5 ms·

None of these changes will do anything to fix the basic issue. All the following aspects were derived from watching the testimony Christopher Wylie gave before

None of these changes will do anything to fix the basic issue. All the following aspects were derived from watching the testimony Christopher Wylie gave before the UK House of Commons Select Committee. He's the CA whistleblower. It's a very illuminating watch - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5g6IJm7YJQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5g6IJm7YJQ The problem is the foll: [1] CA wrote a trojan FB app to derive psychographic user data for FB users. This let them determine for example how susceptible you were to misleading or fake news. [2] They then used FB targeting to target these specific people at scale, pushing extreme fake news such as "Obama moving troops to Texas to ensure 3rd term". This is military grade psyops applied at unprecedented scale. [3] These people, as they were susceptible to manipulation, would then convert at unusually high rates. He says 5% or higher conversion. Conversion was measured as an action like donating money or signing up for a mailing list. In this way, the entire democratic process was corrupted. The issue is not that there were dirty tricks in the 2016 election. The issue here is that the existence of FB's app platform allows the detailed psychological profiling of millions of people on scale, and then allows them to be targeted at scale using that profiling. This is a clear and present danger to democracy. Even with these changes, a rogue app such as CA's would be allowed on the FB platform. FB has no visibility into how app data can be used offline.

