11 ms·

Facebook Decided Which Users Are Interested in Nazis – and Let Ads Target Them

135 points by mnm1 8y ago

1123581321 8y ago
Can Facebook tell the difference between interest in studying history and interest in repeating it? Interest in a skinhead band seems to only have one interpretation, but couldn’t Goebbels and Himler search queries just be to learn and see who is discussing them? I know I’ve spent a lot of time reading about WW2. I’m not trying to be obtuse, just ignorant to what degree Facebook can target different intents behind a query or interest.
- chki 8y ago
  Actually being interested in skinhead bands might also have a legitimate scientific intention when studying political extremism. Intention and interest are very difficult to distinguish.
- Kenji 8y ago
  I went through a phase where I listened to a lot of Hitler speeches on YouTube, just because I was historically interested in what the man actually said and how he said it. He's a fascinating person to study - also from a psychological point of view - precisely because of the horrible things that happened. Anyway, after that, YouTube kept recommending me nazi speeches for at least half a year. I remember how on some days I opened YouTube and Hitler kept reappearing on my front page. Now, I'm not a sensitive person so I don't mind, it's actually kind of hilarious. But after months of this, it irked me a bit.
  - dlivingston 8y ago
    Indeed, someone may have a very strong interest in Hitler and Nazis and Neo-Nazi culture without being one - aka a professor or researcher of authoritarian history.
    - tatersolid 8y ago
      I read a bit of history. I was once derided by a self-important house guest for having a copy of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich with its visible swastika on my bookshelf. She was wearing a T-shirt bearing the face of noted mass-murderer Che Guevara.
- bilbo0s 8y ago
  In fairness, the interest of Facebook is to target ads, so I don't think they really care. An impression on a user with Himmler interest is an impression on a user with himmler interest, a click is a click. Now the folks monitoring at DHS? Yeah, I think they probably go to great lengths to try to differentiate and segment the population of people who look at extremist material of any kind.
- whiddershins 8y ago
  Not all skinhead bands are nazis. It might be seen as a minor point but I am worried how quickly we make sweeping appraisals based on partial information. Early skinhead culture and music overlapped heavily with Jamacain rude boy culture.
  - rhcom2 8y ago
    There's even a group who is (was?) dedicated to skinheads fighting racism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skinheads_Against_Racial_Prejudice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skinheads_Against_Racial_Preju...
  - 1123581321 8y ago
    I didn’t know that. You’re right; I made an assumption without researching the band or the genre.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- nathias 8y ago
  Do you think being a skinhead is a requirement for listening to a skinhead band?
  - fixermark 8y ago
    I think it's absolutely a datapoint considered by any organization that is trying to build a comprehensive profile of citizens to catch people like this before they hurt anyone. https://www.npr.org/2019/02/20/696470366/arrested-coast-guard-officer-planned-mass-terrorist-attack-on-a-scale-rarely-see https://www.npr.org/2019/02/20/696470366/arrested-coast-guar...
- nsxwolf 8y ago
  And you've described why I use DuckDuckGo when I want to learn about something like that. I have no idea how Google is interpreting my intent, if it is at all, and how it might come back to bite me in the future.
- anigbrowl 8y ago
  My understanding is that they rely on the reporting system because their whole curation model is built around assessing individual posts rather than patterns of activity.
- madrox 8y ago
  This is a great point. How many high school kids doing school history reports are getting funneled into nazi indoctrination?
hirundo 8y ago
There are a lot of people interested in these keywords because they're horrified by the Nazi phenomena, and so wish to understand it, to help ensure that it doesn't happen again. I recently made several such searches after rereading Winds of War and War and Remembrance. Would if be better it I had found nothing? George Santayana had a better take: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." When someone asks "what could go wrong" it's better to have an answer. Let's say they perfect a method of only targeting actual Nazi sympathizers. Personally I have a few things that I'd like to show those people, without insult or invective. Like photos of dead family members. It seems to me at least as important to be able to send a targeted message to Nazis as to cat fanciers.
- MrZongle2 8y ago
  Amen. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. Yet we are repeatedly bombarded by stories of this nature and voices telling us that well in this case, maybe we shouldn't have any sunlight because the subject is just too horrible to behold. A censored public is an ignorant public.
Simulacra 8y ago
Can we just have a social network that doesn't target anyone, for anything, and just lets us communicate, and build relationships without trying to manipulate us or violate our privacy?
- bilbo0s 8y ago
  Any social network that has people posting any personal data at all, will be mined. For one purpose or another. (And probably for one purpose AND the other.) Almost the only way to stop it would be to make it explicitly illegal, and even then they would still allow mining for certain purposes. There's just no way to get away from it at this point. (Other than just not using social networks at all I suppose?)
  - munk-a 8y ago
    Putting personal data out there means... putting personal data out there, advertisers mining that data is a hard problem to solve. So can we re-orient the need for a solution to the injection of advertising into the platform? Lets solve this problem one step at a time and first stop those advertisers from leveraging the platform to distribute advertisements, instead only allowing them to mine the data to support ad campaigns. Once that's done we can look at salves for the data mining of social media, though I can't see that being possible without really resilient privacy enforcement.
