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Facebook Australia allowed advertisers to target teens’ emotional states
- devoply 9y agoZuckerberg was talking about all these programs to protect people at risk. I guess this is what he really meant. If you can find people at risk, then you can exploit them.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- sandstrom 9y agoHow do people working at FB feel about spending their time building a huge advertising engine, compared to working at, say, Tesla? Genuinely curious!
- randomdude10 9y agoPays the mortgage. And its better than working for Wall St, the NSA, Indian body shop or random chaotic startup.
- beagle3 9y agoDoes not pay as well as Wall Street. Not sure which one is less ethical, though. Also, both provide useful services but destroy a lot of the ecosystem they operate in.
- raverbashing 9y agoProbably less pressure and bureaucracy than Wall Street though
- user5994461 9y agoFinance and the internet giants both cover a wide range of pay and a wide range of bureaucracy. The top end of both domains pay rather well and has moderate bureaucracy.
- ocdtrekkie 9y agoDepends where you're at. Levandowski got paid $120 million, IIRC? Obviously an edge case, but it's hard to imagine an engineer in Wall Street making that much. (And he may never work again after this scandal runs through... but he also probably will never truly need to work again anyways.)
- deprave 9y agoPeople working at Facebook and Google lie to themselves that they're doing something important while working for a "cool" tech company. They're ignorant to the fact that these companies make their entire revenue from advertisements.
- sebleon 9y agoThey're not ignorant. They either don't care, or don't see source of revenue as the defining quality of their work.
- tendo6 9y agoI used to work at Intel and then Microsoft during the anti-trust years. We were totally oblivious to what mgmt did and were quite happy to accept the company line. It was after all delivered by nice respectable people and we were getting paid well. Also realized engineers are not revolutionaries. We like to work on things that a textbook talks about. The kind of problems these articles talk about most engineers have no idea how to solve. And it's in our nature to say so and shrink away from such problem. Look at Elon Musk today talking about how depressing it would be not to goto space. Poverty and War are depressing too but Engineers know how to build rockets better than they know how to address poverty and peace. What ends up happening is the space we shrink away from gets filled with characters who don't know what they are doing. They compensate by pandering to the public and buying time mostly for themselves to retire to a nice little island. Having said all that as an Engineer reaching his retirement I feel quite disappointed in the culture we have left behind for the next generation.
- dhcode 9y ago> Poverty and War are depressing too but Engineers know how to build rockets better than they know how to address poverty and peace. Colonizing Mars would require engineers to develop more than just rockets. At some point political-economic models of colonies would have to be developed, in order to determine whether colonies will be economically sustainable without subsidies from Earth. Asking people to imagine how these colonies should be organized, and how to measure whether they will be economically sustainable, requires them to consider economic and political ideas which could be later applied to the problems of poverty and political instability on Earth. One potential model that could work well for Mars in order to reduce political tensions between competing colonies and to establish a clear and efficient mechanism for financing territorial public services is cellular democracy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_democracy
- sebleon 9y agoFb employees likely see their work in a much more positive light, i.e. fostering community and strong social ties between billions of people.
- jacquesm 9y agoStrong social ties? Strong social ties is what you find in places that don't have internet.
- ceejayoz 9y agoYou don't have to be actually fostering strong social ties to believe you are.
- longesthunt 9y agoExactly. I sure haven't seen an improvement in community or social ties thanks to facebook. It is funny how Mark Zuckerberg seems to think he is doing something good for the world, at least according to his speeches.
- danso 9y agoI have. Facebook became big just around the time I graduated from college. I don't know how it was for people older than me, or the kids afterward, but Facebook let us make the kind of "weak" connections that became strong. I'm talking about high school classmates whom in past generations, would have only re-connected by staying in the same town, or at the 10th-year reunion. During FB's initial worldwide rollout, it was exciting to just "friend" everyone whom you had an acquaintance, because it wasn't yet taboo or uncool to do so. Some of my best friends today are people who I never talked to at all in high school, or even strongly disliked. When Facebook reconnected us all as post-college adults, I realized it was dumb to let past high school cliqueyness get in the way of a good friendship. Sure, ideally this gets worked out in heartfelt conversations in person. But the thing is that you don't prioritize those kinds of past relationships, because the friction of reconnecting is substantial. Facebook lowered that connection cost, while also making it easier to communicate with close friends.
- netrus 9y agoNot working for Facebook, but while their business is an advertising engine, let's not pretend they do not offer something else to their users. Social media has changed the way our society works, how families, politics and friendships work, and Facebook played a big part in that. Maybe that's all just a byproduct, but that does not mean it is not an substantial contribution to society. Tesla is cool and does an important job, but it's not like they are the only people moving us forward.
