22 ms·

I'm an ex-Facebook exec: don't believe what they tell you about ads

123 points by agd 9y ago

agd 9y ago
"And knowing the Facebook sales playbook, I cannot imagine the company would have concocted such a pitch about teenage emotions without the final hook: “and this is how you execute this on the Facebook ads platform”. Why else would they be making the pitch? The question is not whether this can be done. It is whether Facebook should apply a moral filter to these decisions. Let’s assume Facebook does target ads at depressed teens. My reaction? So what. Sometimes data behaves unethically." This is the key quote for me. It's clear that if this data can be abused, it will be.
- hkon 9y ago
  Don't worry, it's only the data that is unethical.
- the_common_man 9y ago
  Sorry, but did you learn anything new after reading that quote? Seems like a blinding flash of the obvious...
- FussyZeus 9y ago
  > This is the key quote for me. It's clear that if this data can be abused, it will be. And it's so fucking sad that this is true. This kind of technology could enable Facebook and entities like it to predict when people are feeling depressed, hopeless and suicidal and instead of doing something like presenting a simple message like "Hey are you alright? Do you need some help?" nope, their thought is "this person is RIPE for some well placed marketing." I get that this guy is likely a product of his industry and he didn't set out from childhood to prey on people's emotions to sell them shit they don't need, at least, in all likelihood. That said I certainly hope there is a hell if for no other reason than this man and all like him really, really belong there.
ThrustVectoring 9y ago
Advertisers and Facebook don't have to try to target emotionally troubled teens in order to target emotionally troubled teens. All they have to do is have an advertisement that works well on emotionally troubled teens, have sufficiently correlated targeting tools, and run an optimization algorithm like gradient descent. To take a slightly different example: it doesn't matter if Facebook doesn't offer racial targeting if a payday loan company runs ads segmented by zip code and picks the best performing areas that happen to be predominantly black. EDIT: This should teach me to read the entire article first, since I made up an example that was literally used in the article. My bad.
- fnbr 9y ago
  The main problems they're talking about are PR problems, not ethical problems (if you assume that advertising itself is ethical, which I don't necessarily think is true). Specific types of targeting are then bad because of the optics, not because of their efficacy. Put another way, there's no ethical problem with recommending that people who follow Jay-Z should follow Obama, but there's a PR problem there.
  - eridius 9y ago
    > Put another way, there's no ethical problem with recommending that people who follow Jay-Z should follow Obama, but there's a PR problem there. I agree with that specific statement, but I would say there is an ethical problem with the similar situation of recommending payday loans to poor people. The difference is recommending Obama to Jay-Z followers isn't harmful to those followers, but recommending payday loans to poor people is.
    - meric 9y ago
      And that difference is temporal - in the same way Obama as a person can change and payday loan interest rates and regulations can fluctuate
    - ThrustVectoring 9y ago
      Targeting seems, to me, to be ethics-neutral in terms of first-order effects. It amplifies the effectiveness of both positive-value and negative-value advertising. Like, roads can be used both for transporting troops to invade a country as well as to transporting food to relieve a famine, and better roads improve the effectiveness of both. Like, advertising payday loans to poor people may be an acceptable cost of advertising if it gets out valuable mesothelioma information as well.
metastart 9y ago
"The fact that Facebook could easily throw the election by selectively showing a Get Out the Vote reminder in certain counties of a swing state, for example, was a running joke." Woah. They're asking to be regulated.
- NumberCruncher 9y ago
  Exactly, like newspapers and TV channels. Oh, they are already in good hands...
  - TillE 9y ago
    Broadcast media can't microtarget like that. At best they can cultivate a certain audience, but it's an extremely crude tool in comparison.
    - danso 9y ago
      Sure, but broadcast media is regulated by the FEC and FCC: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/20/AR2007112001507_pf.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11... https://www.propublica.org/getinvolved/item/if-tv-stations-wont-post-their-data-on-political-ads-we-will https://www.propublica.org/getinvolved/item/if-tv-stations-w... https://sunlightfoundation.com/2015/11/10/everything-you-need-to-know-about-political-ads/ https://sunlightfoundation.com/2015/11/10/everything-you-nee...
- jasonmp85 9y ago
  Not a very good joke. I'd have considered it a moral imperative to act on that impulse.
  - keebEz 9y ago
    Maybe they did?
    - guelo 9y ago
kristianc 9y ago
The problem with any platform like Facebook (though Facebook happens to be have the richest seam of user data, at scale and across devices) is that the segment with the highest clickthrough rate will inevitably be one which draws on shady factors. It will be the segment deliberately concocted to find that most vulnerable / subsceptible to buy. If you're looking to ship garbage self help books, you're going to target people who like garbage self help book writers. Rinse and repeat for preppers etc. To prevent this you essentially either have to ask marketers to hobble their own search terms even when they know there is likely a higher CTR out there (like payday loan companies willingly deciding not to advertise on daytime TV), or asking Facebook to hobble its own platform. Until there is some kind of regulation or FTC pushback I can't see the situation improving.
delphinius81 9y ago
Misleading title - since when did FB product managers become executives? Though completely believe FB will use their data in any way possible to make money, ethical or not.
- antongm 9y ago
  It's not a title, it's a headline, and it's written by the editors. This is how newspapers work. Media title inflation is standard. Every 'senior' this and that you've ever read about is also bullshit, in case you hadn't noticed.
- AdamSC1 9y ago
