11 ms·

Facebook is America’s scapegoat du jour

155 points by grej 9y ago

knowThySelfx 9y ago
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5520303/Obama-campaign-director-reveals-Facebook-ALLOWED-data.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5520303/Obama-campai... "'They were on our side': Obama campaign director reveals Facebook ALLOWED them to mine American users' profiles in 2012 because they were supportive of the Democrats" Is this news in the USA?
- phronese 9y ago
  I quick scan through the news search engine finds that almost exclusively right wing sources publish on this. Be critical about such news articles.
  - knowThySelfx 9y ago
    So what about left wing published news? Automatically becomes legit? By the way, I didn't know that site was right or left.
    - skocznymroczny 9y ago
      "Independent" "fact-checkers" will make sure of that.
      - jessaustin 9y ago
        They've thought of everything!
blunte 9y ago
"A new communications medium" ... "panic"...? Since when is Facebook a new communciation(s [sic]) medium? Her word choices and her not so deft deflections make me almost wonder if this is very subtle satire. The only other conclusion I can come up with is that she's a Mercer or Koch shill. The tactics employed with this CA/FB saga were far seedier and subversive than just standard targeted advertising (and I believe she knows this). What tripe.
scardine 9y ago
Oh, poor Mark! Such a patsy is the perfect scapegoat. /s The company he founded reflects his work ethics. Personally I don't care that much when the bully starts being bullied. You reap what you sow.
- blunte 9y ago
  From the early days: Sourced from http://www.businessinsider.com/embarrassing-and-damaging-zuckerberg-ims-confirmed-by-zuckerberg-the-new-yorker-2010-9?international=true&r=US&IR=T http://www.businessinsider.com/embarrassing-and-damaging-zuc... ZUCK: yea so if you ever need info about anyone at harvard ZUCK: just ask ZUCK: i have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, sns FRIEND: 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
- hanspeter 9y ago
  This sentiment confuses me. Why do people dislike Zuckerberg by default? How does it happen that anyone sees him as a bully?
  - 908087 9y ago
    What does "dislike by default" mean? Are you implying that people don't actually have reasons to dislike him based on the actions of himself and his company through the years? It's not like people just decided "I don't know who Mark Zuckerberg is yet, but I despise him".
    - hanspeter 9y ago
      It seems that anything praiseworthy Zuckerberg does never generates praise. On the other hand any opportunity to criticize him is always exercised.
  - r00fus 9y ago
    Exemplar: 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...
NiklasMort 9y ago
as always way too late the people with the tinfoil hats predicted all this in the 90s but nobody was listening (except "THEM")
jklinger410 9y ago
Considering how many different companies hate Facebook for stealing your attention from them...this is long overdue. Here's looking at you ISPs, Telcos, Ad Platforms, so-on. Your campaign is working pretty well so far.
zxcb1 9y ago
Advertising and propaganda are basically the same thing. It is reasonable to believe that if one works, the other does too. They are tools to shape preferences, question is how they have been used and will be.
yohann305 9y ago
I saw it coming a few months ago. Didn't you? There is a group of people/organizations acting as puppet masters, dictating what's going to be the next big topic. This is a lot more scarier than the FB story itself. It would be great if someone starts digging it out and uncover what's really happening, who are they and what their motives are. Media started feeding us stories how social networks are "bad for you", then slowly ramped up to give us the "piece de resistance": your soul (your data) has been sold to the devil. Come on, isn't anyone else seeing it?! ps: we have been programmed to believe this is not happening so i won't be surprised if this gets down-voted by the sheeple... ps#2: it might not be a group or organization but just the result of a poorly built internet eco-system.
- Ritsuko_akagi 9y ago
  What do you mean exactly?
- mcphage 9y ago
  > There is a group of people/organizations acting as puppet masters, dictating what's going to be the next big topic. It’s almost like there’s a “trending news” sidebar that these shadowy people added and put in whatever they feel like and whoops we’re talking about Facebook again aren’t we?
  - yohann305 9y ago
    touché! You're bringing up a good point. It might actually not be someone, but just a poorly built internet eco-system.
- rubidium 9y ago
  Tactical note: If your goal is to rally the troops, it's usually good practice not to refer to people as "sheeple" or talk about down-votes. The media decisions on "what shows up in the news" is well known, but under-reported (for obvious reasons). Whatever shows up in the news is meant to increase the value of these 6 companies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_cross-ownership_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_cross-ownership_in_the_U...) and advance their CEO/boards personal agendas for the United States and world. If you take what shows up in standard media's headlines as "what's worth talking about" you are playing their game.
AndrewKemendo 9y ago
This is probably the most even keeled and concise analysis of this story to date, with a reasonable laymans exposition on the technical subtlety between what CA did starting in 2013 and what the Obama Administration did in 2012. Not sure that it's a perfectly direct line between [Trump won] > (Facebook is to blame), because the story seems to be mostly about user data, but it's pretty close.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