randall 9y ago
These would reduce the scale with which it would be able to operate. Someone would have to interact with the app directly, as opposed to their friends' friends' friend.
- not_that_noob 9y ago
  Can you point to the particular new limitation that will have this effect? I can't find anything in the announced changes that do this. The key attraction of FB - viral marketing for an app - is something that FB wouldn't touch I think.
  - koko775 9y ago
    The friends-of-friends change happened in 2014. Cambridge Analytica's method stopped working back then as apps could no longer acquire permission to query friends of friends.
    - not_that_noob 9y ago
      Someone can still write an app to distribute on FB, and can use its platform's ability to foster virality to make it take off. That's a core feature of FB. The change you're talking about, if indeed it was made, may reduce the speed of vitality a tad, but wouldn't really affect the ability for an app to spread virally.
      - koko775 9y ago
        Can you cite any sources? What I've heard was that virality for apps drove off a cliff in 2014.
not_that_noob 9y ago
What's interesting is there have been more than the usual number of downvotes for this thread. I wonder if using IP info admins can determine if these downvotes are clustering from within an org?
- panarky 9y ago
  Yes, I've noticed this on other HN posts about Facebook. Lots of downvotes without comments. Detecting and preventing brigading needs to be more sophisticated than just looking at IP addresses. Need to determine if groups of users are acting in concert across multiple posts and comments, regardless of IP.
  - traek 9y ago
    What if a group of users believes and behaves similarly, without coördinating amongst themselves? Should that be prevented? It's not really distinguishable from the scenario you prevented.
    - panarky 9y ago
      Like-minded people acting independently have a very different signature from organized campaigns of brigades and sock puppets. Independent actors are far less correlated than centrally orchestrated groups.
      - makomk 9y ago
        Having seen many discussions about whether some group is a brigade of sock puppets or not, the signature of like-minded people acting independently is that they hold views that the person judging them agrees with, whereas anyone who holds views they dislike is clearly a brigade of sock puppets. This seems to hold across the board, and judging based on how "correlated" they are doesn't change this because everyone is biased towards thinking of people who're like them as more diverse in viewpoint and outsiders as all alike.
tzs 9y ago
Note that eliminating the ability to do detailed profiling and precise targeting does NOT stop this kind of manipulation. It just makes it more expensive. Those people who will respond to your fake news in a way favorable to you are still out there. It just means that instead of being able to target a group of say, 10 000 people that will give you a 5% conversion rate, you might have to pay to target 1 000 000 people with a 0.05% conversion rate. This raises an interesting question: would we be better off if instead of restricting data we make it more widely available? As suggested in the second paragraph above, restricting the data doesn't stop those with enough money from influencing susceptible people at scale. It just makes it more expensive, so only the very wealthy can do it. If we make the data more open, we make the playing field more level, perhaps giving smaller, less well financed groups a chance to compete with the billionaire backed groups and causes.
- not_that_noob 9y ago
  Quite true and an interesting proposition. Especially with regard to transparency - if we all can see the data FB sees on what ads were targeted to whom - then that might help as well, as outsiders can watch for dark patterns. In addition, I think they need to use AI to verify if posts and ads can be fake before allowing it to go live. Of course, doing so would mean fewer clicks. The more extreme the info, the greater the clicks. This is at the heart of Zuck’s dilemma - to curb this problem in a meaningful way means reduced revenue.
- FridgeSeal 9y ago
  The idea is to discourage people from using propaganda to manipulate democracy. I honestly don't think that throwing open the floodgates so that effectively anyone can would fix the problem at all. Realistically all you're going to do there is make it cheaper and easier for existing players and worse for everyone subjected to it.
  - creaghpatr 9y ago
    One solution to OP's problem is to strengthen libel and slander laws to deter people from casually publishing fraudulent news, akin to a DMCA takedown request but perhaps a bit more bite. In this case I would distinguish publishing from 'sharing' with a bit more legal finesse. The problem is the press will scream bloody murder at any attempt to reign in their right to publish, perhaps rightfully so. IANAL.
white-flame 9y ago
> In this way, the entire democratic process was corrupted. Let's call this what it is: Propaganda. Same as it always was, just with more input tailoring & curating it. The biggest problem I still see here is that people expect "truth" from random Facebook posts. It's a website where basically anybody can upload anything. It's 4chan with a few more rules. Democracy works best with an informed voter base, but misinformation has been there from the beginning. I don't see how this "corrupted the democratic process" any differently than in the past where propaganda was being pushed through other common media outlets, and making money off catering to their audience's outrage and gullibilities. Judgment of information is something where voting citizens need to be personally vigilant, no matter their sources. That vigilance includes recognizing echo chambers and lack of exposure to a breadth of ideas.
- DeRock 9y ago
  The problem isn’t necessarily “fake news”, it’s the ability to target it. This targeting subjects each person to a completely personalized information flow. It’s one thing to have propaganda be broadcast to all, where as a society we can discuss, debate and choose to accept or reject it. With hyper targeting that process can’t exist. How am I supposed to talk to my neighbours or colleagues about current events (or “fake news”) that I don’t know exists? Democracy does not exist in isolation. We can reject the lunatic town crier, but it is much harder when he knows you deeply and is whispering in your ear.
  - white-flame 9y ago
    > How am I supposed to talk to my neighbours or colleagues about current events (or “fake news”) that I don’t know exists? I don't quite understand. This reads really negatively to me, like you want to proactively judge what others privately engage in so you can "re-educate" them in case you disagree, and lack of access to that is a problem? That's a horribly authoritarian view, compared to simply broad exposure to shine light on the multiple sides of issues, to promote more informed judgment (which AI-driven content "optimization" specifically works against, as its own broader problem). > We can reject the lunatic town crier, but it is much harder when he knows you deeply and is whispering in your ear. Of course, on the receiving side of info, with somebody with deep knowledge of you trying to convince you of something, again that's vigilance and exposure on your part. We all have family members in this exact role, trying to convince us all of their viewpoint, with intimate knowledge of us. What's the difference if it's a 3rd party? What if it's you promoting your ideas, and how would you want any "safety" mechanisms affecting you? The responsibility always falls on the person receiving information, not to police other's receipt of information. The latter ends up with people arrested for googling pressure cookers.
mhneu 9y ago
Right. Exactly. And part of the propaganda, even today, is the US right trying to equate that somehow to Obama. They are relying on wan, sad whataboutism: "When Obama used social media it was ok", "If Hillary had done this it would be ok". No. The Trump campaign spent $100M on facebook ads. If they are so proud of those ads, let's see them. Release them. Let's see what they were telling people, and who they were targeting. For normal political advertising on TV or even direct mail, it's hard to keep what you're doing a secret. For online targeted advertising, there is no such constraint. We need to figure out a way to make all political advertising, and who it's targeted to, publicly disclosed. Sunshine helps.
- nopriorarrests 9y ago
  Hmmm. Do you expect to find something very outrageous in those ads? If that would be the case, I think the press would have informed us already. It's not like they are very indulgent towards Teh Donald. And it's hard to spend $100M on facebook ads with some outrageous content without anyone noticing. Screenshots will be posted, shared, etc. So, I don't expect anything that wasn't said by Trump himself during his stump speeches and pre-election rallies. "Build Teh Wall", et al.
  - not_that_noob 9y ago
    FB never revealed the content of these ads, so no one other than FB knows.
    - uptown 9y ago
      Then they fixed a "bug" and removed content from their platform: https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2017-10-13/facebook-removed-data-related-to-russian-ads-that-ran-during-2016-election https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2017-10-13/fac...
feelin_googley 9y ago
"It will also prevent apps from using Facebook Login to collect users' personal information, including details like their religious or political views, relationship status, education and work history, and more. ... In an alarming revelation, he said that recent investigations into data privacy have revealed malicious actors cycling through hundreds of thousands of IP addresses in order to search for users by their phone numbers and scrape their public profile information. Until now, users have had to opt out of making their profiles searchable by phone number. Most, Zuckerberg said, never opted out. Though the CEO accepted blame for all of these data privacy and trust issues, saying, "It was my mistake," he also often put the onus on Facebook users to know better. He mentioned, for instance, that the only information that bad actors would be able to scrape using a phone number was information that was public on Facebook user profiles. Of the researcher who built the data-scraping app for Cambridge Analytica, Zuckerberg said, "Yes, he broke the policy, he broke people's expectations, but also, people chose to share that data with him." And yet it was Zuckerberg and the company he built that made people's data privacy settings so open by default, and made it difficult to find, understand, and adjust those settings." [ Poll: Is "open by default" congruent with "privacy by design"? ] Source: https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-exposed-87-million-users-to-cambridge-analytica/ https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-exposed-87-million-user...
davidf18 9y ago
The focus should be on news transparency. NY Times, Wash Post, the major networks basically censored how Candidate Clinton was helping foreigners displace Americans through H1-B Visa abuse. Nothing Trump is accused of doing is nearly as bad as Clinton wanting to displace American STEM workers with foreigners. Trump on the other hand, complained about H1-B Visa abuse as in the case of Disney of FL replacing 250 American STEM workers with cheaper labor from India. Indeed Obama called Clinton, "The Senator from Punjab [India]". Google on that term, and you'll find these articles. http://blogs.chicagotribune.com/news_columnists_ezorn/2007/06/dpunjab_funny_d.html http://blogs.chicagotribune.com/news_columnists_ezorn/2007/0... From 2007: HILLARY CLINTON (D-PUNJAB)'S PERSONAL FINANCIAL AND POLITICAL TIES TO INDIA The Clintons have reaped significant financial rewards from their relationship with the Indian community, both in their personal finances and Hillary's campaign fundraising.... http://www.breitbart.com/2016-presidential-race/2016/09/20/hillary-clinton-record-on-visas/ http://www.breitbart.com/2016-presidential-race/2016/09/20/h... http://dailycaller.com/2016/07/27/dont-believe-clintons-crocodile-tears-over-lost-american-jobs/ http://dailycaller.com/2016/07/27/dont-believe-clintons-croc... How is it possible that the Democratic Party is so anti-American that they would nominate Clinton as their candidate? Obama met with the anti-Semite Farrakhan in 2005 before ever running for President, yet this key piece of information was censored as well. http://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/Why-did-Barack-Obama-meet-with-Louis-Farrakhan-in-2005-540510 http://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/Why-did-Barack-Obama-meet-with... MSM criticized Trump, but basically censored these critical pieces of information about Clinton and Obama. Trump never met with anti-Semites nor was he against American STEM workers.
johnchristopher 9y ago
Nice example. Do you have a screenshot of what the facebook feed of those prospects would look like (with ads) ?