  To be fair "Executive" means "A person or group having administrative or managerial authority in an organization." Seniority of the product manager role depends on a number of factors. Sure, most FB product managers are not considered execs these days, but he was their first Product Manager responsible for ad targeting and then their advertising exchange all the way back in 2011. That probably brought with it a team, a good salary and a lot of sway. Unlike the cookie-cutter 9-5 corporations of yesteryear, startups have been pretty loose with standard job naming convention. You can be fresh out of a BA and get called "CMO" or you can be a 20-year veteran leading a team making executive decisions and just be a "Product Specialist." The responsibilities and compensation define executives far more than titles.
rrdharan 9y ago
So wait, remind me why we should believe Antonio Garcia Martinez? The guy trumpeted the fact that he lied to his investors as a point of pride: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5b4tqe/i_am_antonio_garcia_martinez_a_tech_entrepreneur/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5b4tqe/i_am_antonio_g... "Trust me, they're lying, I know because I'm a liar" doesn't seem terribly convincing.
- mercer 9y ago
  Why not? I'm inclined to trust the security advice of a 'reformed' criminal hacker, assuming this individual has no clear reason to be lying to me.
Mendenhall 9y ago
Ahh the old "so what" argument. So what if I can target recovering alchoholics with alchohol ads? So what if I target gambling addicts with my gambling platform? So what?
- lucasmullens 9y ago
  There are alcohol and gambling ads on Facebook? Those two in particular often aren't allowed on ad networks.
  - Mendenhall 9y ago
    That defeats his whole "so what" argument, Because if those 2 matter others do as well.
  - FridgeSeal 9y ago
    I have definitely, definitely seen ads for gambling and sports betting on Facebook.
  - mschuster91 9y ago
    > There are alcohol and gambling ads on Facebook? Those two in particular often aren't allowed on ad networks. Gambling? Loads of them, and for what it's worth Farmville and friends IIRC even invented their own virtual currency. Alcohol I haven't seen yet but every major beer and spirits brand has its own Facebook page. Ad networks usually forbid alcohol due to underage-drinking-ad-laws (which FB can avoid due to their real-name policy and them requiring you lots of times to submit a government ID) and gambling due to a host of even more country-specific laws (which FB can certainly spend a lot of lawyer money on to safely navigate them, given that gambling ads usually pay huge sums for well working spots). And I believe that CC processors for ad networks don't like both due to the same issue; with a giant like Facebook, no CC issuer can afford to not deal with them, so they trust FB to not get them in legal trouble.
- antongm 9y ago
  Those ads are actually prohibited, or at least were when I was there. :)
moomin 9y ago
Wow, I can't decide if this guy is more morally or intellectually bankrupt. Seriously, "sometimes data behaves unethically"? Data doesn't do anything. Not even analysis or deep learning does anything. People (or programs written by people) execute decisions on the basis of data. It's still the people being unethical. Big data isn't some magic wand that absolves you of moral responsibility, but it's extremely interesting that at least one marketer at Facebook seems to believe it does. And that's just one of the many things that manage to be simultaneously offensive and just plain incorrect in what is frankly, a pretty short article.
- hammock 9y ago
  You ought to continue to read past that. Because you missed his point. He goes on to basically question "ethics" entirely: >What did this tool start spitting out? Every ethnic stereotype you can imagine....People who liked Jay Z were more likely to like Obama – it was one of the statistical truths Facebook couldn’t be seen espousing. I disagreed. Jay Z is a millionaire music tycoon, so what if we associate him with the president? In our current world, there’s a long list of Truths That Cannot Be Stated Publicly, even though there’s plenty of data suggesting their correctness, and this was one of them. African Americans living in postal codes with depressed incomes likely do respond disproportionately to ads for usurious “payday” loans. Hispanics between the ages of 18 and 25 probably do engage with ads singing the charms and advantages of military service. Why should those examples of targeting be viewed as any less ethical than, say, ads selling $100 Lululemon yoga pants targeting thirtysomething women in affluent postal codes like San Francisco’s Marina district?
  - jolux 9y ago
    That's not questioning, that's rejecting wholesale without a proper argument as to why. And frankly I don't at all see the ethical analogy between luxury athleisure and payday loans, and it seems to me you'd have to be pretty damn fucking self-deluded to think they're remotely comparable.
    - devoply 9y ago
lucasmullens 9y ago
>Why should those examples of targeting be viewed as any less ethical than, say, ads selling $100 Lululemon yoga pants targeting thirtysomething women in affluent postal codes like San Francisco’s Marina district? Because one can cause poverty and the other doesn't.
- a3n 9y ago
  Which one?
- ferongr 9y ago
  How does an ad cause poverty?
  - lucasmullens 9y ago
    If it encourages someone to do something that will cause them to go into poverty, such as taking a payday loan they can't afford.
    - ferongr 9y ago
      I don't think it's actually responsible for the problem then. The choice rests entirely with that person.
    - prostoalex 9y ago
      What about an ad for a car, a college, a credit card, a diamond or a vacation cruise?
    - kk_cz 9y ago
      the problem lies with payday loan itself not with the advertisement, though. If we know that payday loans are harmful for society, why not to outlaw them right away, rather than dance around it being advertised.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
el_memorioso 9y ago
"Sometimes data behaves unethically." No, data doesn't behave at all. This is quite a cynical deflection of responsibility for ethically questionable actions taken by people.
- erpellan 9y ago
  Ethics is a human construct. So data could very well show that unethical (by some definition) behaviour is profitable. I think this is the point being made: the data shows, beyond statistical doubt, that payday loan ads aimed at a certain demographic have better conversion, ergo profit. The data also shows, beyond statistical doubt, that [current fashionable brand] yoga pant ads aimed at a certain demographic have better conversion, ergo profit. The data doesn't care. If you are an ad-funded company (as both facebook and google are), you can't afford to ignore the data, it's your differentiator. I'm not saying I agree with it, I am saying that ethics is an opinion, data is fact. I long for a time when we as a species evolve beyond being so predictably influenced by propaganda.
milesf 9y ago