omw192168 9y ago
Many Americans take their "duty" of uploading every last personal detail of their lives, very seriously. You cant stop them from uploading. If its not Facebook, it will be another platform.
matt_s 9y ago
Giving the visceral comments and opinions on Facebook, those that probably saw ads were already committed to one candidate or another. There is rarely a discussion on the internet where someone is convinced to switch to a different candidate/party. I doubt an advertisement would get someone to switch. However, if there were bots and trolls posting inflammatory content that motivated voters that would have other wise stayed home - that could have influenced turnout and an election. If those bots and trolls were funded by a foreign government, then that is even more concerning. I would like to see 'mainstream media' focus more on that part of it, this Cambridge Analytica company sounds like they were really good at taking campaign money.
WallWextra 9y ago
Here is, roughly, the media's playbook: 1. Never stop talking about Trump. Mention his name 300 times an hour on CNN. He's not a serious candidate, but he is entertaining so they give him free publicity until he is a serious candidate. 2. Start blathering about Hillary's emails, as if that were somehow important. 3. Now Trump is elected. In these tough times, it is more important than ever to support high-quality independent journalism. Subscription numbers swell. 4. We need someone to blame for the outcome of this election. Obviously it is the fault of Facebook, Google, etc, who have been taking the media's ad revenue. Not the fault of the media who would never shut up about Trump.
- ixtli 9y ago
  I realize that this is tangential to what you're talking about but your comment reminded me of it strongly: As much as it's clear that there was some funny business with trump's people and russia, the way liberals are salivating over mueller's investigation makes me uncomfortable. they need the legal system to pronounce in some way that trump and his people broke the rules, in order to avoid acknowledging that the general thrust of all of this is the system working as it was designed.
  - WallWextra 9y ago
    It's like how the 2008 election didn't count, because Obama is actually a Kenyan. People can't just lose an election anymore.
    - ixtli 9y ago
      I like to talk about social issues and politics and stuff but the more I do it in public the more I run into what feels like "politics-as-basketball." It's really begun to feel like team sports as opposed to a critical analysis of conditions and power analysis.
      - mieseratte 9y ago
        As someone in their mid-twenties, I have to ask the older HNers: has it always been this "stupid," so vitriolic and hateful? If not, when did it become this way?
throwaway5752 9y ago
Aren't scapegoats usually blameless? edit: one of many, many articles you can find criticizing Megan McCardle https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2018/02/megan-mcardle-fails-upwards-again-this-time-to-the.html https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2018/02/megan-mcardle... ... this is not a non-sequitur attack on her thesis, but I am saying that she has a long track record that one should be aware of before reading her OpEds.
- PunchTornado 9y ago
  No, but I seriously doubt the idiots at Cambridge Analytica and the guy with pink hair were the genius masterminds who can swing political votes through targeted advertising. People don't like to admit that the people in swing states are mostly against globalisation, wall street and the system as it is. Trump spent less than half what Clinton did on ads. I truly believe he could have spent nothing and still won. Voters are just pissed off at the current state of affairs.
  - dwild 9y ago
    Did you forget the fake news during the election? I'm from Quebec and I remember being ashamed to learn that some people near I lived made a living pushing fake news website just with the help of Google Ads on these pages. They made a profit with fake news. Do you see now how much cheaper it is to push a fake narrative that people want to believe? The share button is the cheapest ad campaign you can ever hope for. You only pay for the first view, all the share are free. It also helps when another country pays for your ad campaigns ;) but that's a whole other story.
    - PunchTornado 9y ago
      The deal here is the "want to believe". People who believed those faked news were voting for Trump anyway. It takes a lot to switch from Democrat to Conservative, not just some news that you read on the net. Political opinions are not that fluid and don't change easy.
      - 9y ago
bshastry 9y ago
I like the critical thinking in this article. Problem is, I am critical about it's critique. Just because Ted Cruz made use of the same platform and did not win, does not mean there is no problem with what Facebook is doing. They are still thieving people's data and selling it for a nice sum.
- PunchTornado 9y ago
  What the hell are you talking about? There is no stealing. People agreed to give their data to facebook and do whatever with it. read the terms and conditions of using fb.
  - blunte 9y ago
    It's not that simple. Facebook's shifting privacy defaults are what enabled some of the deeper reach of the CA mining tactics and are arguably what gave them much more information than probably even Facebook had intended. That's not to say that people are pretty careless about privacy management (and security), but this went well beyond what the informed public thought was happening (or possible) on FB during those years.