randall 9y ago

These would reduce the scale with which it would be able to operate. Someone would have to interact with the app directly, as opposed to their friends' friends' friend.

not_that_noob 9y ago
Can you point to the particular new limitation that will have this effect? I can't find anything in the announced changes that do this. The key attraction of FB - viral marketing for an app - is something that FB wouldn't touch I think.
- koko775 9y ago
  The friends-of-friends change happened in 2014. Cambridge Analytica's method stopped working back then as apps could no longer acquire permission to query friends of friends.
  - not_that_noob 9y ago
    Someone can still write an app to distribute on FB, and can use its platform's ability to foster virality to make it take off. That's a core feature of FB. The change you're talking about, if indeed it was made, may reduce the speed of vitality a tad, but wouldn't really affect the ability for an app to spread virally.
    - koko775 9y ago
      Can you cite any sources? What I've heard was that virality for apps drove off a cliff in 2014.

not_that_noob 9y ago

What's interesting is there have been more than the usual number of downvotes for this thread. I wonder if using IP info admins can determine if these downvotes are clustering from within an org?

panarky 9y ago
Yes, I've noticed this on other HN posts about Facebook. Lots of downvotes without comments. Detecting and preventing brigading needs to be more sophisticated than just looking at IP addresses. Need to determine if groups of users are acting in concert across multiple posts and comments, regardless of IP.
- traek 9y ago
  What if a group of users believes and behaves similarly, without coördinating amongst themselves? Should that be prevented? It's not really distinguishable from the scenario you prevented.
  - panarky 9y ago
    Like-minded people acting independently have a very different signature from organized campaigns of brigades and sock puppets. Independent actors are far less correlated than centrally orchestrated groups.
    - makomk 9y ago
      Having seen many discussions about whether some group is a brigade of sock puppets or not, the signature of like-minded people acting independently is that they hold views that the person judging them agrees with, whereas anyone who holds views they dislike is clearly a brigade of sock puppets. This seems to hold across the board, and judging based on how "correlated" they are doesn't change this because everyone is biased towards thinking of people who're like them as more diverse in viewpoint and outsiders as all alike.