"We are not Facebook's customer. We are their product." I have stated that fact so many times to so many people, and yet most people don't care. They continue to use Facebook. It's almost as if people are addicted to Facebook.
- kakarot 9y ago
  Well, they are. Addicted to immediate and frequent social validation. Telling people heroin is bad for them isn't going to make them quit if they are addicted to it. They have to witness or experience the hardships that come from such an addiction. Telling people Facebook is bad for them, telling them why it is bad for them, isn't enough. We have to show them indisputable evidence of social media having an extreme negative impact on their lives. We have to pull them away long enough for their brains to stop craving the dopamine release they associate with browsing their feeds and narcissistically posting several times a day. Most importantly, we have to care and understand what they are going through. Being angry at them or thinking they are stupid for not knowing better is alienating and divisive behavior. They will rush to Facebook to alleviate their negative emotional response to what you are telling them. Even if they think that you're right.
- nix0n 9y ago
  We're both the customer and the product. I'm the product to advertisers, but also to my friends. Similarly I am the customer to the products that are my friends.
  - qbrass 9y ago
    The product is bait. You're keeping your friends there, they're keeping you there, and now the group of you brings in the bigger fish.
- Wissmania 9y ago
  This is just semantics. You get to use Facebook in exchange for having the info you share there used for advertising, and having those ads show up on the side of the page. Who cares what you call it.
- 9y ago
apozem 9y ago
> Let’s assume Facebook does target ads at depressed teens. My reaction? So what. Sometimes data behaves unethically. Stop right there. Data has no behavior. You behave unethically. Data informs a decision, but you are making the decision. Take responsibility.
- virtuabhi 9y ago
  In your statement - "you are making the decision", "you" can be replaced by algorithms. Algorithms are taking decisions (e.g. giving loans, showing ads) based on data. Algorithms can have bias. Data can have bias.
- andrewflnr 9y ago
  I think you and he have sort of the same point: data has no ethical orientation. If you unpacked that sentence, he would probably clarify it to "data behaves in ways that, if there was a human making that call, would be unethical". What makes the situation interesting is that there's not necessarily a person that makes the decision to do potentially damaging ad targeting: if you want to prevent it, you probably have to specifically prevent it in each case. Is Facebook responsible for preventing every single unethical ad targeting? Given the unfeasibility of that, does this problem mean we should call it quits on targeted ads entirely?
- pjmorris 9y ago
  Exactly. There is a long [0], long [1] history of people being held accountable for problems enabled by their carelessness. [0] Hammurabi's Code, 229. If a builder build a house for some one, and does not construct it properly, and the house which he built fall in and kill its owner, then that builder shall be put to death. [1] Exodus 21:29 If, however, the bull has had the habit of goring and the owner has been warned but has not kept it penned up and it kills a man or woman, the bull is to be stoned and its owner also is to be put to death
hackuser 9y ago
I don't agree with his claims that the following are among "a long list of Truths That Cannot Be Stated Publicly". I don't think anyone would care; I care very much about racism and can't imagine anyone I know objecting to these. * "people who liked Jay Z were more likely to like Obama" * "Hispanics between the ages of 18 and 25 probably do engage with ads singing the charms and advantages of military service." (I'm skipping the other example because it's an issue of economic exploitation, not ethnicity.)
- empath75 9y ago
  Yeah, basically if you have any kind of oppressed category of people, you can take advantage of them by exploiting their vulnerabilities (lack of education, lack of access to credit, etc). If you aren't careful with how you use your algorithms, you can come up with all kinds of systems that reinforce systemic racism.
  - hackuser 9y ago
    A good point that I overlooked; thanks.
- antongm 9y ago
  The Jay-z example was real and the tool was shot down by policy. Some targeting is really prohibited thanks to policy.
  - hackuser 9y ago
    No offense, but how do you know?
    - antongm 9y ago
      I'm the author of the op-ed we're all discussing. :)
      - TECHnickAlly 9y ago
seanca 9y ago
Dumb article is dumb. Ex-product manager = / = Facebook exec, this person also hasn't worked there in four years. "Targeting emotionally troubled teens" without detailed explanation as to how someone could implies simplicity in the matter, but it's not like an advertiser is typing in "show my ads to emotionally troubled teens please."
- antongm 9y ago
  Dumb reader is dumb. It's an op-ed not an article. For the details, perhaps open FB's ad creation UI. You are indeed correct you don't target ads like you enter a search query.
Animats 9y ago
Can you run an ad for Final Exit [1] aimed at depressed teens? If you ask Amazon "suicide how to", you get exactly what you asked for.[2] Is that wrong? [1] https://www.amazon.com/Final-Exit-Digital-2011-Self-Deliverance-ebook/dp/B004TGU1VY/ https://www.amazon.com/Final-Exit-Digital-2011-Self-Delivera... [2]
- datashovel 9y ago
  "Brawndo: The Thirst Mutilator. It's like a monster truck you can pour into your face."
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
cjhanks 9y ago
I am surprised people are shocked by this. Personally, I live in Berkeley - within a 20 mile footprint you have a nice sampling of exorbitant wealth and abject poverty. As you drive through you can see drastic changes of roadside advertisements transitioning between English, Chinese, and Spanish. In the poor areas of town bus stations are plastered with high-interest payday loans. Drive 5 miles North and you will see advertisements for expensive art/music events. Drive slightly more North and you will see endless advertisements for divorce and accident lawyers. It would be a miracle if all of this store location/advertisement placement was coincidence. It's such a shtark reality you can stand at the Bus Station, read the bus outside advertisements, and estimate if it's likely to be going where you are. But once you get inside the bus where fewer people of wealth can see, you no longer can.
dxbydt 9y ago
He's a nice guy. But his book is way past its sell-date - time to stop milking it so much & get on to the next gig/book/whatever. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=antongm https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=antongm
- antongm 9y ago