- throwawayyx96 9y ago
  I don't think the author was trying to excuse Facebook's business model by bringing up Cruz. She was pointing out that if this 'psychological profiling' technique from CA was really a silver bullet for swaying votes, Cruz would have done better in his run the Republican nomination. It's a single data point that arguably isn't worth much, but it was interesting to me as I'd not heard of any other prominent politicians using the service. Balanced article by WAPO in my view.
  - jessaustin 9y ago
    I thought Cruz came in 2nd? To the guy who was on every channel of TV all the time. Keep in mind R primary voters get more of their news from TV than the general electorate, which explains why Trump beat Cruz more than he beat Clinton. Keep in mind also that Cruz is a total pariah in Washington. The only people who will talk to him are those who are paid to do so. Based on previous form, one would not have expected Jeb and the rest to all lose to Trump and Cruz.
charlysl 9y ago
I find the use of the word "scapegoat" interesting. From the little I know about anthropology, when some calamity befell the village/horde/tribe (disease/drought/crime etc) the shaman would magically point out the scapegoat as the culprit, who invariably was someone people didn't like to begin with; because of this, such decisions were rarely contested regardless of their plausibility and the scapegoat was promptly disposed of. I suspect that most people are as clueless about what is really going on as those villagers. Those who control the media, though, just like the shaman, are extremely adept at sizing up the public emotion. For what it's worth, if I understand it correctly, the most interesting aspect of this is that using machine learning techniques they managed to translate the actual tags that they wanted to target (gay/square/racist/unemployed/man/rightwing/white/latino etc etc) to the less revealing tags actually offered by fb, and in this way direct propaganda more accurately.
dalbasal 9y ago
All the terms and templates we are using legally and in the media... they are painting a totally (imo) misleading picture. FB's "crime" is painted as data security. The "criminals" are trump, Bannon, Putin or whoever is alleged to have used this data to "manipulate public opinion." This misses the entire point. FB's business model is based on using large datasets of mundane (in isolation) information in order to "profile" people. More specifically, score people for likelihood to do X, where X is refinance a loan, go to a diet seminar or whatever an advertiser wants. The key point is large quantities of mundane data, not necessarily stuff that is protected. Someone got a hold of a small subset of FBs dataset and presumably used it to target political messages or whatnot. This is exactly what all FB advertiser's do every day. If we're calling this incident "manipulating public opinion" or "foreign meddling"... Then the problem is 10,000X times bigger than this case. This stuff is all around us.
- Chardok 9y ago
  This article practically comes off as apologetic for Facebook and absolutely ignores the point of outrage for a lot of people. Great example of language designed to lead. "Facebook, of course, lets you target exactly those boring, old demographic qualities" - just boring old mundane everyday Facebook. No worries here "To be clear, what Cambridge Analytica did was somewhat worse" - Just a bit worse, but not too far from the norm "Facebook no longer allows anyone to do this, thankfully, and hasn’t for years" - this has been a non-issue for years, what are you worried about?
  - dalbasal 9y ago
    Exactly what I meant. This is made possible by the way the issue is framed, as a data security issue. Well, it isn't hard to imagine an identical scenario playing out where no data was "leaked," with everything being legal and normative data collection. If FB had done with their own data whatever these 3rd parties are alleged to have done... would any laws have been broken?
- maxerickson 9y ago
  As I understand it, the Trump campaign mostly used Facebook's in house ad targeting services. In contrast to the Clinton campaign that relied on their own data team for targeting. It's hard to get a read on it, but there are plenty of people slagging Cambridge Analytica as being pretty worthless.
supernumerary 9y ago
I have writen about why we scape-goat Facebook here - basically we are trained to be highly sceptical of illusions (cf. Plato's allegory of the cave): http://iain.land/posts/20170201-transitional-object.html http://iain.land/posts/20170201-transitional-object.html And this kind of scape-goating - throws the 'baby out with the bath-water' as it were. Basically we need illusions and they effect how we all live. Especially when we all agree on what illusions we want to share...
madmax96 9y ago
The meta-narrative of this thread: people have outsourced their thinking to massive media companies who have a rational self-interest to capture their audience's attention in order to increase revenue. People assume that these media companies are portrayers of truth. While these companies are not (usually) telling lies, they are presenting a point-of-view that suits their interests. The narratives being consumed by the public are designed to keep them in fear and outrage. By being in a state of fear and outrage, the mob produces more stories for the media to sell back to it to induce more fear and outrage. The other day, I took a taxi. The driver was talking about how he stopped logging into Facebook, consuming the news, etc. and was instead focusing on spending more quality time with his wife and daughters. He was the happiest person I spoke to yesterday. We already had what we needed to be happy. Entertainment tools like Facebook are good insofar as we are made better people. Perhaps it's time for us to reflect on how satisfied we are with the people we've become, and accept the personal responsibility of bettering ourselves before we try to save the world. "Turn on, tune in, and drop out."