tzs 9y ago

Note that eliminating the ability to do detailed profiling and precise targeting does NOT stop this kind of manipulation. It just makes it more expensive. Those people who will respond to your fake news in a way favorable to you are still out there. It just means that instead of being able to target a group of say, 10 000 people that will give you a 5% conversion rate, you might have to pay to target 1 000 000 people with a 0.05% conversion rate. This raises an interesting question: would we be better off if instead of restricting data we make it more widely available? As suggested in the second paragraph above, restricting the data doesn't stop those with enough money from influencing susceptible people at scale. It just makes it more expensive, so only the very wealthy can do it. If we make the data more open, we make the playing field more level, perhaps giving smaller, less well financed groups a chance to compete with the billionaire backed groups and causes.

not_that_noob 9y ago
Quite true and an interesting proposition. Especially with regard to transparency - if we all can see the data FB sees on what ads were targeted to whom - then that might help as well, as outsiders can watch for dark patterns. In addition, I think they need to use AI to verify if posts and ads can be fake before allowing it to go live. Of course, doing so would mean fewer clicks. The more extreme the info, the greater the clicks. This is at the heart of Zuck’s dilemma - to curb this problem in a meaningful way means reduced revenue.
FridgeSeal 9y ago
The idea is to discourage people from using propaganda to manipulate democracy. I honestly don't think that throwing open the floodgates so that effectively anyone can would fix the problem at all. Realistically all you're going to do there is make it cheaper and easier for existing players and worse for everyone subjected to it.
- creaghpatr 9y ago
  One solution to OP's problem is to strengthen libel and slander laws to deter people from casually publishing fraudulent news, akin to a DMCA takedown request but perhaps a bit more bite. In this case I would distinguish publishing from 'sharing' with a bit more legal finesse. The problem is the press will scream bloody murder at any attempt to reign in their right to publish, perhaps rightfully so. IANAL.

white-flame 9y ago

> In this way, the entire democratic process was corrupted. Let's call this what it is: Propaganda. Same as it always was, just with more input tailoring & curating it. The biggest problem I still see here is that people expect "truth" from random Facebook posts. It's a website where basically anybody can upload anything. It's 4chan with a few more rules. Democracy works best with an informed voter base, but misinformation has been there from the beginning. I don't see how this "corrupted the democratic process" any differently than in the past where propaganda was being pushed through other common media outlets, and making money off catering to their audience's outrage and gullibilities. Judgment of information is something where voting citizens need to be personally vigilant, no matter their sources. That vigilance includes recognizing echo chambers and lack of exposure to a breadth of ideas.

DeRock 9y ago
The problem isn’t necessarily “fake news”, it’s the ability to target it. This targeting subjects each person to a completely personalized information flow. It’s one thing to have propaganda be broadcast to all, where as a society we can discuss, debate and choose to accept or reject it. With hyper targeting that process can’t exist. How am I supposed to talk to my neighbours or colleagues about current events (or “fake news”) that I don’t know exists? Democracy does not exist in isolation. We can reject the lunatic town crier, but it is much harder when he knows you deeply and is whispering in your ear.
- white-flame 9y ago
  > How am I supposed to talk to my neighbours or colleagues about current events (or “fake news”) that I don’t know exists? I don't quite understand. This reads really negatively to me, like you want to proactively judge what others privately engage in so you can "re-educate" them in case you disagree, and lack of access to that is a problem? That's a horribly authoritarian view, compared to simply broad exposure to shine light on the multiple sides of issues, to promote more informed judgment (which AI-driven content "optimization" specifically works against, as its own broader problem). > We can reject the lunatic town crier, but it is much harder when he knows you deeply and is whispering in your ear. Of course, on the receiving side of info, with somebody with deep knowledge of you trying to convince you of something, again that's vigilance and exposure on your part. We all have family members in this exact role, trying to convince us all of their viewpoint, with intimate knowledge of us. What's the difference if it's a 3rd party? What if it's you promoting your ideas, and how would you want any "safety" mechanisms affecting you? The responsibility always falls on the person receiving information, not to police other's receipt of information. The latter ends up with people arrested for googling pressure cookers.

