facebook) that's powerful enough to assist in this type of weaponized manipulation that's entirely unprotected. Even if you think Facebook is some type of benevolent overlord that you trust with your data, it's a scandal that nothing has stopped any number of third-parties from doing what Cambridge Analytica did.
Second, we have a sitting president who actively made use of these "targeted information strategies" during his election in a blatantly unethical fashion. (For the record, so did Ted Cruz.) I for a long time laughed off the Antifa crowd as being an overreaction to Trump, but it's now blatantly clear to me that he deliberately used authoritarian tactics to win the election.