- icantdrive55 9y agoI understand how FB changed certain societies, but what worth did it give to Americans? I'm being completely honest. I signed up years ago looking for the one who didn't want me. The perfect person I pined for in my twenties. That's the only reason. I found her, and she had 439 friends. Fishing for compliments. Just someone I didn't recognize--on so many levels. Maybe, the worth was I finally stopped thinking about her? Other than that--I'm not sure what it provides. I'm older, so maybe that's what's wrong?
- bamboozled 9y agoJust because they've changed something, doesn't mean it's positive as your making out. Secondly, I've seen engineers running around with Facebook shirts on with the slogan "Connect the world" written on them, I would find it irritating if I couldn't see the irony in it, instead I just find it funny. There is a lot of cognitive bias happening with people working there. They wave big money carrots to keep staff and I feel for some people it's a way of validating their ability, so they stay no matter what impact the product is having on society, even if they don't agree with it inside.
- danieldk 9y agoSocial media has changed the way our society works, how families, politics and friendships work, and Facebook played a big part in that. The problem is that we do not know what we would have gotten instead. Before Facebook (et al.) became big, more of my regular friends/family were on Jabber/XMPP. People were creating blogs that were not locked in a silo (Wordpress and Blogger were quite usable for non-experts). Etc.
- MiddleEndian 9y agoHi, I work as an engineer at Google rather than Facebook, but I'll address this and some of the sub-comments (one of which mentioned Google). I am not speaking on behalf of Google. I actually work for a department that has non- advertising revenue, but regarding ads, a ton of companies, even many startups here on HN, generate revenue from ads. Regardless of revenue, many of Google's products are clearly very high quality. There's no social network lockin for gmail as a webmail client or Google maps as a map client but they're still perceived as the best. Google is truly flexible about hours and as long as I get my work done, communicate with the team and attend meetings I can effectively work any schedule I want (Microsoft actually had a similarly lax environment, one of my former team members there worked roughly noon-8), which for me varies day-to-day based on my non work schedule. This is great compared to a company I worked at where they one decreed that everyone solve bugs "after hours" (unsurprisingly many employees would just sit on the bugs and then mark them as fixed right after five). Free meals (along with microkitchens) are very convenient, and it is highly frowned upon to be in the office long enough for both breakfast and dinner. There's a gym right in the building and beds if I feel like taking a nap. I can't speak for the main campus in California, but my office is in an urban area so I am not isolated from my interests and I don't need to own a car. If I have an appointment for something at 3pm I won't be impeded assuming I don't have a meeting around then. Although many interesting projects are limited to the main campus, there's still a decent variety of work here as we have 1000+ employees in the office. The development tools+environment are not perfect but give me fewer problems than anywhere else I've worked. The main downside is that things can get bureaucratic at times which is the nature of giant organizations, although I never feel pressured by PMs. Sometimes the company's internal self promotion gets a bit silly as well but it's relatively easy to ignore. Tesla+SpaceX seem neat but to work there I'd have to move to the West Coast, which I'm not interested in. Most of the financial industry would require me to be at work by nine and/or require me to wear some sort of specific attire, along with a lower variety of work and likely more stress. Many startups offer the same perks in theory but have extremely long hours in practice and the unspoken expectation that you socialize almost exclusively within the startup. Basically I'm treated more like a human than I would be at many other companies, so when I'm looking to change what I work on, I'd rather look internally than externally.
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- longesthunt 9y agoI don't think Tesla is any better. It is a continued attempt to move the world in a direction it cannot go. There is no technological way out of the modern world's problems. Personally, I hate computers yet work everyday because I need money. There is no good feeling about what I do.
- type0 9y ago> a representative for Facebook Australia issued a formal and lengthy apology, saying in part, "We have opened an investigation to understand the process failure and improve our oversight. We will undertake disciplinary and other processes as appropriate." What did they mean by that, oversight by whom?
- snippyhollow 9y agohttps://newsroom.fb.com/news/h/comments-on-research-and-ad-targeting/ https://newsroom.fb.com/news/h/comments-on-research-and-ad-t...
- morghus 9y agoWe really have no way of knowing for which purpose or in which way any data that is collected about us is used by any company/person/entity.
