17 ms·

Something weird is happening on Facebook

736 points by incomplete 5y ago

cxf12 5y ago
Clicked on the Cambridge Analytica story Vox ran that you linked. As quoted the author of the piece states "It’s not clear to what extent Cambridge Analytica helped".
- Pokepokalypse 5y ago
  The recorded sales-pitch with their CEO Nix that the BBC aired, revealed that effort as largely a Political Scam operation. The guy was supposedly the CEO of an AI research firm - but he was offering services to send underage prostitutes around to politicians to attempt to entrap them for extortion purposes. Whatever Cambridge Analytica actually DID, it was probably 90% snake-oil; (leveraging on the "AI" hype in the industry).
th0ma5 5y ago
Probably mapping spread vectors.
- uptownfunk 5y ago
  does that mean trying to understand how "virality" spreads?
  - th0ma5 5y ago
    How to spread information... Who are the super connected people.
GoodJokes 5y ago
Delete Facebook. By god. How many articles do we need to write to communicate the same sentiment.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- wutbrodo 5y ago
  This article is more than just "Facebook is bad". It's proposing a specific phenomenon the author thinks it's noticed, and digging into what may be behind it.
- spoonjim 5y ago
  "Delete Facebook" is like saying "Delete drugs." The whole reason Facebook is dangerous is because its draw on the human psyche is stronger than that of the average person to resist, and that the people who do engage with it can harm the people who don't. There needs to be a national social media policy the way there is a national drug policy. We need to have the conversation about where we want to be as a country from "full ban" to "fully legal," just like people recognize that a country's drug policy can be somewhere between Singapore's and Portugal's.
  - boppo 5y ago
    >national drug policy I'm not sure that's less harmful to society than no policy. It may be causing more people to use.
  - GoodJokes 5y ago
    While we figure out a social media policy (cough, not for profit, cough) we can also delete Facebook. Facebook isn’t social media, it is a proven bad actor in the social media space. Any article that doesn’t begin and end with that seems pretty contextless to me.
  - int_19h 5y ago
    To ban, you first need to accurately define what you're banning. How would you define it?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- parksy 5y ago
Buvaz 5y ago
Its just me..collecting data to work out what will get my mom of her phone.
Johnny555 5y ago
I've been wondering what those posts are about, I keep seeing them in my feed, and they're always answered by the same 60+ year old relatives.
- ogn3rd 5y ago
  Many of those questions are used as 2FA as well.
  - Johnny555 5y ago
    Those I understand, but I'm wondering about the "What's your perfect fall day" or "How old were you when you got your first job" questions that don't seem like they'd yield answers to security questions.
    - rubicon33 5y ago
      Those are thrown in there to make the general asking of these types of questions considered normal.
      - edoceo 5y ago
        Magician calls that mis-direction.
    - MikeTheGreat 5y ago
      "What's your perfect fall day" does not strike me as a good security question "How old were you when you got your first job" actually does seem like a good security question for many people. You're unlikely to forget it, after a while not many other people will know it, and it's a single number (whole number, most likely) so it's easy for a computer to parse (and hard for you to mess up by leaving out / adding too much detail). Depending on what you respond to on social media, and depending on if you've got any accounts that use this as a security question, you might want to go back and force the account to use a new question ;)
vidanay 5y ago
Facebook...Nuke it from orbit.
bondarchuk 5y ago
>This multi-billion dollar industry has to be getting revenue somewhere else. Wait, how do they know this is a multi-billion dollar industry in the first place?
- Lammy 5y ago
  https://www.statista.com/statistics/693438/affiliate-marketing-spending/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/693438/affiliate-marketi...
bovermyer 5y ago
The real question is, how do we discourage interaction with these bait posts on a scale that matters?
- dqv 5y ago
  Well you can take the approach that one TikToker’s mom took: comment on the post and say it’s datamining.
  - wutbrodo 5y ago
    Would the segment of users who respond to content-free posts like these have much of a reaction to a comment saying that? I don't mean that as a snarky dismissal, but a sincere question. I know that plenty of people, especially among digital-natives, have instant negative reactions to being reminded of data collection. But the type of user answering "what was your first car" or "what do you call your grandchildren" do not strike me as having much overlap with the groups that are cynical about social media platforms.