supernumerary 9y ago
Our most trenchant and persistent criticism of Facebook has been rooted in a skeptical view of its illusory component; one where illusory experience is scapegoated as our fatal flaw to be subsequently exploited by Facebook’s evil machinations. We view the net-worth of its board of directors as being directly proportional to their malign influence in our society, pulling the wool over our eyes with an addictive illusion while voraciously funneling our private information into vast data-centers where AI is trained to new heights of persuasiveness. In this view ‘The Filter Bubble’ and ‘Fake News’ can easily be seen to be be mere effects of the following feedback loop: User engages with material that matches their base desires, they are seduced and enveloped by these illusions, and the illusory experience of having their internal life seemingly manifest in the real world, this feels important to them so they form groups on this basis, like the prisoners in Plato's allegory of the cave. Facebook optimizes for engagement, presenting this user with more specialized material, eventually this material detaches from reality altogether. However this results in a skeptical cul-de-sac where the meaningfulness of Facebook is ignored. Instead it is scapegoated so that we can largely avoid taking responsibility for our actions. To refute these claims Mark Zuckerberg has emphasised our agency in deciding what Facebook is for and does. Regarding Fake News he has said: > “I do think there is a certain profound lack of empathy in asserting that the only reason someone could have voted the way they did is they saw some fake news … If you believe that, then I don’t think you have internalized the message the Trump supporters are trying to send in this election.” And regarding the Filter Bubble: > “The research also shows something that is a little bit less inspiring, which is that we study not only people’s exposure in Newsfeed to content from different points of view, but then what people click on and engage with. By far the biggest filter in the system is not that the content isn’t there, [or] they don’t have friends who support the other candidate or are of another religion, [it’s that] you just don’t click on it. You actually tune it out when you see it. You have your world view. You go through, and I think that we would all be surprised how many things that don’t conform to our world view that we just tune out.” Usefully Winnicott’s transitional object helps us out of the skeptical cul-de-sac by foregrounding our agency in choosing our illusory experiences and thereby restoring their hopeful character. It also matches Mark Zuckerberg’s informed view on what happens on Facebook. - http://iain.land/posts/20170201-transitional-object.html http://iain.land/posts/20170201-transitional-object.html
sandov 9y ago
How can anyone read that website with all that crap around the text?
tyu100 9y ago
Beautiful article. The moral panic around social media is getting ridiculous, and as mentioned in this article and elsewhere, there's very little evidence that any of the C.A. targeting had any measurable effect on anything.
- jessaustin 9y ago
  It is a moral panic, but since the likely outcome is fewer people using Facebook, which is an awful blight on humanity, that's fine.
Feniks 9y ago
Facebook, blacks, browns, gays, single mother families, liberals, Chinese, guns, videogames. Scapegoats is something the US is really good at.
notacoward 9y ago
The references to Obama (and Cruz) are empty both-sides-ism, but then this is McMegan. On the other hand, she might almost unintentionally have a point about the need for people to feel that they've identified and fixed the single root cause of a problem. We see that all the time in programming - bug fixes and rewrites that are highly satisfying until the bug reappears and turns out to have had an entirely different cause. Even if these things don't work in practical terms, they have an important psychological effect of providing closure. Seeking that might well be at least part of why this story has driven even more important ones out of this news cycle.
bshastry 9y ago
BTW, how does Google fare on these counts? I am sure they have as much data, or perhaps more, on all of us.
KirinDave 9y ago
This article is amazing to me. You've literally got the e staff and c suite on camera talking about voter manipulation, compromising politicians with human trafficking victims, revealing that state governments were cooperating with Trump's media org directly, all while using a service that not only failed to put adequate controls on how partners used data but also provided services which are illegal when used for elections under the letter of the law. But no, she implies, this mass panic is unjustified. After all, something something Hilary Clinton. Something something information society. There is nothing we can do because we can and should be powerless to regulate companies. What an awful opinion piece.
mdekkers 9y ago
I stopped reading after "Facebook feeds lit up with outraged Hillary Clinton voters announcing that they were shutting down their accounts" Not because of my politics (non-american) but because that set the intellectual level of the author. Life is too short to be reading this kind of garbage