- golergka 9y agoA person has a need; a company wants to satisfy it. Whether the offering is actually good for the person in long term is said persons' decision to make. Currently fashionable imperative that society has to force it's members to good choices and protect from bad ones is, in my, opinion, deeply immoral, and strips society's members from their ability to make meaningful choices. Now, this particular story includes teenagers, and I agree - the people who we are not yet take as adults _should_ have some protection and guidance. But as person closes to the 18 (or 21) years, this protection and guidance needs to gradually go away. We cannot pretend that a 16 year old and 9 year old are on the same responsibility and mental level.
- mintplant 9y ago> A person has a need; a company wants to satisfy it. Whether the offering is actually good for the person in long term is said persons' decision to make. A company doesn't "want" to satisfy anything; it needs to make money. We're talking mega-corporations with armies of psychologists and data scientists, pouring billions of dollars and collective man-centuries into learning to manipulate people to act in certain ways, irrespective of their own self-interest, on a massive scale... versus individual human beings with inherently limited time and access to information and, on average, predictable behavioral patterns. The most successful ad isn't the most helpful, informative, or even honest, it's the one which acts the most like a mind virus.
- golergka 9y agoStill, the critical thing here is _personal_choice_. Any kind of interaction is, in some respect, manipulation; you just used a lot of scare tactics right now to inflate the role of manipulation in this particular one. May be fair, may be not; having worked in an industry that usually gets a rep for being manipulative (free2play gamedev), I don't believe in the black magic power of the game designers and marketers anymore, but I don't have enough information about topic at hand. But regardless - we have to make a clear distinction between somewhere, because otherwise we would be on a slippery slope to forbid any kind of interaction where parties have conflicting interests at all. And in my opinion, the perfect way to make distinction is whether the person is making the decision out of a sane state of mind and voluntarily.
- eveningcoffee 9y agoIt is time to criminalize targeted advertising.
- forinti 9y agoEspecially advertising targeted at children. The way I see it, an advert is a business proposal and children do not have the autonomy to engage in a deal.
- vikeri 9y agoIt used to be illegal to direct TV ads at kids in Sweden but it's now been legalized to harmonize with the TV channels that were broadcasting from the UK. Even though it's legal the networks have refrained from doing it as far as I'm aware. Not sure about other mediums though.
- willyt 9y agoIANAL but my understanding is that wether an advert is a business proposal or not is based around the idea of an 'invitation to treat'[0] in contract law. It's pretty interesting reading about some of the cases where this concept developed. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invitation_to_treat https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invitation_to_treat
- dmerfield 9y agoNot it's not. It's time to stop supporting ad-based businesses. Install an adblocker. Install an adblocker on your friends' and family's computers.
- OliverJones 9y agoRepeat after me: "If I don't pay for the product I am the product." Teaching this to schoolkids is necessary for public mental health. I'm sure FB, like gouging pharmaceutical companies, employs risk managers who plan just how far they can go with this sort of thing and still get away with "issuing a formal and lengthy apology."
- krapp 9y agoYou're often still the product even when you pay for the product.
- mattparlane 9y agoThat's why they didn't say "Iff I don't pay for the product [...]"
- davnicwil 9y agoI'm experimenting with building a subscription based social network: https://postbelt.com https://postbelt.com - basically to entirely step over the 'you are the product' problem and offer the type of social network I actually want to exist. Check it out if it sounds interesting!
- ddorian43 9y agoCan't you just, like, make it free and just add very dumb ads, and few enough to be worth it ? Nobody (meaning mainstream people) will pay.
- 3131s 9y agoThe idea I had is to let users monetize their own data, as in by default there are no ads or tracking, but if you choose you can turn them on and get paid to do so (and the site takes a percentage of that money). It could easily grow into a platform for users to monetize and sell other types of content that they create too, like photos, videos, stories, etc.
- psyc 9y agoA bit like hitting the broad side of barn, though, isn't it? I've been seeing a ton of backlash against Facebook lately. I know there's always backlash against Facebook, but I've been seeing a lot more of it. Especially devs calling out other devs for working there.
- masterponomo 9y agoIf you watch comment sections where shareholders hang out, such as Yahoo Business site for FB, you see every negative allegation against FB ever published, every single day. In comments sections, it is typically the shorts railing against any uptick in share price. And while the main Yahoo Business site does publish both pro and con articles year-round, there does always seem to be one major "new" negative allegation right at earnings time (Q1 report is in two days), like clockwork. Often, the "new" thing is not new at all. The major themes they like to repackage as news at earnings time are 1) the young are fleeing FB; 2) FB's revenue growth will slow as user growth slows; and 3) FB uses their data to sell ads. It's really funny to see these things touted as new revelations, when FB openly discusses all of these and more when discussing risk factors in their own financial reporting.
