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You can target Facebook ads with surgical precision to manipulate people exactly the way you want. This is exactly what Cambridge Analytica did. You cannot tar

• macspoofing 6y ago
  >This is exactly what Cambridge Analytica did The impact of Cambridge Analytica is so overstated that it crosses into hyperbole. They were a bunch of clowns with minimal impact that got magnified to a status of super-villain because you could use them to club Trump over the head with. And let's not lose sight of the big picture, namely before Trump accidentally won (yes, accidentally and barely), the Trump campaign was seen (correctly) as a total disorganized disaster and one of the biggest clown-shows in modern political campaigns ... and yet they were at the same time these nefarious puppet masters using modern high-tech technology to manipulate voters and ultimately skew the election.
  • retortio 6y ago
    Exactly. Not just that, when the Obama used social media targeted advertising to its advantage it was fawned over in the media. Cambridge Analytica was targeted purely because they were on the wrong political side, it's as simple as that. Does anyone really think they would have gotten any attention if they were working for Hillary?
    • edmundsauto 6y ago
      Yes, I think they would have been screamed about from every Republican supporting media outlet there is. And I think they were targeted because of the underhanded way they went about collecting data, and for violating FB ToS. But the real reason that I think they were targeted? I think they leaned into it as a submarine PR coverage tactic. "We're so effective that it's a national scandal" was a great marketing tactic in the (hopefully bygone) era when amorality had no consequences.
  • pphysch 6y ago
    >the Trump campaign was seen (correctly) as a total disorganized disaster and one of the biggest clown-shows in modern political campaigns ... and yet they were at the same time these nefarious puppet masters using modern high-tech technology to manipulate voters Trump's posse is certainly a clown show but the "disorganized" bit is misleading. In the backend they are absolutely a decades-honed elite movement with boatloads of money, influence/coercion, and genocidal bloodlust. It wasn't a disorganized insurgency, it was a planned coup from a demographic of geriatric brats with virtually no sense of obligation to their nation or humanity.
  • cloverich 6y ago
    They aren't the only ones doing it. I get what you are saying, but is your (more general) argument that CA was bad, or that precise, hidden information targeting based on a persons characteristics cannot be used in nefarious ways? Because if you aren't arguing the latter, I don't think its worth calling OP out on CA specifically.
    • macspoofing 6y ago
      > but is your (more general) argument that CA was bad, or that precise, hidden information targeting based on a persons characteristics cannot be used in nefarious ways? The only argument I made was that the impact of CA was overblown for political reasons. I don't have a well-formed opinion on targetted political messaging, except maybe that it is a reality and we should just get used to it - perhaps having some regulations may make sense (the way lobbyists are regulated) so that the entire industry doesn't go underground. >Because if you aren't arguing the latter, I don't think its worth calling OP out on CA specifically. OP was making a political point - that CA was uniquely bad or an example of the problems of the industry because they were tied to Trump's joke of a campaign. If you actually read what they did, they were clearly clowns and shysters - as in, they siphoned consulting money from the campaign by promising the moon, and couldn't actually deliver. Ironically, their promises were taken at face value after Trump's election.
• throwawaygh 6y ago
  The targeted precision really is what's different. Your candidate can be N different single-issue candidates in a way that's just not possible without precise targeting. The "echo chambers" explanation, in particular, seems wrong. Echo chambers always existed.
  • adventured 6y ago
    > The "echo chambers" explanation, in particular, seems wrong. Echo chambers always existed. The echo chambers haven't gotten worse at all. They've become easier to observe in action and quantify, because social media is leaving a giant digital trail that everyone can observe (whereas previously the average person didn't leave much of a partisan trail/record for observation or study or reporting). The perception that the echo chambers have gotten worse is merely the horror of seeing the already existing echo chambers in action so vividly now that everything is recorded and everyone has a bullhorn.
    • kuzimoto 6y ago
      I think there is a case to be made that it has gotten worse. For example, before social media a lot of social interaction happened in public areas with a more diverse group of people. With social media you can pick and choose who you interact with, and what content you consume. To make things worse, companies use algorithms that are more likely to show you things you like and already agree with to increase engagement in their platform. Additionally from my perspective, it seems society is reverting back to a sort of tribalism, where people identify with a specific group and are more and more unwilling to find common ground with one another or to even have respect for differing viewpoints. Things are only seen as black and white, and anyone that doesn't agree is wrong, and must be silenced.
      • dx87 6y ago
        I've had older coworkers say the same thing. They said that when your social circle was usually your coworkers and neighbors, you had to make an effort to get along, and if you had any sort of extreme viewpoints, you had to remember that there were real life consequences to everything you said. Now you can hide your extreme viewpoints from people you interract with, and probably find groups online who share the same viewpoints and only interact with them, getting the false opinion that an extreme viewpoint is normal and socially acceptable.
• bhupy 6y ago
  I think you might want to brush up on more recent news, because by now Cambridge Analytica’s data has been shown to have been mostly useless at meaningful targeting. Even the New York Times reported that Cambridge Analytica’s impact on the election of Donald Trump as president was overrated. https://stratechery.com/2018/the-facebook-brand/ https://stratechery.com/2018/the-facebook-brand/ From the article: “But a dozen Republican consultants and former Trump campaign aides, along with current and former Cambridge employees, say the company’s ability to exploit personality profiles — “our secret sauce,” Mr. Nix once called it — is exaggerated. Cambridge executives now concede that the company never used psychographics in the Trump campaign. The technology — prominently featured in the firm’s sales materials and in media reports that cast Cambridge as a master of the dark campaign arts — remains unproved, according to former employees and Republicans familiar with the firm’s work.”