- gravy 8y ago
  Real life?
  - Simulacra 8y ago
    Ha! Touche, and a very good point.
- Gokenstein 8y ago
  we had that. It was called livejournal. And everyone stopped using it.
duxup 8y ago
The problem with algorithms and such that show you what you're interested in is that sometimes they work. The math and computers don't care, we have to care unless we want to facilitate just about anything.
- hn_throwaway_99 8y ago
  Couldn't agree more, and the real problem is that Facebook (would be the same for any other company with a similar ad targeting model) is now in the position of arbiter of what is acceptable and what is not. Perhaps a punk white-supremacist band is off limits, but what about joining "maga" with "Infowars" with "Insane Clown Posse"? You'll likely be targeting many of the same people anyway.
fixermark 8y ago
The libertarian answer to this would seem to then be "Excellent; now anti-fascist organizations have an optimized channel to get their message to those people."
- twblalock 8y ago
  Also: now we know who the Nazis are.
  - zdragnar 8y ago
    No, now you know who are interested in the Nazis, which includes no shortage of kids writing history reports for school.
  - yellow_postit 8y ago
    “Know” is probably giving their targeting and classification a bit too much credit.
- TuringNYC 8y ago
  The libertarian answer is "to let the market decide" and walk with their pocketbook / talk with their wallet. That is all fine in theory but the theory doesn't address what happens when there is only a single dominant player. For example, if I "walk away with my wallet" on my cable tv provider, i'm done -- there is only one provider.
  - blfr 8y ago
    Cable TV isn't a good example because "nothing" is a strong competitor and really much better than cable TV. But lately companies like VISA and MC seem to be abusing their semi-monopolies. Try living without a card or bank account.
  - krapp 8y ago
    >That is all fine in theory but the theory doesn't address what happens when there is only a single dominant player. The market can decide that only one player is sufficient to its needs.
not2b 8y ago
They'll take anyone's money. I got a sponsored ad (meaning Facebook got paid) from a notorious antivax organization, these people: https://www.skepticalraptor.com/skepticalraptorblog.php/physicians-for-informed-consent-another-radical-anti-vaccine-group/ https://www.skepticalraptor.com/skepticalraptorblog.php/phys...
angott 8y ago
I just don't understand why Facebook doesn't provide a subscription option. I would be willing to pay $4.99/month or perhaps a bit more in exchange for no ads and no tracking. What is so wrong about being able to pay for things?
- nyrulez 8y ago
  It won't be a $100B+ company. And that's important to them.
- RickS 8y ago
  It blocks you from seeing the future. If they get money and no data, they're getting paid for who they are today with less insight into who they need to be tomorrow to keep getting paid. The idea that data is "just sold to businesses" and can be substituted for its sale-value equivalent in cash is wrong, IMO. Serious insight, product directions, election swinging power, really big shit – are all emergent properties of data in aggregate like this that are somewhat unknowable until you actually get the data and see things unfold. So what they're actually keeping, by choosing data over cash, is priceless long-term optionality.
- whiddershins 8y ago
  If you let people pay for an ad free service, you just removed the most valuable users (target demographic) from your advertising pool.
ahallock 8y ago
Am I the only one who doesn't mind the targeted ads on FB? Even from a site I visited recently, it doesn't really bother me. I actually like seeing products I'm interested in as opposed to generic targeting like you have on TV. I've discovered some pretty compelling products this way.
- untog 8y ago
  That doesn't really seem to address the issue at hand, which concerns allowing people to advertise to Nazis. At least I hope it doesn't.
- Klathmon 8y ago
  I feel the same, but at the same time I understand that not everyone feels that way, and that there should be easy ways for those people to not have to be subject to it. Sadly any time this kind of thing gets discussed, the nuance gets thrown out and the discussion becomes either "ban all targeting" or "don't regulate anything", both of which are horrible ideas IMO.
wbxrs 8y ago
...and? Don't they have categories for every political leaning?
- anigbrowl 8y ago
  People generally have a problem with political leanings that are explicitly predicated on abuse of others.
buboard 8y ago
This sounds like a non-issue. > Facebook allowed The Times to target ads to users Facebook has determined are interested in Goebbels, the Third Reich’s chief propagandist, Himmler, the architect of the Holocaust and leader of the SS, and Mengele, the infamous concentration camp doctor who performed human experiments on prisoners. Each category included hundreds of thousands of users. If i make a documentary about goebbels' life i shouldn't be able to advertise it? How about even selling it? I think this is crossing the line of fake outrage.
- s_m_t 8y ago
  Shit, I guess I'm a Nazi because I like history. Edit: Just checked my bookshelf and I might also be a genghis khan sympathizer.
- whoisjuan 8y ago
  This. I think I have searched for Nazi-related stuff a lot in the past when watching documentaries or reading WWII books. I think this goes without saying, but I'm NOT a sympathizer of Nazi ideology. I just enjoy learning. By this rationale, I should be in a hate crime watchlist already.
- bArray 8y ago
  I was literally about to make the same comment. It's guilt by association. Researching these topics does not mean you are a Nazi. In this case, Facebook did nothing wrong. One can have an interest in history without being a Nazi. One can have a history in Nazis without being one. This is unbelievably poor reporting, the headline does not reflect the actual content and the wrong conclusions are drawn. LA Times, in particular Sam Dean, should be ashamed.