  Lol. Nope. It's been out less than a year. How many writing careers do you follow?
  - dxbydt 9y ago
    Everybody I know and his cat has read the book. Give us another book. How about reprinting the old adgrok blog posts about why SF is better than nyc because person in NYC is significant only if they showed up in the Sunday marriage section, whereas the SF guy can build something out of thin air and climb the rings of Fame. I dug that.
    - antongm 9y ago
      That's on the Wayback Machine, not that it was the Gettysburg Address or anything.
danso 9y ago
A little off-topic, but from the article: > I’ll illustrate with an anecdote from my Facebook days. Someone on the data science team had cooked up a new tool that recommended Facebook Pages users should like. And what did this tool start spitting out? Every ethnic stereotype you can imagine. We killed the tool when it recommended then president Obama if a user had “liked” rapper Jay Z... The author left Facebook in 2013 [0], so I had assumed by now Facebook could do a proper job of recommendations. It's been awhile since I've "Liked" a page, so I just tried it (In-N-Out Burger) and was extremely surprised to see that Facebook apparently still doesn't provide a popup for related pages I may also "Like", in the same way that Twitter does whenever you follow any user. That's really surprising. For starters, Twitter has had user suggestions for several years now, and it has much less structured data to work with than Facebook does -- for example, a FB page can specify its category, address, and many other attributes; Twitter has nothing to go by other than user's name, account screen name, biography, a location field, and connection metadata (i.e. geolocated IP). Yet it's been awhile if ever since I've seen Twitter recommend someone truly off, e.g. President Obama and Jay-Z. In contrast, Facebook provides a related stories feature for news stories a user shares in the feed - or at least it did before the fake news thing blew up. Is this a signal that Facebook doesn't really care about user engagement with brand pages? Or did the fuckup that the author describes make it so that this was a feature that no product manager wants to be associated with? (Or it could be that I'm just missing the Related Pages feature. Maybe it shows up in mobile and not the browser version) edit: It's strange that the feature doesn't exist in 2017, but this anecdote, as portrayed by the author, reflects badly on both Facebook's data science and the author. I mean, how is it possible for so many smart people to not figure out how to fix such undesired associations? There are so many other signals for clustering related users beyond similar followers. edit 2: This feature does exist -- you have to like a post in your news feed (on the website), and then Facebook will append a "Related" box in your newsfeed. Unless your browser window is open particularly high, the fact that the "Related" box was triggered by the Like action is obfuscated (because it is out of view). Still doesn't explain why they couldn't make the feature work in 2012-2013. edit 3: Appears author is wrong about the tool being "killed". Seems to still exist, though maybe it was only temporarily "killed" http://www.adweek.com/digital/facebook-suggests-similar-pages-after-users-click-like-on-pages-timeline/ http://www.adweek.com/digital/facebook-suggests-similar-page... https://www.facebook.com/addpage https://www.facebook.com/addpage [0] https://www.linkedin.com/in/antongm/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/antongm/
siliconc0w 9y ago
This is a tricky problem in pretty much the entire consumer-facing ML space. For example, even if you don't feed in 'protected classes' - you can say 'the algo finds a way'. It might figure out a certain zip code won't pay back a loan, so it will down weight them accordingly - even though that zip may predominantly be one ethnicity. Is that discriminating on a protected class? Well, kinda. It's discriminating on a proxy for a protected class which, if we're getting technical, is really a (poor) proxy for cultural, genetic, and socio-economic backgrounds. So it's in some ways 'more fair' but it does take away our ability to 'socially engineer' certain decisions by prohibiting use of one feature or another.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
- ithinkinstereo 9y ago
  > If working at Facebook in 2011 gives you the self-perceived authority to talk about the company in 2017, I must be a world expert on the topic. Not to nitpick, but the author worked at FB from 2011-2013. He was there when FB's ad platform really started to find legs.
  - mpeg 9y ago
    In those years FB ads was a toddler compared to the platform of today, I worked with FB ads at the time and until 2013-2014 too (author went to Nanigans after FB) For starters, today's platform is completely mobile focused. FBX (product the author worked on) was entirely desktop inventory.
    - antongm 9y ago
      Did you even read what I said? You're literally repeating it. Funny, and you're citing Custom Audiences, for which I was the first PM, as some sort of counter-example. LOL.
- thr0waway1239 9y ago
  >> you can also target people who search for ways to suicide on Google Not that either companies' employees seem to care, of course. Once again, a little reminder about my suggestion to create a public dataset of all employees of Facebook and Google for improving the state of the art of ML and DL algorithms (consider it a public service). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14245513 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14245513 If you obtain private information and exploit it, it is called doxing. If a megacorp does the same, it is called a business plan. We should probably start with Antonio Garcia-Martinez as the starting node, and do a BFS. Or is DFS better? I just get super stoked about all these technical riddles, I can't really help it!
Bodell 9y ago
So yeah obviously Facebook like any other large advertising platform is gonna use its data for seedy means. What's crazy to me is that the author seems to be using the word 'ethics' synonymously with the concept of political correctness. As if he actually does not know the difference.
rs86 9y ago
Sometimes data behave unethically -- I just can't take that much of cynism
TECHnickAlly 9y ago
Just started reading Chaos Monkeys. Thoroughly enjoying it so far (am up to Zuck's inner circle of desks). Guardianistas are a funny lot aren't they. They write as if people who can endure the push and shove of business long enough to try to improve things from the inside (unlike themselves) are going to be anti-business (like themselves).
Unknoob 9y ago
"In our current world, there’s a long list of Truths That Cannot Be Stated Publicly, even though there’s plenty of data suggesting their correctness" Truer words were never spoken.