155 points by grej 9y ago

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5520303/Obama-campaign-director-reveals-Facebook-ALLOWED-data.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5520303/Obama-campai... "'They were on our side': Obama campaign director reveals Facebook ALLOWED them to mine American users' profiles in 2012 because they were supportive of the Democrats" Is this news in the USA?

phronese 9y ago
I quick scan through the news search engine finds that almost exclusively right wing sources publish on this. Be critical about such news articles.
- knowThySelfx 9y ago
  So what about left wing published news? Automatically becomes legit? By the way, I didn't know that site was right or left.
  - skocznymroczny 9y ago
    "Independent" "fact-checkers" will make sure of that.
    - jessaustin 9y ago
      They've thought of everything!

blunte 9y ago

"A new communications medium" ... "panic"...? Since when is Facebook a new communciation(s [sic]) medium? Her word choices and her not so deft deflections make me almost wonder if this is very subtle satire. The only other conclusion I can come up with is that she's a Mercer or Koch shill. The tactics employed with this CA/FB saga were far seedier and subversive than just standard targeted advertising (and I believe she knows this). What tripe.

scardine 9y ago

Oh, poor Mark! Such a patsy is the perfect scapegoat. /s The company he founded reflects his work ethics. Personally I don't care that much when the bully starts being bullied. You reap what you sow.

blunte 9y ago
From the early days: Sourced from http://www.businessinsider.com/embarrassing-and-damaging-zuckerberg-ims-confirmed-by-zuckerberg-the-new-yorker-2010-9?international=true&r=US&IR=T http://www.businessinsider.com/embarrassing-and-damaging-zuc... ZUCK: yea so if you ever need info about anyone at harvard ZUCK: just ask ZUCK: i have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, sns FRIEND: 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
hanspeter 9y ago
This sentiment confuses me. Why do people dislike Zuckerberg by default? How does it happen that anyone sees him as a bully?
- 908087 9y ago
  What does "dislike by default" mean? Are you implying that people don't actually have reasons to dislike him based on the actions of himself and his company through the years? It's not like people just decided "I don't know who Mark Zuckerberg is yet, but I despise him".
  - hanspeter 9y ago
    It seems that anything praiseworthy Zuckerberg does never generates praise. On the other hand any opportunity to criticize him is always exercised.
- r00fus 9y ago
  Exemplar: 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...

NiklasMort 9y ago

as always way too late the people with the tinfoil hats predicted all this in the 90s but nobody was listening (except "THEM")

jklinger410 9y ago

Considering how many different companies hate Facebook for stealing your attention from them...this is long overdue. Here's looking at you ISPs, Telcos, Ad Platforms, so-on. Your campaign is working pretty well so far.

zxcb1 9y ago

Advertising and propaganda are basically the same thing. It is reasonable to believe that if one works, the other does too. They are tools to shape preferences, question is how they have been used and will be.

yohann305 9y ago

I saw it coming a few months ago. Didn't you? There is a group of people/organizations acting as puppet masters, dictating what's going to be the next big topic. This is a lot more scarier than the FB story itself. It would be great if someone starts digging it out and uncover what's really happening, who are they and what their motives are. Media started feeding us stories how social networks are "bad for you", then slowly ramped up to give us the "piece de resistance": your soul (your data) has been sold to the devil. Come on, isn't anyone else seeing it?! ps: we have been programmed to believe this is not happening so i won't be surprised if this gets down-voted by the sheeple... ps#2: it might not be a group or organization but just the result of a poorly built internet eco-system.

Ritsuko_akagi 9y ago
What do you mean exactly?
mcphage 9y ago
> There is a group of people/organizations acting as puppet masters, dictating what's going to be the next big topic. It’s almost like there’s a “trending news” sidebar that these shadowy people added and put in whatever they feel like and whoops we’re talking about Facebook again aren’t we?
- yohann305 9y ago
  touché! You're bringing up a good point. It might actually not be someone, but just a poorly built internet eco-system.
rubidium 9y ago
Tactical note: If your goal is to rally the troops, it's usually good practice not to refer to people as "sheeple" or talk about down-votes. The media decisions on "what shows up in the news" is well known, but under-reported (for obvious reasons). Whatever shows up in the news is meant to increase the value of these 6 companies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_cross-ownership_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_cross-ownership_in_the_U...) and advance their CEO/boards personal agendas for the United States and world. If you take what shows up in standard media's headlines as "what's worth talking about" you are playing their game.

