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Ex-Facebook Data Experts Spent $75M on Targeted Anti-Trump Ads

69 points by theduder99 6y ago

micropoet 6y ago
They probably regret promoting Trump on 2016.
ody4242 6y ago
I'm glad they did.
jeffbee 6y ago
The title makes it seem like they spent their own money, but according to the article they raised the $75m from donors via their committee.
thrav 6y ago
Facebook engineer guides San Antonio Trump team to victory, realizes the gravity of what he has done, goes soul searching in Peru and undoubtedly does Ayahuasca, then leaves Facebook and resolves to defeat his old partners. Someone needs to contact this guy for the movie rights. It’s the perfect modern redemption arc, and peak Silicon Valley.
- disgruntledphd2 6y ago
  James Barnes is a salesperson, not an engineer.
  - noema 6y ago
    Arguably a social engineer.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
      No, just a salesperson. He's a very good salesperson, mind you, and like many salespeople, he ends up as the front-facing person in these kinds of endeavours.
- PedroBatista 6y ago
  It's a complete cliché even Mike Judge would pass if the script wasn't something in the line of Idiocracy.
coold 6y ago
Again these russian hacke...wait
- icedistilled 6y ago
  Why do people still joke as if the Russian hacks and russian social media war was fake. The republican led gop senate investigation concluded russian hackers were behind the dnc/podesta hacks and were working to boost trump on social media in ways never seen before in the states. Edit: Adding relevant excerpts from the 5th, I think final, senate GOP led report's executive summary. This is the Republican led report. This was not led be democrats. Hack and Leak >"The Committee found that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the Russian effort to hack computer networks and accounts affiliated with the Democratic Party and leak information damaging to Hillary Clinton and her campaign for president. Moscow's intent was to harm the Clinton Campaign, tarnish an expected Clinton presidential administration, help the Trump Campaign after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, and undermine the U.S. democratic process. " Social Media executive summary ("Influence for hire" section) >"The Committee found that highly evolved tools used to shape popular sentiment were utilized in support of the Trump Campaign during the 2016 election season, and Russia has made use of such tools in its influence operations, but a link between Russian efforts and the Campaign's use of these tools was not established. These commercially available services many of which are based overseas-rely on an array of personal information to build targeted messaging profiles. Russia applied these sam·technologies and methodologies to its influence· campaign during the 2016 election and, in doing so, conducted foreign influence operationsagainst the United States with a speed, precision, and scale not previously seen." And from the intro of the actual section on Influence for hire.: >"All three companies either aspired to apply micro-targeted social media messaging techniques comparable to those employed by Russian information operatives with the Internet Research Agency, or actively engaged in the application of these techniques. "
  - xncl 6y ago
    I think he was saying it's not just Russians doing it.
bot41 6y ago
Imagine there was no Facebook. I suspect the events of the last few years would have gone the same. 4 years of Trump is what got Biden elected.. not facebook ads.
- whimsicalism 6y ago
  Seriously this. There have been lots and lots of studies on the impact of internet ads on voting, most of it appears to be super negligible. TV ads? That's a whole different ball game that has clear signal in the polling.
- Udik 6y ago
  > 4 years of Trump is what got Biden elected Trump got 63 million votes in 2016. He got 7 million more in 2020. In the end, what decided the election is 3 votes every 100. The result is clear-cut: one wins, the other loses. But in reality what decided the election is a really tiny difference. Small enough for ads (from all sides) to have an effect on it, and really too small to say that anything has actually changed in the country.
  - lowdose 6y ago
    Such an under appreciated fact. Without Cambridge Analytics Trump wouldn't have won in 2016, I'm glad a bunch of smart people decided to make a significant difference in this election and Trump didn't have a trump card this time.
    - edmundsauto 6y ago
      I mean this genuinely - how do we know that CA impacted the election? How many votes were swung or non-voters converted? I go back and forth. Sometimes I think this stuff must be super valuable because so much money gets spent in it. Then I work with medium businesses who have no clue how effective their spend is. I mean this sincerely: what actual evidence is there that CA affected the 2016 election? 1. Advertisers wouldn't spend so much money if it didn't work 2. ...?
dm319 6y ago
Do people remember 'bullshit jobs'? One class was 'goons'. You only need them because the opposition have them. I guess it looks like targetted ads to influence voting is here to stay.
- r00fus 6y ago
  Well we could legislate those ads out of existence. Free speech is one thing but paid promotion of ideas isn’t protected.
malikNF 6y ago
Tech wise, this is really impressive when I think about how much effort goes in to building systems like this, but as a believer in democracy it horrifies me. There are just so many people who doesn't care about their data or doesn't understand what information they share has consequences for all of us. "I/you are not someone important, its okay if X company has access to my data" is something I hear quite often whenever the topic of data privacy is brought up among some of my friends, and the worst thing is when you hear this sort of speak from people with a good education people with access to information people who are earning a good living and are considered to be "doing well". We need to start putting even more effort in to educating the average non-technical person about privacy and how it can harm democracy and so many other things in our life and we have to as an industry start taking more responsibility for the tech we develop.
- bcrl 6y ago
  At the moment I feal that it's a lost cause. There is no longer any connection between the people running the ads and the communities they are impacting. When the printing press was invented, the people writing the paper and publishing stories tended to live in the communities they published in. As media empires started being built in the 1980s and 1990s, local ownership vanished, and local content disappeared as well. The internet then amplified this effect as the advertising empires of Google and Facebook began to grow in the '00s. I don't think this is healthy for humanity. And I don't think we have the collective political will to fix this.
oyra 6y ago
data experts, huh? now time to assess ROI. try analyze voting patterns and see how effective was their anti-trump campaign vs "voting pattern"
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