randyrand 8y ago
Lots of historians are interested in Nazis. As are many people that follow politics. Who cares?
sickcodebruh 8y ago
I encounter and consider this when creating ads for my black metal band. Avoiding supporters of nazi metal is such a common concern that I didn't even think of it as odd, just business as usual. I actually appreciate that I'm able to explicitly exclude audiences, as it limits the likelihood that I'll deal with a deluge of hate mail. Incidentally, Facebook seems to have already reacted to this article by removing "national socialist black metal" from its interest targeting options.
- eponeponepon 8y ago
  NSBM's a difficult problem. For one thing, where do you draw the line? For every band that are out-and-proud unequivocal neo-nazis preaching race-war, there's another who insist they're apolitical as musicians, another who just want to "explore themes of our national history" (yeah, pull the other one...) and probably half a dozen who just flirt with the imagery because it sells records. For another thing, this stuff is interesting - there's no two ways around that. Musically, it's almost entirely straight-up bad (when Varg Vikernes is the best a movement has to offer, you know there's a quality problem), but the cultural mechanisms that made it and the social history that feeds it is, speaking with cold clinicism, really very interesting.
  - sickcodebruh 8y ago
    It’s a tough question for sure and I don’t think there’s a clear answer. We can start by refusing to support the worst of it, calling out the friends and artists who do, and making it seem less normal and acceptable than it really is. Black metal has become such a safe space for it. Even the term “NSBM” helps whitewash it! Edit: I'm not trying to insult or shame you for using "NSBM." Everyone says it, it's totally normal at this point, and that's the problem.
    - eponeponepon 8y ago
      I have never looked at the term that way, but what you say is completely fair. I seem to recall a time when a lot of that scene rejected the label and tried to claim it was "just black metal", but now that I think about it, I suspect they've collectively owned it these days. I don't know what else to call it that doesn't either minimise it or need a dozen paragraphs' worth of explanation, though...
RickS 8y ago
What's the expected fix here? I was unfamiliar with the bands and most of the people in those targeting lists. The way I see it, these are the ways you can handle this: 1) Facebook builds this data the hard way. They staff a team of experts on "undesirables", who research and implement custom blocklists at facebook's scale. Insanely cash and time intensive, to say nothing of the "who decides what's undesirable" problem. 2) Spread cost and effort by amassing a central repository of known baddies, and all the orgs contribute and share access. The government does something like this with hashes of sex trafficking imagery, so that eng teams can filter against a blacklist. I think this topic FAR more nuanced and less binary than "does this picture contain illegal pornography or nah". Who maintains this list of undesirables? You're at "social credit score" in a hurry. 3) Algos. You let software extrapolate commonalities from known-bad actors – school shooters, confirmed russian propaganda branches, etc. And let the machine learn their language and flag accordingly. This is going to be coarse and stupid in the way ML always is, and local business owners with names like Heinrich are gonna get their livelihoods smashed accidentally here and there. Not great. 4) What Simulacra said – you just turn the whole targeting infra off. Facebook stops making money. This is great, I'd love to see it as regulation, but it's a big stretch, and very lofty when phrased like this. 5) Some kind of adtech equivalent of finance's KYC (Know Your Customer) regulation. Tie ad buys to confirmable, prosecutable identities, and rather than filtering before launch, aggressively follow up after launch. You run an ad campaign for nazis? Cool, your LLC and its primary stakeholders are permabanned. Facebook has already tried light versions of this, but it was lip service. IMO 4 and 5 are the places to spend effort. I think we nee to start having conversations that do away with the idea that humans are autonomous and impervious to influence, and start having the discussion in a new context: When and how are you allowed to manipulate the minds of citizens at scale, and what kind of paper trail does it leave?
- pbreit 8y ago
  I don't understand why we don't let such platforms adopt a more laissez faire approach to such situations. There's an inordinate amount of pressure to curb free speech these days which seems very un-American.
  - 8y ago
catilac 8y ago
Just stop using Facebook. Stop putting the onus on Facebook to fix all of this. We just need to stop using it. There are alternatives out there; start using them. These articles are always going to come up. We're going to act surprised for 5 minutes, and continue to feed the machine.
- throwaway_9168 8y ago
  After seeing these comments, I think we have it all completely wrong (that is, the mental model of those of us who wish FB stopped existing). Don't ask people to stop using Facebook. Encourage them to use it more. We should instead call out the people who fund Facebook as sponsoring child abuse. [1] And those who work at Facebook as inciting pogroms. [2] And finally, those who defend Facebook as "dumb fucks" because, well, that's what they are anyway according to Mark Z. At the same time, don't ask anyone to stop using Facebook. In fact, they should use Facebook so much that they bring down Facebook's servers. [3] Encourage the low ARPU "deadbeats" to keep using Facebook and its network as much as possible. Just call out everyone who is giving them money [4]. Lets see how long FB operates after that. [1] https://www.npr.org/2019/02/21/696430478/advocates-ask-ftc-to-investigate-facebook-deception-over-kids-in-game-purchases https://www.npr.org/2019/02/21/696430478/advocates-ask-ftc-t... [2] https://newrepublic.com/article/147486/facebook-genocide-problem https://newrepublic.com/article/147486/facebook-genocide-pro... [3] https://www.jbaynews.com/whatsapp-crashes-almost-worldwide-on-new-years-eve/ https://www.jbaynews.com/whatsapp-crashes-almost-worldwide-o... [4] https://m.signalvnoise.com/become-a-facebook-free-business/ https://m.signalvnoise.com/become-a-facebook-free-business/