AndrewKemendo 9y ago

This is probably the most even keeled and concise analysis of this story to date, with a reasonable laymans exposition on the technical subtlety between what CA did starting in 2013 and what the Obama Administration did in 2012. Not sure that it's a perfectly direct line between [Trump won] > (Facebook is to blame), because the story seems to be mostly about user data, but it's pretty close.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

omw192168 9y ago

Many Americans take their "duty" of uploading every last personal detail of their lives, very seriously. You cant stop them from uploading. If its not Facebook, it will be another platform.

matt_s 9y ago

Giving the visceral comments and opinions on Facebook, those that probably saw ads were already committed to one candidate or another. There is rarely a discussion on the internet where someone is convinced to switch to a different candidate/party. I doubt an advertisement would get someone to switch. However, if there were bots and trolls posting inflammatory content that motivated voters that would have other wise stayed home - that could have influenced turnout and an election. If those bots and trolls were funded by a foreign government, then that is even more concerning. I would like to see 'mainstream media' focus more on that part of it, this Cambridge Analytica company sounds like they were really good at taking campaign money.

WallWextra 9y ago

Here is, roughly, the media's playbook: 1. Never stop talking about Trump. Mention his name 300 times an hour on CNN. He's not a serious candidate, but he is entertaining so they give him free publicity until he is a serious candidate. 2. Start blathering about Hillary's emails, as if that were somehow important. 3. Now Trump is elected. In these tough times, it is more important than ever to support high-quality independent journalism. Subscription numbers swell. 4. We need someone to blame for the outcome of this election. Obviously it is the fault of Facebook, Google, etc, who have been taking the media's ad revenue. Not the fault of the media who would never shut up about Trump.

ixtli 9y ago
I realize that this is tangential to what you're talking about but your comment reminded me of it strongly: As much as it's clear that there was some funny business with trump's people and russia, the way liberals are salivating over mueller's investigation makes me uncomfortable. they need the legal system to pronounce in some way that trump and his people broke the rules, in order to avoid acknowledging that the general thrust of all of this is the system working as it was designed.
- WallWextra 9y ago
  It's like how the 2008 election didn't count, because Obama is actually a Kenyan. People can't just lose an election anymore.
  - ixtli 9y ago
    I like to talk about social issues and politics and stuff but the more I do it in public the more I run into what feels like "politics-as-basketball." It's really begun to feel like team sports as opposed to a critical analysis of conditions and power analysis.
    - mieseratte 9y ago
      As someone in their mid-twenties, I have to ask the older HNers: has it always been this "stupid," so vitriolic and hateful? If not, when did it become this way?

throwaway5752 9y ago

Aren't scapegoats usually blameless? edit: one of many, many articles you can find criticizing Megan McCardle https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2018/02/megan-mcardle-fails-upwards-again-this-time-to-the.html https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2018/02/megan-mcardle... ... this is not a non-sequitur attack on her thesis, but I am saying that she has a long track record that one should be aware of before reading her OpEds.

PunchTornado 9y ago
No, but I seriously doubt the idiots at Cambridge Analytica and the guy with pink hair were the genius masterminds who can swing political votes through targeted advertising. People don't like to admit that the people in swing states are mostly against globalisation, wall street and the system as it is. Trump spent less than half what Clinton did on ads. I truly believe he could have spent nothing and still won. Voters are just pissed off at the current state of affairs.
- dwild 9y ago
  Did you forget the fake news during the election? I'm from Quebec and I remember being ashamed to learn that some people near I lived made a living pushing fake news website just with the help of Google Ads on these pages. They made a profit with fake news. Do you see now how much cheaper it is to push a fake narrative that people want to believe? The share button is the cheapest ad campaign you can ever hope for. You only pay for the first view, all the share are free. It also helps when another country pays for your ad campaigns ;) but that's a whole other story.
  - PunchTornado 9y ago
    The deal here is the "want to believe". People who believed those faked news were voting for Trump anyway. It takes a lot to switch from Democrat to Conservative, not just some news that you read on the net. Political opinions are not that fluid and don't change easy.
    - 9y ago

bshastry 9y ago

I like the critical thinking in this article. Problem is, I am critical about it's critique. Just because Ted Cruz made use of the same platform and did not win, does not mean there is no problem with what Facebook is doing. They are still thieving people's data and selling it for a nice sum.