    - dqv 5y ago
      I don't really think it's a legitimate or scalable way to inform people. On a smaller scale it could help people in the local social network to be aware of what those posts are doing. Another thing to do is to tell people "they're trying to use this information to get into your bank account". That will make them stop really fast. But as far as scalability goes, I don't think there's a way.
  - Nition 5y ago
    I once saw an official Facebook blog post about some change to the T&C, with 80,000+ comments on it, most of them one of those meaningless copy-pastes about how they don't consent to Facebook using their data. More comments were appearing every second. Every 20th post or so, someone would be saying something like "Stop it you idiots, this stupid copy-paste doesn't do anything, you can't declare your rights like this." Then a bunch more copy-paste comments would appear before the next person telling the idiots to stop.
yabones 5y ago
My speculation: The exact same thing that happens with reddit accounts used for astroturfing... People will 'build up' a profile over the course of several months, reposting popular posts from months/years ago, etc. They're actually quite easy to spot, an account with high posting points and low comment points is usually one of these. Then, when it's nice and ripe, they will sell it to a troll farm which uses it to push a particular agenda. We saw this happen quite a bit in 2015-2016, and again starting in early 2020 (though it never really stopped). But, in this case, the product is the 'network' rather than individual accounts. Something that appears this 'organic' and 'homegrown' is a very valuable tool for a widespread disinfo campaign. Or, it could simply be the magician gang that makes viral posts of gross food. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/creators-countertop-spaghetti-hack-make-cooking-fun_n_609c2478e4b03e1dd384df0a https://www.huffpost.com/entry/creators-countertop-spaghetti...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- bink 5y ago
  I've never understood this logic. Very few subs limit posts by karma and those that do certainly don't require the insane amounts of karma that these bots are farming. I know I don't go back through someone's post history before voting on their comments and I don't really care about their aggregate karma values.
  - MattGaiser 5y ago
    It just takes one person to do that though and say "you made a new account for this you troll?" before everyone gets it.
    - josefx 5y ago
      That would work if the moderators of various subs weren't part of it, quite a few subs will hand out temp. bans when you "accuse someone of shilling". Even if the account was created the day a story went public, didn't post anything until weeks later when the story hit reddit and never backed up its attempts to discredit one side of the conflict. Some fun oriented subs will however happily ban spam bots that just automate imgur reposts if you point one out early enough.
TheSockStealer 5y ago
Some of these questions are similar to those questions you would see in an identify verification challenges. What is your first car, pet name, city you were born in. I am not saying this is the "only" answer, but could be one of them.
- wodenokoto 5y ago
  The article directly addresses this point and claims that the password is worthless, while somehow also claiming that the data they can scrape about you after you interact with them is where the money is made.
giansegato 5y ago
I don't get it. What do these people would be doing with such data? Ok, they know that a certain Facebook account named John Doe is likely to be a male, between 40 and 50 years old, voted for Trump both in 16 and 20. So what? It's not like you can retarget said account through ads. I fail to see the purpose.
- bink 5y ago
  In 2016 it was used to target these specific types of people with outrage. Get them riled up against their opponents and make them more likely to vote for your candidate or issues and more likely to spread your propaganda for you. AFAIK you absolutely can target (or could target) groups of people based on very specific criteria.
- akersten 5y ago
  There is extreme value in knowing who your most-prospective marks are. If you had a population of 1,000 people, and had to sell something (read: convince to vote a certain way) to 400 of them, wouldn't you like to know the subset of those people who are already predisposed to your position and just need a little more nudging with a narrowly-tailored meme , instead of making a dartboard attempt against all 1,000? That was the entire value-add of Cambridge Analytica , whose Facebook-API data-gathering loophole has now been replaced by just engaging suckers via the platform itself and a tiny bit of NLP/sentiment analysis.