redm 8y ago
Nazi imagery and information is prevalent still, such as History Channel's many Nazi shows, or Nazi mega weapons on PBS, or Science/Discovery which also sell many ads on Nazi-related shows. They cover the atrocities but also the many successes of the regime. I'm not surprised this programmatically translates into Facebook as well, i.e. Nazi information is not equivalent to skinheads. It's a tough problem to solve programatically.
MrZongle2 8y ago
So let's step away from the "Nazis" part for a second, and rewrite the headline: "Facebook Decided Which Users Are Interested in ____________ -- and Let Ads Target Them Directly". Isn't this how it is supposed to work? So let's go back to the "Nazis" part of this. Yes, Nazis, Neo-Nazis, white supremacists and racists of all stripes are repellent to most of us. Are we agreed on that? Good. How is Facebook supposed to differentiate between somebody who is an admirer of Nazi icons, and somebody simply doing research on them? Is somebody supposed to be curating a list of what's "acceptable" for people to like and not like? Who's in charge of that list? What happens when those people leave and are replaced by different people? What happens when something deeply embarrassing to Mark Zuckerberg or Facebook takes place and starts getting attention? Should that be on the list? And if somebody places it on the list, what recourse does anybody outside of that company have to remove it from that list? Popular, happy speech isn't the speech that needs to be protected. Everybody nods when this point is raised, then we end up having this same stupid conversation again in a couple of weeks and people act like this time something is new and different and in just this case perhaps some light, smiley-faced censorship is necessary... but of course it surely won't get out of hand. Sheesh.
- anigbrowl 8y ago
  How is Facebook supposed to differentiate between somebody who is an admirer of Nazi icons, and somebody simply doing research on them? The degree, frequency, and enthusiasm with which they share content are good clues, among other factors.
minimaxir 8y ago
Facebook/YouTube's approach to fixing these issues is reactive instead of proactive. Would an open-sourced list of unequivocally objectionable topics work to help companies QA their algos? I'm up for building one.
- chillacy 8y ago
  I imagine if your list is missing anything at all (and it will) then you’ll get slammed in the press for missing it. Skinhead bands are by no means obvious to me, but even if they would have been in your list, you’ll miss something inevitably.
fixermark 8y ago
Worth noting: the article's headline is one of those tricky situations where the summary isn't wrong, but should probably include more information. FB allows advertisers to target at specific topics, and they've been blacklisting objectionable categories. But the blacklisting appears to be manual, so while "nazi" isn't a micro-targeting category, things like Josef Mengele and a white supremacist punk band are. Manually keeping up with and out-thinking objectionable content keywords is a perpetual arms race. If FB wants to win it that way, they'll have to invest pretty hard in that space if they don't want a story like this every quarter.
- WhompingWindows 8y ago
  Why not just ask people for $1 per year to use FB, and then have non-targeted ads to cover the rest of the loss in revenue?
  - p49k 8y ago
    Because an insanely high percentage of people will refuse to pay $1/year. Also, because $1 does not come close to covering the cost difference; targeted ads typically bring in 2x or more revenue per impression and the average revenue per user per year in the US is around $25.
    - Calib3r 8y ago
      targeted ads typically bring in 2x or more revenue per impression Source?
      - p49k 8y ago
        https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265266107_The_Value_of_Behavioral_Targeting https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265266107_The_Value... Study quotes 2.68x earnings in 2009 but in my experience it’s even higher these days.
        thinkingemote 8y ago
cmurf 8y ago
Google (youtube) is having a similar problem with pedophiles taking advantage of comment keywording to make it possible for people to find things that ostensibly should be banned. https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/18/youtube-under-fire-for-recommending-videos-of-kids-with-inappropriate-comments/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/18/youtube-under-fire-for-rec...
fixermark 8y ago
This story immediately becomes more interesting if an advertiser figures out a way to exfiltrate Facebook's graph of who it thnks Nazis are. ... but in general, the ad networks are architected to make that kind of exfiltration as difficult as possible, since it violates the privacy constraints users assume.
some1else 8y ago
How come ads are allowed to evade public scrutiny when they're shown online?
xkcd-sucks 8y ago
"Deradicalization" is a form of "Advertising" which doesn't seem to cause so much mainstream consternation
RickJWagner 8y ago
It's amazing to me how attitudes have shifted so critically. In the 70s, 'Hogans Heros' was a hit tv show. It portrayed the Nazis as bumbling idiots, but still it was a topic that was featured prominently in the show. I bet today people would be fearful to say they watched such a show. The same thing is true of the 'Dukes of Hazzard'. Imagine it: A tv show where two wild young men drove a car that had a Confederate flag on the hood, and the horn played 'Dixie'. (Even though the show famously portrayed African Americans only in a positive light.) Today, people are ashamed to admit they watched the show, had t-shirts, etc. Yet the show was wildly popular back then. (And race relations seemed like they were better at the time, TBH.) It's good to make progress in calling out evil, but things feel a little odd in this area.