PunchTornado 9y ago
What the hell are you talking about? There is no stealing. People agreed to give their data to facebook and do whatever with it. read the terms and conditions of using fb.
- blunte 9y ago
  It's not that simple. Facebook's shifting privacy defaults are what enabled some of the deeper reach of the CA mining tactics and are arguably what gave them much more information than probably even Facebook had intended. That's not to say that people are pretty careless about privacy management (and security), but this went well beyond what the informed public thought was happening (or possible) on FB during those years.
throwawayyx96 9y ago
I don't think the author was trying to excuse Facebook's business model by bringing up Cruz. She was pointing out that if this 'psychological profiling' technique from CA was really a silver bullet for swaying votes, Cruz would have done better in his run the Republican nomination. It's a single data point that arguably isn't worth much, but it was interesting to me as I'd not heard of any other prominent politicians using the service. Balanced article by WAPO in my view.
- jessaustin 9y ago
  I thought Cruz came in 2nd? To the guy who was on every channel of TV all the time. Keep in mind R primary voters get more of their news from TV than the general electorate, which explains why Trump beat Cruz more than he beat Clinton. Keep in mind also that Cruz is a total pariah in Washington. The only people who will talk to him are those who are paid to do so. Based on previous form, one would not have expected Jeb and the rest to all lose to Trump and Cruz.

charlysl 9y ago

I find the use of the word "scapegoat" interesting. From the little I know about anthropology, when some calamity befell the village/horde/tribe (disease/drought/crime etc) the shaman would magically point out the scapegoat as the culprit, who invariably was someone people didn't like to begin with; because of this, such decisions were rarely contested regardless of their plausibility and the scapegoat was promptly disposed of. I suspect that most people are as clueless about what is really going on as those villagers. Those who control the media, though, just like the shaman, are extremely adept at sizing up the public emotion. For what it's worth, if I understand it correctly, the most interesting aspect of this is that using machine learning techniques they managed to translate the actual tags that they wanted to target (gay/square/racist/unemployed/man/rightwing/white/latino etc etc) to the less revealing tags actually offered by fb, and in this way direct propaganda more accurately.

dalbasal 9y ago

All the terms and templates we are using legally and in the media... they are painting a totally (imo) misleading picture. FB's "crime" is painted as data security. The "criminals" are trump, Bannon, Putin or whoever is alleged to have used this data to "manipulate public opinion." This misses the entire point. FB's business model is based on using large datasets of mundane (in isolation) information in order to "profile" people. More specifically, score people for likelihood to do X, where X is refinance a loan, go to a diet seminar or whatever an advertiser wants. The key point is large quantities of mundane data, not necessarily stuff that is protected. Someone got a hold of a small subset of FBs dataset and presumably used it to target political messages or whatnot. This is exactly what all FB advertiser's do every day. If we're calling this incident "manipulating public opinion" or "foreign meddling"... Then the problem is 10,000X times bigger than this case. This stuff is all around us.

Chardok 9y ago
This article practically comes off as apologetic for Facebook and absolutely ignores the point of outrage for a lot of people. Great example of language designed to lead. "Facebook, of course, lets you target exactly those boring, old demographic qualities" - just boring old mundane everyday Facebook. No worries here "To be clear, what Cambridge Analytica did was somewhat worse" - Just a bit worse, but not too far from the norm "Facebook no longer allows anyone to do this, thankfully, and hasn’t for years" - this has been a non-issue for years, what are you worried about?
- dalbasal 9y ago
  Exactly what I meant. This is made possible by the way the issue is framed, as a data security issue. Well, it isn't hard to imagine an identical scenario playing out where no data was "leaked," with everything being legal and normative data collection. If FB had done with their own data whatever these 3rd parties are alleged to have done... would any laws have been broken?
maxerickson 9y ago
As I understand it, the Trump campaign mostly used Facebook's in house ad targeting services. In contrast to the Clinton campaign that relied on their own data team for targeting. It's hard to get a read on it, but there are plenty of people slagging Cambridge Analytica as being pretty worthless.

supernumerary 9y ago

I have writen about why we scape-goat Facebook here - basically we are trained to be highly sceptical of illusions (cf. Plato's allegory of the cave): http://iain.land/posts/20170201-transitional-object.html http://iain.land/posts/20170201-transitional-object.html And this kind of scape-goating - throws the 'baby out with the bath-water' as it were. Basically we need illusions and they effect how we all live. Especially when we all agree on what illusions we want to share...

madmax96 9y ago

The meta-narrative of this thread: people have outsourced their thinking to massive media companies who have a rational self-interest to capture their audience's attention in order to increase revenue. People assume that these media companies are portrayers of truth. While these companies are not (usually) telling lies, they are presenting a point-of-view that suits their interests. The narratives being consumed by the public are designed to keep them in fear and outrage. By being in a state of fear and outrage, the mob produces more stories for the media to sell back to it to induce more fear and outrage. The other day, I took a taxi. The driver was talking about how he stopped logging into Facebook, consuming the news, etc. and was instead focusing on spending more quality time with his wife and daughters. He was the happiest person I spoke to yesterday. We already had what we needed to be happy. Entertainment tools like Facebook are good insofar as we are made better people. Perhaps it's time for us to reflect on how satisfied we are with the people we've become, and accept the personal responsibility of bettering ourselves before we try to save the world. "Turn on, tune in, and drop out."