123 points by agd 9y ago

agd 9y ago

"And knowing the Facebook sales playbook, I cannot imagine the company would have concocted such a pitch about teenage emotions without the final hook: “and this is how you execute this on the Facebook ads platform”. Why else would they be making the pitch? The question is not whether this can be done. It is whether Facebook should apply a moral filter to these decisions. Let’s assume Facebook does target ads at depressed teens. My reaction? So what. Sometimes data behaves unethically." This is the key quote for me. It's clear that if this data can be abused, it will be.

hkon 9y ago
Don't worry, it's only the data that is unethical.
the_common_man 9y ago
Sorry, but did you learn anything new after reading that quote? Seems like a blinding flash of the obvious...
FussyZeus 9y ago
> This is the key quote for me. It's clear that if this data can be abused, it will be. And it's so fucking sad that this is true. This kind of technology could enable Facebook and entities like it to predict when people are feeling depressed, hopeless and suicidal and instead of doing something like presenting a simple message like "Hey are you alright? Do you need some help?" nope, their thought is "this person is RIPE for some well placed marketing." I get that this guy is likely a product of his industry and he didn't set out from childhood to prey on people's emotions to sell them shit they don't need, at least, in all likelihood. That said I certainly hope there is a hell if for no other reason than this man and all like him really, really belong there.

ThrustVectoring 9y ago

Advertisers and Facebook don't have to try to target emotionally troubled teens in order to target emotionally troubled teens. All they have to do is have an advertisement that works well on emotionally troubled teens, have sufficiently correlated targeting tools, and run an optimization algorithm like gradient descent. To take a slightly different example: it doesn't matter if Facebook doesn't offer racial targeting if a payday loan company runs ads segmented by zip code and picks the best performing areas that happen to be predominantly black. EDIT: This should teach me to read the entire article first, since I made up an example that was literally used in the article. My bad.

fnbr 9y ago
The main problems they're talking about are PR problems, not ethical problems (if you assume that advertising itself is ethical, which I don't necessarily think is true). Specific types of targeting are then bad because of the optics, not because of their efficacy. Put another way, there's no ethical problem with recommending that people who follow Jay-Z should follow Obama, but there's a PR problem there.
- eridius 9y ago
  > Put another way, there's no ethical problem with recommending that people who follow Jay-Z should follow Obama, but there's a PR problem there. I agree with that specific statement, but I would say there is an ethical problem with the similar situation of recommending payday loans to poor people. The difference is recommending Obama to Jay-Z followers isn't harmful to those followers, but recommending payday loans to poor people is.
  - meric 9y ago
    And that difference is temporal - in the same way Obama as a person can change and payday loan interest rates and regulations can fluctuate
  - ThrustVectoring 9y ago
    Targeting seems, to me, to be ethics-neutral in terms of first-order effects. It amplifies the effectiveness of both positive-value and negative-value advertising. Like, roads can be used both for transporting troops to invade a country as well as to transporting food to relieve a famine, and better roads improve the effectiveness of both. Like, advertising payday loans to poor people may be an acceptable cost of advertising if it gets out valuable mesothelioma information as well.

metastart 9y ago

"The fact that Facebook could easily throw the election by selectively showing a Get Out the Vote reminder in certain counties of a swing state, for example, was a running joke." Woah. They're asking to be regulated.

NumberCruncher 9y ago
Exactly, like newspapers and TV channels. Oh, they are already in good hands...
- TillE 9y ago
  Broadcast media can't microtarget like that. At best they can cultivate a certain audience, but it's an extremely crude tool in comparison.
  - danso 9y ago
    Sure, but broadcast media is regulated by the FEC and FCC: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/20/AR2007112001507_pf.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11... https://www.propublica.org/getinvolved/item/if-tv-stations-wont-post-their-data-on-political-ads-we-will https://www.propublica.org/getinvolved/item/if-tv-stations-w... https://sunlightfoundation.com/2015/11/10/everything-you-need-to-know-about-political-ads/ https://sunlightfoundation.com/2015/11/10/everything-you-nee...
jasonmp85 9y ago
Not a very good joke. I'd have considered it a moral imperative to act on that impulse.
- keebEz 9y ago
  Maybe they did?
  - guelo 9y ago

kristianc 9y ago

The problem with any platform like Facebook (though Facebook happens to be have the richest seam of user data, at scale and across devices) is that the segment with the highest clickthrough rate will inevitably be one which draws on shady factors. It will be the segment deliberately concocted to find that most vulnerable / subsceptible to buy. If you're looking to ship garbage self help books, you're going to target people who like garbage self help book writers. Rinse and repeat for preppers etc. To prevent this you essentially either have to ask marketers to hobble their own search terms even when they know there is likely a higher CTR out there (like payday loan companies willingly deciding not to advertise on daytime TV), or asking Facebook to hobble its own platform. Until there is some kind of regulation or FTC pushback I can't see the situation improving.

delphinius81 9y ago

Misleading title - since when did FB product managers become executives? Though completely believe FB will use their data in any way possible to make money, ethical or not.

antongm 9y ago
It's not a title, it's a headline, and it's written by the editors. This is how newspapers work. Media title inflation is standard. Every 'senior' this and that you've ever read about is also bullshit, in case you hadn't noticed.
AdamSC1 9y ago
To be fair "Executive" means "A person or group having administrative or managerial authority in an organization." Seniority of the product manager role depends on a number of factors. Sure, most FB product managers are not considered execs these days, but he was their first Product Manager responsible for ad targeting and then their advertising exchange all the way back in 2011. That probably brought with it a team, a good salary and a lot of sway. Unlike the cookie-cutter 9-5 corporations of yesteryear, startups have been pretty loose with standard job naming convention. You can be fresh out of a BA and get called "CMO" or you can be a 20-year veteran leading a team making executive decisions and just be a "Product Specialist." The responsibilities and compensation define executives far more than titles.

rrdharan 9y ago

So wait, remind me why we should believe Antonio Garcia Martinez? The guy trumpeted the fact that he lied to his investors as a point of pride: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5b4tqe/i_am_antonio_garcia_martinez_a_tech_entrepreneur/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5b4tqe/i_am_antonio_g... "Trust me, they're lying, I know because I'm a liar" doesn't seem terribly convincing.

mercer 9y ago
Why not? I'm inclined to trust the security advice of a 'reformed' criminal hacker, assuming this individual has no clear reason to be lying to me.