135 points by mnm1 8y ago

Can Facebook tell the difference between interest in studying history and interest in repeating it? Interest in a skinhead band seems to only have one interpretation, but couldn’t Goebbels and Himler search queries just be to learn and see who is discussing them? I know I’ve spent a lot of time reading about WW2. I’m not trying to be obtuse, just ignorant to what degree Facebook can target different intents behind a query or interest.

chki 8y ago
Actually being interested in skinhead bands might also have a legitimate scientific intention when studying political extremism. Intention and interest are very difficult to distinguish.
Kenji 8y ago
I went through a phase where I listened to a lot of Hitler speeches on YouTube, just because I was historically interested in what the man actually said and how he said it. He's a fascinating person to study - also from a psychological point of view - precisely because of the horrible things that happened. Anyway, after that, YouTube kept recommending me nazi speeches for at least half a year. I remember how on some days I opened YouTube and Hitler kept reappearing on my front page. Now, I'm not a sensitive person so I don't mind, it's actually kind of hilarious. But after months of this, it irked me a bit.
- dlivingston 8y ago
  Indeed, someone may have a very strong interest in Hitler and Nazis and Neo-Nazi culture without being one - aka a professor or researcher of authoritarian history.
  - tatersolid 8y ago
    I read a bit of history. I was once derided by a self-important house guest for having a copy of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich with its visible swastika on my bookshelf. She was wearing a T-shirt bearing the face of noted mass-murderer Che Guevara.
bilbo0s 8y ago
In fairness, the interest of Facebook is to target ads, so I don't think they really care. An impression on a user with Himmler interest is an impression on a user with himmler interest, a click is a click. Now the folks monitoring at DHS? Yeah, I think they probably go to great lengths to try to differentiate and segment the population of people who look at extremist material of any kind.
whiddershins 8y ago
Not all skinhead bands are nazis. It might be seen as a minor point but I am worried how quickly we make sweeping appraisals based on partial information. Early skinhead culture and music overlapped heavily with Jamacain rude boy culture.
- rhcom2 8y ago
  There's even a group who is (was?) dedicated to skinheads fighting racism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skinheads_Against_Racial_Prejudice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skinheads_Against_Racial_Preju...
- 1123581321 8y ago
  I didn’t know that. You’re right; I made an assumption without researching the band or the genre.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 8y ago
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nathias 8y ago
Do you think being a skinhead is a requirement for listening to a skinhead band?
- fixermark 8y ago
  I think it's absolutely a datapoint considered by any organization that is trying to build a comprehensive profile of citizens to catch people like this before they hurt anyone. https://www.npr.org/2019/02/20/696470366/arrested-coast-guard-officer-planned-mass-terrorist-attack-on-a-scale-rarely-see https://www.npr.org/2019/02/20/696470366/arrested-coast-guar...
nsxwolf 8y ago
And you've described why I use DuckDuckGo when I want to learn about something like that. I have no idea how Google is interpreting my intent, if it is at all, and how it might come back to bite me in the future.
anigbrowl 8y ago
My understanding is that they rely on the reporting system because their whole curation model is built around assessing individual posts rather than patterns of activity.
madrox 8y ago
This is a great point. How many high school kids doing school history reports are getting funneled into nazi indoctrination?

hirundo 8y ago

There are a lot of people interested in these keywords because they're horrified by the Nazi phenomena, and so wish to understand it, to help ensure that it doesn't happen again. I recently made several such searches after rereading Winds of War and War and Remembrance. Would if be better it I had found nothing? George Santayana had a better take: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." When someone asks "what could go wrong" it's better to have an answer. Let's say they perfect a method of only targeting actual Nazi sympathizers. Personally I have a few things that I'd like to show those people, without insult or invective. Like photos of dead family members. It seems to me at least as important to be able to send a targeted message to Nazis as to cat fanciers.

MrZongle2 8y ago
Amen. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. Yet we are repeatedly bombarded by stories of this nature and voices telling us that well in this case, maybe we shouldn't have any sunlight because the subject is just too horrible to behold. A censored public is an ignorant public.

Simulacra 8y ago

Can we just have a social network that doesn't target anyone, for anything, and just lets us communicate, and build relationships without trying to manipulate us or violate our privacy?

bilbo0s 8y ago
Any social network that has people posting any personal data at all, will be mined. For one purpose or another. (And probably for one purpose AND the other.) Almost the only way to stop it would be to make it explicitly illegal, and even then they would still allow mining for certain purposes. There's just no way to get away from it at this point. (Other than just not using social networks at all I suppose?)
- munk-a 8y ago
  Putting personal data out there means... putting personal data out there, advertisers mining that data is a hard problem to solve. So can we re-orient the need for a solution to the injection of advertising into the platform? Lets solve this problem one step at a time and first stop those advertisers from leveraging the platform to distribute advertisements, instead only allowing them to mine the data to support ad campaigns. Once that's done we can look at salves for the data mining of social media, though I can't see that being possible without really resilient privacy enforcement.
gravy 8y ago
Real life?
- Simulacra 8y ago
  Ha! Touche, and a very good point.
Gokenstein 8y ago
we had that. It was called livejournal. And everyone stopped using it.