- mavdi 9y agoLive stream killing an elderly man, or hanging of your 2 year old kid, or want to target the most volunrable in our society? Facebook. They keep overstepping the mark and they keep getting away with it.
- delegate 9y agohttp://thoughtmaybe.com/facebook-cracking-the-code/ http://thoughtmaybe.com/facebook-cracking-the-code/ Watched it last night and I think it's very relevant to this discussion. Now I don't think its Facebook, the company that has these scary social side effects, it is the concept of the 'social network' itself that's dangerous. Facebook is just very good at promoting and monetizing it (and of course it's also a technological marvel). Give everyone a voice ? Nice idea in theory, but one bad apple ... what about a million bad apples ?
- i_feel_great 9y agoAll kids feel worthless at some time. This is evil.
- some1else 9y agoI hoped they did it to prove themselves that advertisers will use such capabilities to take advantage of innocent filterless future consumers, but that would require a diametrically inverse interpretation of results. Having worked in advertising, I feel we should have heavy-handed restrictions with regard to advertising to minors. Given the potential for abuse, I would recommend enforcing equal restrictions on targeting based on the current emotional state. Irrational decisions are the motor of many successful marketing campaigns (things like anchor pricing are the norm). Letting advertisers sophisticate the message according to the customers emotional state, is like giving sudo privilege to a bitlocker. The metrics on their dashboards do not include morals. We have to stay on top of this.
- rdxm 9y agoTotally unsurprising. I mean, people don't actually think FB is a positive force in the world do they? The science is clear on human's capacity for meaningful/real realtionships (it's a pretty small number), the anecdotal evidence is also fairly clear on FB's real contributions to society (it's not positive). FB really is the poster child for just how willing we are as a species to roll around in our own feces. It's most definetly a sad commentary on where we are at in general as a society and the contribution it made to the last electoral shitshow is just icing on the cake. Hell, it's also sigularly unsurprising that Zuck is headed to politics, in fact that morass of crap is just about a perfect fit for him.
- lepo-tazz 9y agoThis guy has access to everyone's conversation and anyone he wants to talk to at his finger tips and he has gone off on a "listening tour". Says all there needs to be said, about his ability to have a real conversation on his own platform.
- loceng 9y agoZuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard Zuck: Just ask. Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS [Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one? Zuck: People just submitted it. Zuck: I don't know why. Zuck: They "trust me" Zuck: Dumb fucks. - http://www.businessinsider.com/well-these-new-zuckerberg-ims-wont-help-facebooks-privacy-problems-2010-5 http://www.businessinsider.com/well-these-new-zuckerberg-ims... Has he ever acknowledged saying this publicly - or ever spoke about how he fucked over the twin brothers? I want a leader who's transparent, open - honest.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- jpalomaki 9y agoWhat should we think about the future, where nobody is making the decision to target teens' with specific emotional state, but instead the machine makes the decision? I see this as inevitable - probably something that is already happening to some extend. Let's assume you are advertising something where the target action takes place online. Something where you can establish a direct connection between the events "Person A sees ad" and "Person A buys product". Assuming the volumes are high enough, why would you put human in charge for targeting the ads? Why not just put the machines to work, to analyse the thousands weak signals your platform is collecting about each individual and then determine which ads are most likely to result in purchase. If the sale takes place through your own platform you have pretty nice feedback loop there. The machine of course does not think "hey, this person is depressed, let's sell him some Happy Pills" but the end result is likely the same. Machine learns some patterns in behavior which indicate the person is likely to be interested in Happy Pills. Is this good or bad?
- webkike 9y agoI can't say whether it's good or bad but I definitely can say I don't want to live in a world like that.
- linkregister 9y agoFrom the article, it just looks like a misunderstanding; this was at worst a proposal and most likely the weird/inappropriate "Facebook Research" that gets occasionally reported. It's easy to find out what controls are available to advertisers: just open up an ad campaign on Facebook [1]. 1. https://www.facebook.com/business/news/ads-manager-app https://www.facebook.com/business/news/ads-manager-app
- ramblenode 9y agoThe original headline was potentially misleading. > Update, 5/1 12:12 p.m.: Facebook has issued a statement disputing The Australian's report. "The premise of the article is misleading," the company wrote in its authorless statement. "Facebook does not offer tools to target people based on their emotional state. The analysis done by an Australian researcher was intended to help marketers understand how people express themselves on Facebook. It was never used to target ads and was based on data that was anonymous and aggregated."