Mendenhall 9y ago

Ahh the old "so what" argument. So what if I can target recovering alchoholics with alchohol ads? So what if I target gambling addicts with my gambling platform? So what?

lucasmullens 9y ago
There are alcohol and gambling ads on Facebook? Those two in particular often aren't allowed on ad networks.
- Mendenhall 9y ago
  That defeats his whole "so what" argument, Because if those 2 matter others do as well.
- FridgeSeal 9y ago
  I have definitely, definitely seen ads for gambling and sports betting on Facebook.
- mschuster91 9y ago
  > There are alcohol and gambling ads on Facebook? Those two in particular often aren't allowed on ad networks. Gambling? Loads of them, and for what it's worth Farmville and friends IIRC even invented their own virtual currency. Alcohol I haven't seen yet but every major beer and spirits brand has its own Facebook page. Ad networks usually forbid alcohol due to underage-drinking-ad-laws (which FB can avoid due to their real-name policy and them requiring you lots of times to submit a government ID) and gambling due to a host of even more country-specific laws (which FB can certainly spend a lot of lawyer money on to safely navigate them, given that gambling ads usually pay huge sums for well working spots). And I believe that CC processors for ad networks don't like both due to the same issue; with a giant like Facebook, no CC issuer can afford to not deal with them, so they trust FB to not get them in legal trouble.
antongm 9y ago
Those ads are actually prohibited, or at least were when I was there. :)

moomin 9y ago

Wow, I can't decide if this guy is more morally or intellectually bankrupt. Seriously, "sometimes data behaves unethically"? Data doesn't do anything. Not even analysis or deep learning does anything. People (or programs written by people) execute decisions on the basis of data. It's still the people being unethical. Big data isn't some magic wand that absolves you of moral responsibility, but it's extremely interesting that at least one marketer at Facebook seems to believe it does. And that's just one of the many things that manage to be simultaneously offensive and just plain incorrect in what is frankly, a pretty short article.

hammock 9y ago
You ought to continue to read past that. Because you missed his point. He goes on to basically question "ethics" entirely: >What did this tool start spitting out? Every ethnic stereotype you can imagine....People who liked Jay Z were more likely to like Obama – it was one of the statistical truths Facebook couldn’t be seen espousing. I disagreed. Jay Z is a millionaire music tycoon, so what if we associate him with the president? In our current world, there’s a long list of Truths That Cannot Be Stated Publicly, even though there’s plenty of data suggesting their correctness, and this was one of them. African Americans living in postal codes with depressed incomes likely do respond disproportionately to ads for usurious “payday” loans. Hispanics between the ages of 18 and 25 probably do engage with ads singing the charms and advantages of military service. Why should those examples of targeting be viewed as any less ethical than, say, ads selling $100 Lululemon yoga pants targeting thirtysomething women in affluent postal codes like San Francisco’s Marina district?
- jolux 9y ago
  That's not questioning, that's rejecting wholesale without a proper argument as to why. And frankly I don't at all see the ethical analogy between luxury athleisure and payday loans, and it seems to me you'd have to be pretty damn fucking self-deluded to think they're remotely comparable.
  - devoply 9y ago

lucasmullens 9y ago

>Why should those examples of targeting be viewed as any less ethical than, say, ads selling $100 Lululemon yoga pants targeting thirtysomething women in affluent postal codes like San Francisco’s Marina district? Because one can cause poverty and the other doesn't.

a3n 9y ago
Which one?
ferongr 9y ago
How does an ad cause poverty?
- lucasmullens 9y ago
  If it encourages someone to do something that will cause them to go into poverty, such as taking a payday loan they can't afford.
  - ferongr 9y ago
    I don't think it's actually responsible for the problem then. The choice rests entirely with that person.
  - prostoalex 9y ago
    What about an ad for a car, a college, a credit card, a diamond or a vacation cruise?
  - kk_cz 9y ago
    the problem lies with payday loan itself not with the advertisement, though. If we know that payday loans are harmful for society, why not to outlaw them right away, rather than dance around it being advertised.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

el_memorioso 9y ago

"Sometimes data behaves unethically." No, data doesn't behave at all. This is quite a cynical deflection of responsibility for ethically questionable actions taken by people.

erpellan 9y ago
Ethics is a human construct. So data could very well show that unethical (by some definition) behaviour is profitable. I think this is the point being made: the data shows, beyond statistical doubt, that payday loan ads aimed at a certain demographic have better conversion, ergo profit. The data also shows, beyond statistical doubt, that [current fashionable brand] yoga pant ads aimed at a certain demographic have better conversion, ergo profit. The data doesn't care. If you are an ad-funded company (as both facebook and google are), you can't afford to ignore the data, it's your differentiator. I'm not saying I agree with it, I am saying that ethics is an opinion, data is fact. I long for a time when we as a species evolve beyond being so predictably influenced by propaganda.