duxup 8y ago

The problem with algorithms and such that show you what you're interested in is that sometimes they work. The math and computers don't care, we have to care unless we want to facilitate just about anything.

hn_throwaway_99 8y ago
Couldn't agree more, and the real problem is that Facebook (would be the same for any other company with a similar ad targeting model) is now in the position of arbiter of what is acceptable and what is not. Perhaps a punk white-supremacist band is off limits, but what about joining "maga" with "Infowars" with "Insane Clown Posse"? You'll likely be targeting many of the same people anyway.

fixermark 8y ago

The libertarian answer to this would seem to then be "Excellent; now anti-fascist organizations have an optimized channel to get their message to those people."

twblalock 8y ago
Also: now we know who the Nazis are.
- zdragnar 8y ago
  No, now you know who are interested in the Nazis, which includes no shortage of kids writing history reports for school.
- yellow_postit 8y ago
  “Know” is probably giving their targeting and classification a bit too much credit.
TuringNYC 8y ago
The libertarian answer is "to let the market decide" and walk with their pocketbook / talk with their wallet. That is all fine in theory but the theory doesn't address what happens when there is only a single dominant player. For example, if I "walk away with my wallet" on my cable tv provider, i'm done -- there is only one provider.
- blfr 8y ago
  Cable TV isn't a good example because "nothing" is a strong competitor and really much better than cable TV. But lately companies like VISA and MC seem to be abusing their semi-monopolies. Try living without a card or bank account.
- krapp 8y ago
  >That is all fine in theory but the theory doesn't address what happens when there is only a single dominant player. The market can decide that only one player is sufficient to its needs.

not2b 8y ago

They'll take anyone's money. I got a sponsored ad (meaning Facebook got paid) from a notorious antivax organization, these people: https://www.skepticalraptor.com/skepticalraptorblog.php/physicians-for-informed-consent-another-radical-anti-vaccine-group/ https://www.skepticalraptor.com/skepticalraptorblog.php/phys...

angott 8y ago

I just don't understand why Facebook doesn't provide a subscription option. I would be willing to pay $4.99/month or perhaps a bit more in exchange for no ads and no tracking. What is so wrong about being able to pay for things?

nyrulez 8y ago
It won't be a $100B+ company. And that's important to them.
RickS 8y ago
It blocks you from seeing the future. If they get money and no data, they're getting paid for who they are today with less insight into who they need to be tomorrow to keep getting paid. The idea that data is "just sold to businesses" and can be substituted for its sale-value equivalent in cash is wrong, IMO. Serious insight, product directions, election swinging power, really big shit – are all emergent properties of data in aggregate like this that are somewhat unknowable until you actually get the data and see things unfold. So what they're actually keeping, by choosing data over cash, is priceless long-term optionality.
whiddershins 8y ago
If you let people pay for an ad free service, you just removed the most valuable users (target demographic) from your advertising pool.

ahallock 8y ago

Am I the only one who doesn't mind the targeted ads on FB? Even from a site I visited recently, it doesn't really bother me. I actually like seeing products I'm interested in as opposed to generic targeting like you have on TV. I've discovered some pretty compelling products this way.

untog 8y ago
That doesn't really seem to address the issue at hand, which concerns allowing people to advertise to Nazis. At least I hope it doesn't.
Klathmon 8y ago
I feel the same, but at the same time I understand that not everyone feels that way, and that there should be easy ways for those people to not have to be subject to it. Sadly any time this kind of thing gets discussed, the nuance gets thrown out and the discussion becomes either "ban all targeting" or "don't regulate anything", both of which are horrible ideas IMO.

wbxrs 8y ago

...and? Don't they have categories for every political leaning?

anigbrowl 8y ago
People generally have a problem with political leanings that are explicitly predicated on abuse of others.

buboard 8y ago

This sounds like a non-issue. > Facebook allowed The Times to target ads to users Facebook has determined are interested in Goebbels, the Third Reich’s chief propagandist, Himmler, the architect of the Holocaust and leader of the SS, and Mengele, the infamous concentration camp doctor who performed human experiments on prisoners. Each category included hundreds of thousands of users. If i make a documentary about goebbels' life i shouldn't be able to advertise it? How about even selling it? I think this is crossing the line of fake outrage.

s_m_t 8y ago
Shit, I guess I'm a Nazi because I like history. Edit: Just checked my bookshelf and I might also be a genghis khan sympathizer.
whoisjuan 8y ago
This. I think I have searched for Nazi-related stuff a lot in the past when watching documentaries or reading WWII books. I think this goes without saying, but I'm NOT a sympathizer of Nazi ideology. I just enjoy learning. By this rationale, I should be in a hate crime watchlist already.
bArray 8y ago
I was literally about to make the same comment. It's guilt by association. Researching these topics does not mean you are a Nazi. In this case, Facebook did nothing wrong. One can have an interest in history without being a Nazi. One can have a history in Nazis without being one. This is unbelievably poor reporting, the headline does not reflect the actual content and the wrong conclusions are drawn. LA Times, in particular Sam Dean, should be ashamed.