mhneu 9y ago

Right. Exactly. And part of the propaganda, even today, is the US right trying to equate that somehow to Obama. They are relying on wan, sad whataboutism: "When Obama used social media it was ok", "If Hillary had done this it would be ok". No. The Trump campaign spent $100M on facebook ads. If they are so proud of those ads, let's see them. Release them. Let's see what they were telling people, and who they were targeting. For normal political advertising on TV or even direct mail, it's hard to keep what you're doing a secret. For online targeted advertising, there is no such constraint. We need to figure out a way to make all political advertising, and who it's targeted to, publicly disclosed. Sunshine helps.

nopriorarrests 9y ago
Hmmm. Do you expect to find something very outrageous in those ads? If that would be the case, I think the press would have informed us already. It's not like they are very indulgent towards Teh Donald. And it's hard to spend $100M on facebook ads with some outrageous content without anyone noticing. Screenshots will be posted, shared, etc. So, I don't expect anything that wasn't said by Trump himself during his stump speeches and pre-election rallies. "Build Teh Wall", et al.
- not_that_noob 9y ago
  FB never revealed the content of these ads, so no one other than FB knows.
  - uptown 9y ago
    Then they fixed a "bug" and removed content from their platform: https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2017-10-13/facebook-removed-data-related-to-russian-ads-that-ran-during-2016-election https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2017-10-13/fac...

feelin_googley 9y ago

"It will also prevent apps from using Facebook Login to collect users' personal information, including details like their religious or political views, relationship status, education and work history, and more. ... In an alarming revelation, he said that recent investigations into data privacy have revealed malicious actors cycling through hundreds of thousands of IP addresses in order to search for users by their phone numbers and scrape their public profile information. Until now, users have had to opt out of making their profiles searchable by phone number. Most, Zuckerberg said, never opted out. Though the CEO accepted blame for all of these data privacy and trust issues, saying, "It was my mistake," he also often put the onus on Facebook users to know better. He mentioned, for instance, that the only information that bad actors would be able to scrape using a phone number was information that was public on Facebook user profiles. Of the researcher who built the data-scraping app for Cambridge Analytica, Zuckerberg said, "Yes, he broke the policy, he broke people's expectations, but also, people chose to share that data with him." And yet it was Zuckerberg and the company he built that made people's data privacy settings so open by default, and made it difficult to find, understand, and adjust those settings." [ Poll: Is "open by default" congruent with "privacy by design"? ] Source: https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-exposed-87-million-users-to-cambridge-analytica/ https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-exposed-87-million-user...

davidf18 9y ago

The focus should be on news transparency. NY Times, Wash Post, the major networks basically censored how Candidate Clinton was helping foreigners displace Americans through H1-B Visa abuse. Nothing Trump is accused of doing is nearly as bad as Clinton wanting to displace American STEM workers with foreigners. Trump on the other hand, complained about H1-B Visa abuse as in the case of Disney of FL replacing 250 American STEM workers with cheaper labor from India. Indeed Obama called Clinton, "The Senator from Punjab [India]". Google on that term, and you'll find these articles. http://blogs.chicagotribune.com/news_columnists_ezorn/2007/06/dpunjab_funny_d.html http://blogs.chicagotribune.com/news_columnists_ezorn/2007/0... From 2007: HILLARY CLINTON (D-PUNJAB)'S PERSONAL FINANCIAL AND POLITICAL TIES TO INDIA The Clintons have reaped significant financial rewards from their relationship with the Indian community, both in their personal finances and Hillary's campaign fundraising.... http://www.breitbart.com/2016-presidential-race/2016/09/20/hillary-clinton-record-on-visas/ http://www.breitbart.com/2016-presidential-race/2016/09/20/h... http://dailycaller.com/2016/07/27/dont-believe-clintons-crocodile-tears-over-lost-american-jobs/ http://dailycaller.com/2016/07/27/dont-believe-clintons-croc... How is it possible that the Democratic Party is so anti-American that they would nominate Clinton as their candidate? Obama met with the anti-Semite Farrakhan in 2005 before ever running for President, yet this key piece of information was censored as well. http://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/Why-did-Barack-Obama-meet-with-Louis-Farrakhan-in-2005-540510 http://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/Why-did-Barack-Obama-meet-with... MSM criticized Trump, but basically censored these critical pieces of information about Clinton and Obama. Trump never met with anti-Semites nor was he against American STEM workers.

johnchristopher 9y ago

Nice example. Do you have a screenshot of what the facebook feed of those prospects would look like (with ads) ?