milesf 9y ago

"We are not Facebook's customer. We are their product." I have stated that fact so many times to so many people, and yet most people don't care. They continue to use Facebook. It's almost as if people are addicted to Facebook.

kakarot 9y ago
Well, they are. Addicted to immediate and frequent social validation. Telling people heroin is bad for them isn't going to make them quit if they are addicted to it. They have to witness or experience the hardships that come from such an addiction. Telling people Facebook is bad for them, telling them why it is bad for them, isn't enough. We have to show them indisputable evidence of social media having an extreme negative impact on their lives. We have to pull them away long enough for their brains to stop craving the dopamine release they associate with browsing their feeds and narcissistically posting several times a day. Most importantly, we have to care and understand what they are going through. Being angry at them or thinking they are stupid for not knowing better is alienating and divisive behavior. They will rush to Facebook to alleviate their negative emotional response to what you are telling them. Even if they think that you're right.
nix0n 9y ago
We're both the customer and the product. I'm the product to advertisers, but also to my friends. Similarly I am the customer to the products that are my friends.
- qbrass 9y ago
  The product is bait. You're keeping your friends there, they're keeping you there, and now the group of you brings in the bigger fish.
Wissmania 9y ago
This is just semantics. You get to use Facebook in exchange for having the info you share there used for advertising, and having those ads show up on the side of the page. Who cares what you call it.
9y ago

apozem 9y ago

> Let’s assume Facebook does target ads at depressed teens. My reaction? So what. Sometimes data behaves unethically. Stop right there. Data has no behavior. You behave unethically. Data informs a decision, but you are making the decision. Take responsibility.

virtuabhi 9y ago
In your statement - "you are making the decision", "you" can be replaced by algorithms. Algorithms are taking decisions (e.g. giving loans, showing ads) based on data. Algorithms can have bias. Data can have bias.
andrewflnr 9y ago
I think you and he have sort of the same point: data has no ethical orientation. If you unpacked that sentence, he would probably clarify it to "data behaves in ways that, if there was a human making that call, would be unethical". What makes the situation interesting is that there's not necessarily a person that makes the decision to do potentially damaging ad targeting: if you want to prevent it, you probably have to specifically prevent it in each case. Is Facebook responsible for preventing every single unethical ad targeting? Given the unfeasibility of that, does this problem mean we should call it quits on targeted ads entirely?
pjmorris 9y ago
Exactly. There is a long [0], long [1] history of people being held accountable for problems enabled by their carelessness. [0] Hammurabi's Code, 229. If a builder build a house for some one, and does not construct it properly, and the house which he built fall in and kill its owner, then that builder shall be put to death. [1] Exodus 21:29 If, however, the bull has had the habit of goring and the owner has been warned but has not kept it penned up and it kills a man or woman, the bull is to be stoned and its owner also is to be put to death

hackuser 9y ago

I don't agree with his claims that the following are among "a long list of Truths That Cannot Be Stated Publicly". I don't think anyone would care; I care very much about racism and can't imagine anyone I know objecting to these. * "people who liked Jay Z were more likely to like Obama" * "Hispanics between the ages of 18 and 25 probably do engage with ads singing the charms and advantages of military service." (I'm skipping the other example because it's an issue of economic exploitation, not ethnicity.)

empath75 9y ago
Yeah, basically if you have any kind of oppressed category of people, you can take advantage of them by exploiting their vulnerabilities (lack of education, lack of access to credit, etc). If you aren't careful with how you use your algorithms, you can come up with all kinds of systems that reinforce systemic racism.
- hackuser 9y ago
  A good point that I overlooked; thanks.
antongm 9y ago
The Jay-z example was real and the tool was shot down by policy. Some targeting is really prohibited thanks to policy.
- hackuser 9y ago
  No offense, but how do you know?
  - antongm 9y ago
    I'm the author of the op-ed we're all discussing. :)
    - TECHnickAlly 9y ago

seanca 9y ago

Dumb article is dumb. Ex-product manager = / = Facebook exec, this person also hasn't worked there in four years. "Targeting emotionally troubled teens" without detailed explanation as to how someone could implies simplicity in the matter, but it's not like an advertiser is typing in "show my ads to emotionally troubled teens please."

antongm 9y ago
Dumb reader is dumb. It's an op-ed not an article. For the details, perhaps open FB's ad creation UI. You are indeed correct you don't target ads like you enter a search query.

Animats 9y ago

Can you run an ad for Final Exit [1] aimed at depressed teens? If you ask Amazon "suicide how to", you get exactly what you asked for.[2] Is that wrong? [1] https://www.amazon.com/Final-Exit-Digital-2011-Self-Deliverance-ebook/dp/B004TGU1VY/ https://www.amazon.com/Final-Exit-Digital-2011-Self-Delivera... [2]

datashovel 9y ago
"Brawndo: The Thirst Mutilator. It's like a monster truck you can pour into your face."

deleted 9y ago

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cjhanks 9y ago

I am surprised people are shocked by this. Personally, I live in Berkeley - within a 20 mile footprint you have a nice sampling of exorbitant wealth and abject poverty. As you drive through you can see drastic changes of roadside advertisements transitioning between English, Chinese, and Spanish. In the poor areas of town bus stations are plastered with high-interest payday loans. Drive 5 miles North and you will see advertisements for expensive art/music events. Drive slightly more North and you will see endless advertisements for divorce and accident lawyers. It would be a miracle if all of this store location/advertisement placement was coincidence. It's such a shtark reality you can stand at the Bus Station, read the bus outside advertisements, and estimate if it's likely to be going where you are. But once you get inside the bus where fewer people of wealth can see, you no longer can.