69 points by theduder99 6y ago

micropoet 6y ago

They probably regret promoting Trump on 2016.

ody4242 6y ago

I'm glad they did.

jeffbee 6y ago

The title makes it seem like they spent their own money, but according to the article they raised the $75m from donors via their committee.

thrav 6y ago

Facebook engineer guides San Antonio Trump team to victory, realizes the gravity of what he has done, goes soul searching in Peru and undoubtedly does Ayahuasca, then leaves Facebook and resolves to defeat his old partners. Someone needs to contact this guy for the movie rights. It’s the perfect modern redemption arc, and peak Silicon Valley.

disgruntledphd2 6y ago
James Barnes is a salesperson, not an engineer.
- noema 6y ago
  Arguably a social engineer.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
    No, just a salesperson. He's a very good salesperson, mind you, and like many salespeople, he ends up as the front-facing person in these kinds of endeavours.
PedroBatista 6y ago
It's a complete cliché even Mike Judge would pass if the script wasn't something in the line of Idiocracy.

coold 6y ago

Again these russian hacke...wait

icedistilled 6y ago
Why do people still joke as if the Russian hacks and russian social media war was fake. The republican led gop senate investigation concluded russian hackers were behind the dnc/podesta hacks and were working to boost trump on social media in ways never seen before in the states. Edit: Adding relevant excerpts from the 5th, I think final, senate GOP led report's executive summary. This is the Republican led report. This was not led be democrats. Hack and Leak >"The Committee found that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the Russian effort to hack computer networks and accounts affiliated with the Democratic Party and leak information damaging to Hillary Clinton and her campaign for president. Moscow's intent was to harm the Clinton Campaign, tarnish an expected Clinton presidential administration, help the Trump Campaign after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, and undermine the U.S. democratic process. " Social Media executive summary ("Influence for hire" section) >"The Committee found that highly evolved tools used to shape popular sentiment were utilized in support of the Trump Campaign during the 2016 election season, and Russia has made use of such tools in its influence operations, but a link between Russian efforts and the Campaign's use of these tools was not established. These commercially available services many of which are based overseas-rely on an array of personal information to build targeted messaging profiles. Russia applied these sam·technologies and methodologies to its influence· campaign during the 2016 election and, in doing so, conducted foreign influence operationsagainst the United States with a speed, precision, and scale not previously seen." And from the intro of the actual section on Influence for hire.: >"All three companies either aspired to apply micro-targeted social media messaging techniques comparable to those employed by Russian information operatives with the Internet Research Agency, or actively engaged in the application of these techniques. "
- xncl 6y ago
  I think he was saying it's not just Russians doing it.

bot41 6y ago

Imagine there was no Facebook. I suspect the events of the last few years would have gone the same. 4 years of Trump is what got Biden elected.. not facebook ads.

whimsicalism 6y ago
Seriously this. There have been lots and lots of studies on the impact of internet ads on voting, most of it appears to be super negligible. TV ads? That's a whole different ball game that has clear signal in the polling.
Udik 6y ago
> 4 years of Trump is what got Biden elected Trump got 63 million votes in 2016. He got 7 million more in 2020. In the end, what decided the election is 3 votes every 100. The result is clear-cut: one wins, the other loses. But in reality what decided the election is a really tiny difference. Small enough for ads (from all sides) to have an effect on it, and really too small to say that anything has actually changed in the country.
- lowdose 6y ago
  Such an under appreciated fact. Without Cambridge Analytics Trump wouldn't have won in 2016, I'm glad a bunch of smart people decided to make a significant difference in this election and Trump didn't have a trump card this time.
  - edmundsauto 6y ago
    I mean this genuinely - how do we know that CA impacted the election? How many votes were swung or non-voters converted? I go back and forth. Sometimes I think this stuff must be super valuable because so much money gets spent in it. Then I work with medium businesses who have no clue how effective their spend is. I mean this sincerely: what actual evidence is there that CA affected the 2016 election? 1. Advertisers wouldn't spend so much money if it didn't work 2. ...?

dm319 6y ago

Do people remember 'bullshit jobs'? One class was 'goons'. You only need them because the opposition have them. I guess it looks like targetted ads to influence voting is here to stay.

r00fus 6y ago
Well we could legislate those ads out of existence. Free speech is one thing but paid promotion of ideas isn’t protected.

malikNF 6y ago

Tech wise, this is really impressive when I think about how much effort goes in to building systems like this, but as a believer in democracy it horrifies me. There are just so many people who doesn't care about their data or doesn't understand what information they share has consequences for all of us. "I/you are not someone important, its okay if X company has access to my data" is something I hear quite often whenever the topic of data privacy is brought up among some of my friends, and the worst thing is when you hear this sort of speak from people with a good education people with access to information people who are earning a good living and are considered to be "doing well". We need to start putting even more effort in to educating the average non-technical person about privacy and how it can harm democracy and so many other things in our life and we have to as an industry start taking more responsibility for the tech we develop.

bcrl 6y ago
At the moment I feal that it's a lost cause. There is no longer any connection between the people running the ads and the communities they are impacting. When the printing press was invented, the people writing the paper and publishing stories tended to live in the communities they published in. As media empires started being built in the 1980s and 1990s, local ownership vanished, and local content disappeared as well. The internet then amplified this effect as the advertising empires of Google and Facebook began to grow in the '00s. I don't think this is healthy for humanity. And I don't think we have the collective political will to fix this.

oyra 6y ago

data experts, huh? now time to assess ROI. try analyze voting patterns and see how effective was their anti-trump campaign vs "voting pattern"

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]