randyrand 8y ago

Lots of historians are interested in Nazis. As are many people that follow politics. Who cares?

sickcodebruh 8y ago

I encounter and consider this when creating ads for my black metal band. Avoiding supporters of nazi metal is such a common concern that I didn't even think of it as odd, just business as usual. I actually appreciate that I'm able to explicitly exclude audiences, as it limits the likelihood that I'll deal with a deluge of hate mail. Incidentally, Facebook seems to have already reacted to this article by removing "national socialist black metal" from its interest targeting options.

eponeponepon 8y ago
NSBM's a difficult problem. For one thing, where do you draw the line? For every band that are out-and-proud unequivocal neo-nazis preaching race-war, there's another who insist they're apolitical as musicians, another who just want to "explore themes of our national history" (yeah, pull the other one...) and probably half a dozen who just flirt with the imagery because it sells records. For another thing, this stuff is interesting - there's no two ways around that. Musically, it's almost entirely straight-up bad (when Varg Vikernes is the best a movement has to offer, you know there's a quality problem), but the cultural mechanisms that made it and the social history that feeds it is, speaking with cold clinicism, really very interesting.
- sickcodebruh 8y ago
  It’s a tough question for sure and I don’t think there’s a clear answer. We can start by refusing to support the worst of it, calling out the friends and artists who do, and making it seem less normal and acceptable than it really is. Black metal has become such a safe space for it. Even the term “NSBM” helps whitewash it! Edit: I'm not trying to insult or shame you for using "NSBM." Everyone says it, it's totally normal at this point, and that's the problem.
  - eponeponepon 8y ago
    I have never looked at the term that way, but what you say is completely fair. I seem to recall a time when a lot of that scene rejected the label and tried to claim it was "just black metal", but now that I think about it, I suspect they've collectively owned it these days. I don't know what else to call it that doesn't either minimise it or need a dozen paragraphs' worth of explanation, though...

RickS 8y ago

What's the expected fix here? I was unfamiliar with the bands and most of the people in those targeting lists. The way I see it, these are the ways you can handle this: 1) Facebook builds this data the hard way. They staff a team of experts on "undesirables", who research and implement custom blocklists at facebook's scale. Insanely cash and time intensive, to say nothing of the "who decides what's undesirable" problem. 2) Spread cost and effort by amassing a central repository of known baddies, and all the orgs contribute and share access. The government does something like this with hashes of sex trafficking imagery, so that eng teams can filter against a blacklist. I think this topic FAR more nuanced and less binary than "does this picture contain illegal pornography or nah". Who maintains this list of undesirables? You're at "social credit score" in a hurry. 3) Algos. You let software extrapolate commonalities from known-bad actors – school shooters, confirmed russian propaganda branches, etc. And let the machine learn their language and flag accordingly. This is going to be coarse and stupid in the way ML always is, and local business owners with names like Heinrich are gonna get their livelihoods smashed accidentally here and there. Not great. 4) What Simulacra said – you just turn the whole targeting infra off. Facebook stops making money. This is great, I'd love to see it as regulation, but it's a big stretch, and very lofty when phrased like this. 5) Some kind of adtech equivalent of finance's KYC (Know Your Customer) regulation. Tie ad buys to confirmable, prosecutable identities, and rather than filtering before launch, aggressively follow up after launch. You run an ad campaign for nazis? Cool, your LLC and its primary stakeholders are permabanned. Facebook has already tried light versions of this, but it was lip service. IMO 4 and 5 are the places to spend effort. I think we nee to start having conversations that do away with the idea that humans are autonomous and impervious to influence, and start having the discussion in a new context: When and how are you allowed to manipulate the minds of citizens at scale, and what kind of paper trail does it leave?

pbreit 8y ago
I don't understand why we don't let such platforms adopt a more laissez faire approach to such situations. There's an inordinate amount of pressure to curb free speech these days which seems very un-American.
- 8y ago

catilac 8y ago

Just stop using Facebook. Stop putting the onus on Facebook to fix all of this. We just need to stop using it. There are alternatives out there; start using them. These articles are always going to come up. We're going to act surprised for 5 minutes, and continue to feed the machine.

throwaway_9168 8y ago
After seeing these comments, I think we have it all completely wrong (that is, the mental model of those of us who wish FB stopped existing). Don't ask people to stop using Facebook. Encourage them to use it more. We should instead call out the people who fund Facebook as sponsoring child abuse. [1] And those who work at Facebook as inciting pogroms. [2] And finally, those who defend Facebook as "dumb fucks" because, well, that's what they are anyway according to Mark Z. At the same time, don't ask anyone to stop using Facebook. In fact, they should use Facebook so much that they bring down Facebook's servers. [3] Encourage the low ARPU "deadbeats" to keep using Facebook and its network as much as possible. Just call out everyone who is giving them money [4]. Lets see how long FB operates after that. [1] https://www.npr.org/2019/02/21/696430478/advocates-ask-ftc-to-investigate-facebook-deception-over-kids-in-game-purchases https://www.npr.org/2019/02/21/696430478/advocates-ask-ftc-t... [2] https://newrepublic.com/article/147486/facebook-genocide-problem https://newrepublic.com/article/147486/facebook-genocide-pro... [3] https://www.jbaynews.com/whatsapp-crashes-almost-worldwide-on-new-years-eve/ https://www.jbaynews.com/whatsapp-crashes-almost-worldwide-o... [4] https://m.signalvnoise.com/become-a-facebook-free-business/ https://m.signalvnoise.com/become-a-facebook-free-business/

redm 8y ago

Nazi imagery and information is prevalent still, such as History Channel's many Nazi shows, or Nazi mega weapons on PBS, or Science/Discovery which also sell many ads on Nazi-related shows. They cover the atrocities but also the many successes of the regime. I'm not surprised this programmatically translates into Facebook as well, i.e. Nazi information is not equivalent to skinheads. It's a tough problem to solve programatically.