dxbydt 9y ago

He's a nice guy. But his book is way past its sell-date - time to stop milking it so much & get on to the next gig/book/whatever. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=antongm https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=antongm

antongm 9y ago
Lol. Nope. It's been out less than a year. How many writing careers do you follow?
- dxbydt 9y ago
  Everybody I know and his cat has read the book. Give us another book. How about reprinting the old adgrok blog posts about why SF is better than nyc because person in NYC is significant only if they showed up in the Sunday marriage section, whereas the SF guy can build something out of thin air and climb the rings of Fame. I dug that.
  - antongm 9y ago
    That's on the Wayback Machine, not that it was the Gettysburg Address or anything.

danso 9y ago

A little off-topic, but from the article: > I’ll illustrate with an anecdote from my Facebook days. Someone on the data science team had cooked up a new tool that recommended Facebook Pages users should like. And what did this tool start spitting out? Every ethnic stereotype you can imagine. We killed the tool when it recommended then president Obama if a user had “liked” rapper Jay Z... The author left Facebook in 2013 [0], so I had assumed by now Facebook could do a proper job of recommendations. It's been awhile since I've "Liked" a page, so I just tried it (In-N-Out Burger) and was extremely surprised to see that Facebook apparently still doesn't provide a popup for related pages I may also "Like", in the same way that Twitter does whenever you follow any user. That's really surprising. For starters, Twitter has had user suggestions for several years now, and it has much less structured data to work with than Facebook does -- for example, a FB page can specify its category, address, and many other attributes; Twitter has nothing to go by other than user's name, account screen name, biography, a location field, and connection metadata (i.e. geolocated IP). Yet it's been awhile if ever since I've seen Twitter recommend someone truly off, e.g. President Obama and Jay-Z. In contrast, Facebook provides a related stories feature for news stories a user shares in the feed - or at least it did before the fake news thing blew up. Is this a signal that Facebook doesn't really care about user engagement with brand pages? Or did the fuckup that the author describes make it so that this was a feature that no product manager wants to be associated with? (Or it could be that I'm just missing the Related Pages feature. Maybe it shows up in mobile and not the browser version) edit: It's strange that the feature doesn't exist in 2017, but this anecdote, as portrayed by the author, reflects badly on both Facebook's data science and the author. I mean, how is it possible for so many smart people to not figure out how to fix such undesired associations? There are so many other signals for clustering related users beyond similar followers. edit 2: This feature does exist -- you have to like a post in your news feed (on the website), and then Facebook will append a "Related" box in your newsfeed. Unless your browser window is open particularly high, the fact that the "Related" box was triggered by the Like action is obfuscated (because it is out of view). Still doesn't explain why they couldn't make the feature work in 2012-2013. edit 3: Appears author is wrong about the tool being "killed". Seems to still exist, though maybe it was only temporarily "killed" http://www.adweek.com/digital/facebook-suggests-similar-pages-after-users-click-like-on-pages-timeline/ http://www.adweek.com/digital/facebook-suggests-similar-page... https://www.facebook.com/addpage https://www.facebook.com/addpage [0] https://www.linkedin.com/in/antongm/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/antongm/

siliconc0w 9y ago

This is a tricky problem in pretty much the entire consumer-facing ML space. For example, even if you don't feed in 'protected classes' - you can say 'the algo finds a way'. It might figure out a certain zip code won't pay back a loan, so it will down weight them accordingly - even though that zip may predominantly be one ethnicity. Is that discriminating on a protected class? Well, kinda. It's discriminating on a proxy for a protected class which, if we're getting technical, is really a (poor) proxy for cultural, genetic, and socio-economic backgrounds. So it's in some ways 'more fair' but it does take away our ability to 'socially engineer' certain decisions by prohibiting use of one feature or another.

deleted 9y ago

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ithinkinstereo 9y ago
> If working at Facebook in 2011 gives you the self-perceived authority to talk about the company in 2017, I must be a world expert on the topic. Not to nitpick, but the author worked at FB from 2011-2013. He was there when FB's ad platform really started to find legs.
- mpeg 9y ago
  In those years FB ads was a toddler compared to the platform of today, I worked with FB ads at the time and until 2013-2014 too (author went to Nanigans after FB) For starters, today's platform is completely mobile focused. FBX (product the author worked on) was entirely desktop inventory.
  - antongm 9y ago
    Did you even read what I said? You're literally repeating it. Funny, and you're citing Custom Audiences, for which I was the first PM, as some sort of counter-example. LOL.
thr0waway1239 9y ago
>> you can also target people who search for ways to suicide on Google Not that either companies' employees seem to care, of course. Once again, a little reminder about my suggestion to create a public dataset of all employees of Facebook and Google for improving the state of the art of ML and DL algorithms (consider it a public service). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14245513 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14245513 If you obtain private information and exploit it, it is called doxing. If a megacorp does the same, it is called a business plan. We should probably start with Antonio Garcia-Martinez as the starting node, and do a BFS. Or is DFS better? I just get super stoked about all these technical riddles, I can't really help it!

Bodell 9y ago

So yeah obviously Facebook like any other large advertising platform is gonna use its data for seedy means. What's crazy to me is that the author seems to be using the word 'ethics' synonymously with the concept of political correctness. As if he actually does not know the difference.

rs86 9y ago

Sometimes data behave unethically -- I just can't take that much of cynism

TECHnickAlly 9y ago

Just started reading Chaos Monkeys. Thoroughly enjoying it so far (am up to Zuck's inner circle of desks). Guardianistas are a funny lot aren't they. They write as if people who can endure the push and shove of business long enough to try to improve things from the inside (unlike themselves) are going to be anti-business (like themselves).

Unknoob 9y ago

"In our current world, there’s a long list of Truths That Cannot Be Stated Publicly, even though there’s plenty of data suggesting their correctness" Truer words were never spoken.