- kafkaesq 9y agoGiven the level of detail in the Australian article (or what we can see quoted from it; the original seems to be not easily available at the moment), and FB's past behavior[2], I'm not sure I believe their denial at this stage, quite frankly. We'll know for sure when the original presentation that the article refers to inevitably leeks out in full. [1] According to the Australian, the data available to advertisers includes a young user’s relationship status, location, number of friends on the platform and how often they access the site on mobile or desktop. The newspaper reported that Facebook also has information on users who are discussing “looking good and body confidence” and “working out & losing weight”. [2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/29/facebook-users-emotions-news-feeds https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/29/facebook-...
- danderino 9y ago>The newspaper reported that Facebook also has information on users who are discussing “looking good and body confidence” and “working out & losing weight” What's wrong with that exactly? Is that any different than an option to advertise to people who are talking about buying cars?
- kafkaesq 9y agoBecause it's creepy. More specifically: it explicitly attempts to address a particular mental and psychological states (in particular, states associated with anxiety and the need for approval from others) rather than an economic activity (like "needs a car"). Yes, car ads (and all kind of ads) have implicitly been designed to work off feelings of anxiety (and the need to fit i), since the beginning of time. But it's the all-out brazenness off this effort (combined with the fact that, again, it was explicitly designed to target teenagers) that pushes it over the edge, in my view -- and well into the terrain of Creepy.
- wdr1 9y agoThe title ("Facebook Australia allowed advertisers to target teens’ emotional states") is fundamentally incorrect. Update, 5/1 12:12 p.m.: "Facebook does not offer tools to target people based on their emotional state."
- nobodyorother 9y agoI don't think it's fair to say that marketers ruin everything... Marketers devalue everything.
- a3n 9y agoSo, facebook was paid for data on users' poor emotional state. And facebook experimented with adjusting news feeds to make people feel better or worse. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=facebook+news+feed+experiment&t=lm&ia=news https://duckduckgo.com/?q=facebook+news+feed+experiment&t=lm... I wonder how much it would cost to have facebook make people feel bad, and then serve them ads to which they would be more susceptible because of their low state.
- artursapek 9y agoI'm sure there is already a price for that
- reitanqild 9y agoAnd here is one reason why I'm busy trying to get people to abandon Whatsapp. I don't want to support this company. I don't want them to have tons of metadata including a list of everyone I talk to. I definitely don't want them to track my kids. So I hold my nose and say "try Telegram".
- Shinkirou 9y agoSay 'try signal' instead. Good crypto is never be overrated.
- reitanqild 9y agoGood crypto is never be overrated. Agree. But for the rest of us: does Signal have group conversations and multi-device support? I think if we are going to replace Whatsapp we need to provide an alternative that matches the features people use and feels better. Telegram does all that and more. Amd BTW if you can get people to use Signal then that is great too! (Oh the irony of me trying to get people off WhatsApp, - I was an enthusiastic user until they got bought.)
- i336_ 9y agoNot sure why nobody has tried cache:-loading the news article. It gets around the paywall just fine. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:dRqAloIGKuoJ:www.theaustralian.com.au/business/media/digital/facebook-targets-insecure-young-people-to-sell-ads/news-story/a89949ad016eee7d7a61c3c30c909fa6 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:dRqAloI... http://archive.is/paAKu http://archive.is/paAKu
- thr0waway1239 9y agoTo all those who supposedly "show they care" by "keeping in touch" with "folks from around the world" (as a reason for explaining why FB provides an important service). Whatever FB's lofty mission statement is on the inside, the actual service Facebook is providing is estrangement, as mentioned in a comment below. Here is a very small way you can show you care, which will be actually productive and hopefully makes you rethink that statement. There is someone in your life who is technologically inept. Help them with their technology related problems for an hour a week. Pull your hair out in frustration at your complete failures (which will definitely happen initially). Persist with it until they learn something. Continue for a while until you realize they have mastered it so well that they are now teaching you something even you didn't know. In about 6 months, ask yourself if you would rather show that you care about others by actually helping someone out, or if the better way is to press the Like button like Pavlovian dogs. And then come and comment on how useful you think FB is at that point. I am not saying it is absolutely useless. I am just saying that FB's engagement would dwindle down in proportion to its actual importance. The funny thing is, anyone with a modicum of common sense can see that FB has been designed to be like an entertaining movie, designed to appeal to our most base instincts (the well studied combination of narcissism and voyeurism). You will not watch such movies 24 x 7 x 365, would you?
- return0 9y agoI don't understand, this has been a feature since forever. You can tell the emotional state of people by the music they listen to.