MrZongle2 8y ago

So let's step away from the "Nazis" part for a second, and rewrite the headline: "Facebook Decided Which Users Are Interested in ____________ -- and Let Ads Target Them Directly". Isn't this how it is supposed to work? So let's go back to the "Nazis" part of this. Yes, Nazis, Neo-Nazis, white supremacists and racists of all stripes are repellent to most of us. Are we agreed on that? Good. How is Facebook supposed to differentiate between somebody who is an admirer of Nazi icons, and somebody simply doing research on them? Is somebody supposed to be curating a list of what's "acceptable" for people to like and not like? Who's in charge of that list? What happens when those people leave and are replaced by different people? What happens when something deeply embarrassing to Mark Zuckerberg or Facebook takes place and starts getting attention? Should that be on the list? And if somebody places it on the list, what recourse does anybody outside of that company have to remove it from that list? Popular, happy speech isn't the speech that needs to be protected. Everybody nods when this point is raised, then we end up having this same stupid conversation again in a couple of weeks and people act like this time something is new and different and in just this case perhaps some light, smiley-faced censorship is necessary... but of course it surely won't get out of hand. Sheesh.

anigbrowl 8y ago
How is Facebook supposed to differentiate between somebody who is an admirer of Nazi icons, and somebody simply doing research on them? The degree, frequency, and enthusiasm with which they share content are good clues, among other factors.

minimaxir 8y ago

Facebook/YouTube's approach to fixing these issues is reactive instead of proactive. Would an open-sourced list of unequivocally objectionable topics work to help companies QA their algos? I'm up for building one.

chillacy 8y ago
I imagine if your list is missing anything at all (and it will) then you’ll get slammed in the press for missing it. Skinhead bands are by no means obvious to me, but even if they would have been in your list, you’ll miss something inevitably.

fixermark 8y ago

Worth noting: the article's headline is one of those tricky situations where the summary isn't wrong, but should probably include more information. FB allows advertisers to target at specific topics, and they've been blacklisting objectionable categories. But the blacklisting appears to be manual, so while "nazi" isn't a micro-targeting category, things like Josef Mengele and a white supremacist punk band are. Manually keeping up with and out-thinking objectionable content keywords is a perpetual arms race. If FB wants to win it that way, they'll have to invest pretty hard in that space if they don't want a story like this every quarter.

WhompingWindows 8y ago
Why not just ask people for $1 per year to use FB, and then have non-targeted ads to cover the rest of the loss in revenue?
- p49k 8y ago
  Because an insanely high percentage of people will refuse to pay $1/year. Also, because $1 does not come close to covering the cost difference; targeted ads typically bring in 2x or more revenue per impression and the average revenue per user per year in the US is around $25.
  - Calib3r 8y ago
    targeted ads typically bring in 2x or more revenue per impression Source?
    - p49k 8y ago
      https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265266107_The_Value_of_Behavioral_Targeting https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265266107_The_Value... Study quotes 2.68x earnings in 2009 but in my experience it’s even higher these days.
      - thinkingemote 8y ago

cmurf 8y ago

Google (youtube) is having a similar problem with pedophiles taking advantage of comment keywording to make it possible for people to find things that ostensibly should be banned. https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/18/youtube-under-fire-for-recommending-videos-of-kids-with-inappropriate-comments/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/18/youtube-under-fire-for-rec...

fixermark 8y ago

This story immediately becomes more interesting if an advertiser figures out a way to exfiltrate Facebook's graph of who it thnks Nazis are. ... but in general, the ad networks are architected to make that kind of exfiltration as difficult as possible, since it violates the privacy constraints users assume.

some1else 8y ago

How come ads are allowed to evade public scrutiny when they're shown online?

xkcd-sucks 8y ago

"Deradicalization" is a form of "Advertising" which doesn't seem to cause so much mainstream consternation

RickJWagner 8y ago

It's amazing to me how attitudes have shifted so critically. In the 70s, 'Hogans Heros' was a hit tv show. It portrayed the Nazis as bumbling idiots, but still it was a topic that was featured prominently in the show. I bet today people would be fearful to say they watched such a show. The same thing is true of the 'Dukes of Hazzard'. Imagine it: A tv show where two wild young men drove a car that had a Confederate flag on the hood, and the horn played 'Dixie'. (Even though the show famously portrayed African Americans only in a positive light.) Today, people are ashamed to admit they watched the show, had t-shirts, etc. Yet the show was wildly popular back then. (And race relations seemed like they were better at the time, TBH.) It's good to make progress in calling out evil, but things feel a little odd in this area.