  • MacsHeadroom 6y ago
    I'm not contesting the conclusion. But traditional media is incentivized to be biased against social media. So "even the NY Times" isn't particularly compelling. (Not to mention NYT is squarely center right, politically. "Left" of the GOP but not left in any meaningful sense.)
    • bhupy 6y ago
      Lots to unpack here. 1. That the traditional media is incentivized to be biased against social media, and "even the NYTimes" came to a conclusion that advances a social media friendly narrative is exactly the point. If we are talking about the historical biases of the NYTimes, their reporting has consistently had a bent critical of the Citizens United decision (pertaining to paid political speech) and in this particular case, overstating the impact of Cambridge Analytica. That the NYTimes would then go on to conclude that CA's impact on the 2016 election was overrated is absolutely worthy of special remark. 2. Calling NYT "squarely center right and not left in any meaningful sense" is pretty odd. The left-right spectrum is created within the polity in question. It's of no use to an American to classify the American political spectrum from the locus of European politics, because Europeans have no say in American politics. It literally doesn't matter that Joe Biden is "to the right of" Corbyn, because the two will never run against each other in a political election, and British voters have no say in American elections. So while you're technically correct that, on a global scale, the NYT is "center right", that fact is not meaningful at all to their readers, the vast majority of whom are American voters participating in the American political spectrum. 3. Even if one were to concede your premise that it's somehow valuable to classify American politics through another political entity's spectrum of discourse, the left-right spectrum is an extremely lossy way of encoding both social and economic views. On social issues, I think you'd have a pretty difficult time arguing that the NYT is "squarely center right". The issues of election integrity, paid speech, and campaign finance are decidedly social in nature.
• vharuck 6y ago
  In my opinion, surgically precise targeting was not the problem with Cambridge Analytica. The problems were: 1. Disregard for privacy, by scraping data from people who had not agreed to their terms. And, honestly, from most of the people who "agreed" to their terms. 2. Doubling down on the idea "a candidate should get votes", instead of "a voter should choose the best candidate." It's the classic problem of a measure (vote count) becoming less useful. This has always been the case in politics, but we should discourage it. Not sell it as a service. I also remember hearing one of their goals was suppressing turnout among voters who likely supported the opponent, but I'm having trouble finding a good source. Even if Cambridge Analytica didn't focus on this, it's another case of the measure ruining its own intent. Voter suppression by official acts is often illegal, but it's not much better when done through legal messaging. As powerful as Facebook is in the world of American communication, it can't solve those problems. Reducing political ads can help, but we're far from being able to wipe our hands and think we've accomplished much.
  • JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago
    Surgical ads allow you to greatly reduce ad spend. If you know people who like A, B, C and are easily convinced of your worldview via data scrapping, and X, Y, Z are not, you can rile up a relatively small group of voters to shape the election outcome in battleground states.
• kalleboo 6y ago
  I wonder what the result would be if they disabled any kind of targeting for political ads (or massively limited it, to targeting per-state).
• avalys 6y ago
  Because voters are too stupid to tell fact from fiction, and need their betters to protect them from misinformation and make sure they are only exposed to approved viewpoints?
  • dave5104 6y ago
    > Because voters are too stupid to tell fact from fiction Education on critical thinking skills is a problem in the US, in my opinion. I don't think that needs to lead to 1984-esque "approved viewpoints", though.
    • avalys 6y ago
      If that’s true, I’d say that’s the biggest underlying risk to democracy, not targeted advertising.
  • cwhiz 6y ago
    Every single person is susceptible to manipulation. If you have enough data points you can manipulate someone. This has absolutely nothing to do with intelligence or “smarts.” I would argue that there is actually an inverse relationship between how susceptible you are to manipulation and how susceptible you think you are.
• arethuza 6y ago
  The other thing that is notable about that kind of precise targetting is that nobody other than the recipients and the advertiser know these ads exist and what their contents were.
• johnpaulkiser 6y ago
  Democracy is inherently broken if you think people can be controlled in this way.
  • cpmsmith 6y ago
    A lot of money is spent based on the assumption that they can—it's not a great situation even if the assumption were wrong. The worst form of government, except for the others.
  • svachalek 6y ago
    The US election system is a much narrower target than "democracy". It's possible to get big results by tipping over a small minority of people.
  • cloverich 6y ago
    Do you inherently disagree that targeted information tuned for uptake via automated, ML driven feedback, is incapable of affecting a persons behavior? If so, do you disagree that information in general is capable of influencing people?
• Reedx 6y ago
  I would say that social media generally is the biggest threat. However, I find it hard to believe that ads are even remotely the real problem (though they're part of it). They're not nearly as effective at influencing people as friends/journalists/etc and the methods social media uses to reward and elevate angry, tribal content. An endless stream of confirmation bias and strawmen, mostly from other users. Ads are a small part of that river, more likely to be ignored/blocked and more likely to be understood as fiction vs other content. They do have an effect of course, but it seems to be greatly overstated. Also remember the unprecedented $500M ad experiment Bloomberg ran to little effect. Would $50B even have done the trick? I would bet not.
• deleted 6y ago
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