supernumerary 9y ago

Our most trenchant and persistent criticism of Facebook has been rooted in a skeptical view of its illusory component; one where illusory experience is scapegoated as our fatal flaw to be subsequently exploited by Facebook’s evil machinations. We view the net-worth of its board of directors as being directly proportional to their malign influence in our society, pulling the wool over our eyes with an addictive illusion while voraciously funneling our private information into vast data-centers where AI is trained to new heights of persuasiveness. In this view ‘The Filter Bubble’ and ‘Fake News’ can easily be seen to be be mere effects of the following feedback loop: User engages with material that matches their base desires, they are seduced and enveloped by these illusions, and the illusory experience of having their internal life seemingly manifest in the real world, this feels important to them so they form groups on this basis, like the prisoners in Plato's allegory of the cave. Facebook optimizes for engagement, presenting this user with more specialized material, eventually this material detaches from reality altogether. However this results in a skeptical cul-de-sac where the meaningfulness of Facebook is ignored. Instead it is scapegoated so that we can largely avoid taking responsibility for our actions. To refute these claims Mark Zuckerberg has emphasised our agency in deciding what Facebook is for and does. Regarding Fake News he has said: > “I do think there is a certain profound lack of empathy in asserting that the only reason someone could have voted the way they did is they saw some fake news … If you believe that, then I don’t think you have internalized the message the Trump supporters are trying to send in this election.” And regarding the Filter Bubble: > “The research also shows something that is a little bit less inspiring, which is that we study not only people’s exposure in Newsfeed to content from different points of view, but then what people click on and engage with. By far the biggest filter in the system is not that the content isn’t there, [or] they don’t have friends who support the other candidate or are of another religion, [it’s that] you just don’t click on it. You actually tune it out when you see it. You have your world view. You go through, and I think that we would all be surprised how many things that don’t conform to our world view that we just tune out.” Usefully Winnicott’s transitional object helps us out of the skeptical cul-de-sac by foregrounding our agency in choosing our illusory experiences and thereby restoring their hopeful character. It also matches Mark Zuckerberg’s informed view on what happens on Facebook. - http://iain.land/posts/20170201-transitional-object.html http://iain.land/posts/20170201-transitional-object.html

sandov 9y ago

How can anyone read that website with all that crap around the text?

tyu100 9y ago

Beautiful article. The moral panic around social media is getting ridiculous, and as mentioned in this article and elsewhere, there's very little evidence that any of the C.A. targeting had any measurable effect on anything.

jessaustin 9y ago
It is a moral panic, but since the likely outcome is fewer people using Facebook, which is an awful blight on humanity, that's fine.

Feniks 9y ago

Facebook, blacks, browns, gays, single mother families, liberals, Chinese, guns, videogames. Scapegoats is something the US is really good at.

notacoward 9y ago

The references to Obama (and Cruz) are empty both-sides-ism, but then this is McMegan. On the other hand, she might almost unintentionally have a point about the need for people to feel that they've identified and fixed the single root cause of a problem. We see that all the time in programming - bug fixes and rewrites that are highly satisfying until the bug reappears and turns out to have had an entirely different cause. Even if these things don't work in practical terms, they have an important psychological effect of providing closure. Seeking that might well be at least part of why this story has driven even more important ones out of this news cycle.

bshastry 9y ago

BTW, how does Google fare on these counts? I am sure they have as much data, or perhaps more, on all of us.

KirinDave 9y ago

This article is amazing to me. You've literally got the e staff and c suite on camera talking about voter manipulation, compromising politicians with human trafficking victims, revealing that state governments were cooperating with Trump's media org directly, all while using a service that not only failed to put adequate controls on how partners used data but also provided services which are illegal when used for elections under the letter of the law. But no, she implies, this mass panic is unjustified. After all, something something Hilary Clinton. Something something information society. There is nothing we can do because we can and should be powerless to regulate companies. What an awful opinion piece.

mdekkers 9y ago

I stopped reading after "Facebook feeds lit up with outraged Hillary Clinton voters announcing that they were shutting down their accounts" Not because of my politics (non-american) but because that set the intellectual level of the author. Life is too short to be reading this kind of garbage