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> Isn't the Cambridge Analytics headline really just, "Group doesn't follow website's terms of service from five years ago". I think the the headline people ar

by m52go 9y ago

> Isn't the Cambridge Analytics headline really just, "Group doesn't follow website's terms of service from five years ago". I think the the headline people are seeing is more like "Group doesn't follow website's terms of service from five years ago, and ends up helping Donald Trump win presidency." A big part of the reason this has become so big a story is political.

TAForObvReasons 9y ago
"A foreign entity that was not registered as foreign agents collaborated with a multinational corporation to influence the presidential election" is why people are outraged. But it's likely that none of this would have been investigated had Clinton won the election
- fatbird 9y ago
  If Clinton had won, the propaganda and dirty tricks would have failed, and so would have seemed much lower priority.
fatbird 9y ago
Cambridge Analytica’s actions had real world political consequences, so yes it’s political for that reason. But another angle of the CA portion of the story is that they were ratfucking in a very effective way—such as publishing fake news about BLM activists were organizing violent rallies, then broadcasting that to likely Trump voters. In some cases they even organized BLM events with incitement to commit violence, then pushed true stories about the events that suited their narrative. In other words, CA demonstrated a tremendous vulnerability in our political dialogue to pure propaganda and dirty tricks that social media, in its algorithmic purity, was supposed to make less likely, not more. Some of the fallout of this affair will be a tremendous distrust that any provider of social media is an honest broker of what others use their services for. If my news feed is tainted by a group like CA manipulating it at the algorithm level, what hope can I have that anything I’m receiving over the Internet isn’t compromised? Maybe the stories are fake; maybe they’re true but the balance of stories is altered; maybe the facts are true-ish but slanted or selective. These are all legitimate concerns in the normal marketplace of ideas, but now we find the marketplace of ideas is deliberately compromised by malicious entities.
- m52go 9y ago
  > If my news feed is tainted by a group like CA manipulating it at the algorithm level, what hope can I have that anything I’m receiving over the Internet isn’t compromised? Was it CA doing the manipulating, or was it Facebook? It's Facebook that runs Facebook...CA was merely taking advantage of Facebook to the fullest extent it could. I'm not saying what CA did was right, but your comment seems to suggest Facebook was somehow helplessly complicit in executing CA's malicious plan.
  - fatbird 9y ago
    They weren’t helpless, they were complicit, at least if early reports are still accurate that Facebook (meaning the Facebook employees who were actually assisting CA) knew what CA was doing while they advised CA on maximizing their data haul via the same techniques the Obama campaign had used in 2012 that had never been disabled. Facebook looks amoral and negligent in this story: All they cared about was making money by selling more data to a client with bottomless pockets. CA was using the data to maximize the effectiveness of their ratfucking operation, that depended upon understanding how Facebook’s newsfeed algorithms worked.
wdr1 9y ago
> I think the the headline people are seeing is more like "Group doesn't follow website's terms of service from five years ago, and ends up helping Donald Trump win presidency." Exactly. The Obama campaign already acknowledge they did the same thing, but on a bigger scale. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/facebooks-rules-for-accessing-user-data-lured-more-than-just-cambridge-analytica/2018/03/19/31f6979c-658e-43d6-a71f-afdd8bf1308b_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/facebooks-ru... "In 2011, Carol Davidsen, director of data integration and media analytics for Obama for America, built a database of every American voter using the same Facebook developer tool used by Cambridge, known as the social graph API. Any time people used Facebook’s log-in button to sign on to the campaign’s website, the Obama data scientists were able to access their profile as well as their friends’ information. That allowed them to chart the closeness of people’s relationships and make estimates about which people would be most likely to influence other people in their network to vote. “We ingested the entire U.S. social graph,” Davidsen said in an interview. “We would ask permission to basically scrape your profile, and also scrape your friends, basically anything that was available to scrape. We scraped it all.”"
- softawre 9y ago
  > We would ask permission They asked each user for permission to look at their social graph, in an app designed for this task (Obama election).

by m52go 9y ago

TAForObvReasons 9y ago

"A foreign entity that was not registered as foreign agents collaborated with a multinational corporation to influence the presidential election" is why people are outraged. But it's likely that none of this would have been investigated had Clinton won the election

fatbird 9y ago
If Clinton had won, the propaganda and dirty tricks would have failed, and so would have seemed much lower priority.

fatbird 9y ago

Cambridge Analytica’s actions had real world political consequences, so yes it’s political for that reason. But another angle of the CA portion of the story is that they were ratfucking in a very effective way—such as publishing fake news about BLM activists were organizing violent rallies, then broadcasting that to likely Trump voters. In some cases they even organized BLM events with incitement to commit violence, then pushed true stories about the events that suited their narrative. In other words, CA demonstrated a tremendous vulnerability in our political dialogue to pure propaganda and dirty tricks that social media, in its algorithmic purity, was supposed to make less likely, not more. Some of the fallout of this affair will be a tremendous distrust that any provider of social media is an honest broker of what others use their services for. If my news feed is tainted by a group like CA manipulating it at the algorithm level, what hope can I have that anything I’m receiving over the Internet isn’t compromised? Maybe the stories are fake; maybe they’re true but the balance of stories is altered; maybe the facts are true-ish but slanted or selective. These are all legitimate concerns in the normal marketplace of ideas, but now we find the marketplace of ideas is deliberately compromised by malicious entities.

m52go 9y ago
> If my news feed is tainted by a group like CA manipulating it at the algorithm level, what hope can I have that anything I’m receiving over the Internet isn’t compromised? Was it CA doing the manipulating, or was it Facebook? It's Facebook that runs Facebook...CA was merely taking advantage of Facebook to the fullest extent it could. I'm not saying what CA did was right, but your comment seems to suggest Facebook was somehow helplessly complicit in executing CA's malicious plan.
- fatbird 9y ago
  They weren’t helpless, they were complicit, at least if early reports are still accurate that Facebook (meaning the Facebook employees who were actually assisting CA) knew what CA was doing while they advised CA on maximizing their data haul via the same techniques the Obama campaign had used in 2012 that had never been disabled. Facebook looks amoral and negligent in this story: All they cared about was making money by selling more data to a client with bottomless pockets. CA was using the data to maximize the effectiveness of their ratfucking operation, that depended upon understanding how Facebook’s newsfeed algorithms worked.

wdr1 9y ago

> I think the the headline people are seeing is more like "Group doesn't follow website's terms of service from five years ago, and ends up helping Donald Trump win presidency." Exactly. The Obama campaign already acknowledge they did the same thing, but on a bigger scale. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/facebooks-rules-for-accessing-user-data-lured-more-than-just-cambridge-analytica/2018/03/19/31f6979c-658e-43d6-a71f-afdd8bf1308b_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/facebooks-ru... "In 2011, Carol Davidsen, director of data integration and media analytics for Obama for America, built a database of every American voter using the same Facebook developer tool used by Cambridge, known as the social graph API. Any time people used Facebook’s log-in button to sign on to the campaign’s website, the Obama data scientists were able to access their profile as well as their friends’ information. That allowed them to chart the closeness of people’s relationships and make estimates about which people would be most likely to influence other people in their network to vote. “We ingested the entire U.S. social graph,” Davidsen said in an interview. “We would ask permission to basically scrape your profile, and also scrape your friends, basically anything that was available to scrape. We scraped it all.”"

softawre 9y ago
> We would ask permission They asked each user for permission to look at their social graph, in an app designed for this task (Obama election).