  - obelos 5y ago
    I suspect there's also value in avoiding showing some forms of persuasive/propagandistic content to those who are unlikely to be amenable to it. This allows the content to circulate with less suppressive feedback from a target's peers.
    - AlexAndScripts 5y ago
      You can also avoid targeting people who already support you. Or, in the case of Cambridge Analytica's brexit manipulation, identify those who have never voted before (using hundreds of indicators) and introduce them to politics... Their first information being propaganda from the leave campaign.
___luigi 5y ago
Social platforms amplifies all of our human qualities, and our interaction habits. Since old ages, people were striving to seek attention and show their work [1] [2]. After reading this book [3] indistractable, I started to reflect on how our educational systems are not designed to prepare students to live in this digital age, yesterday it's FB, today it's TikTk and tomorrow there will be something else. FB is just one Pawn in this game. I know that siding with FB is one of these topics that are very controversial in HN, but I am not finding excuses for the practices of these companies, my point is that our kids will live in a different age than the one we lived in, educational systems should keep up with these challenges and find innovative way to prepare people to efficiently manage that. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu%27allaqat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu%27allaqat [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_of_ancient_Rome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_of_ancient_Rome [3]: https://www.nirandfar.com/indistractable/ https://www.nirandfar.com/indistractable/
jsnell 5y ago
With those comment counts, something dodgy is obviously happening. The interesting question here is whether Facebook is somehow accidentally amplifying it. Certainly it is not in Facebook's interest to allow this kind of data harvesting. If it hurts you to think that Facebook somehow isn't maximally evil, at least consider that this is data that could be only Facebook's. Allowing somebody else to harvest it is money straight out of Facebook's pocket. So, given FB should not be complicit, what mistake could they be making to allow the system to be haunted? The obvious guess is that they have a feedback loop in the ranking algorithm. It values comments very highly as a signal of good engagement, but they weren't prepared for "content" that is this good at eliciting low effort comments and have wide appeal demographically. As long as one of these reaches a critical mass, it'll be shown to tens or hundreds of millions of people just by any engagement feeding even more engagement. Is there anything less obvious?
- NineStarPoint 5y ago
  A quick point I’d make is that it may not be a mistake (from facebooks perspective) to allow others to exploit a given system as long as they’re gaining enough value from it to outweigh that. If whatever is being exploited doubles how much they can charge for ads, they might accept some of their data being stolen until they could find a way to have their cake and eat it too.
- cratermoon 5y ago
  > The interesting question here is whether Facebook is somehow accidentally amplifying it. Someone somewhere found a way to exploit what FB's engagement metrics do. Is it 'accidental' that FB amplifies things if their system is designed to do exactly what it does when gamed?
- jaywalk 5y ago
  It has been this way for years, so it's definitely no accident. Posts that elicit more comments absolutely end up getting ranked higher by The Algorithm™.
- captainmuon 5y ago
  I always thought that FB is somewhat complicit (not out of evilness necessarily). I see a lot of "viral" posts - some like those mentioned in the article, but also a ton of odd woodworking, cooking, and "resin art" videos. The videos are quite repetitive and not really interesting so I wonder if they are maybe hidden ads, but they are not marked as such, and it is not clear what they are selling. (Well maybe they are trying to sell resin, which is really expensive.) Anyway, it seems like they are different kinds of posts on FB. Some stay close to their point of origin, and only rarely get shown to other people who have not liked a page or are friends themselves. And other posts which, if somebody commented on or interacted in any way with them, get shown to their friends and friends-of-friends. After running a charitable cause / political FB page for a while, I'm convinced that internally there are actually different categories of posts - ones that are shown to followers, and ones that are allowed to float or go viral. I really wonder what the mechanism is to get into the floating category. It doesn't seem to be based on quality, nor on money spent. Maybe it is some interaction metric that somebody learned to game?
throwawaywindev 5y ago
Those look like phishing for answers to account security questions.
ergot_vacation 5y ago
"Oh no the Skinner box we built to exploit and manipulate people is being used to exploit and manipulate people!" "But why is that-" "Because OTHER people are doing it!" "Oh no!"
- Kiro 5y ago
  Facebook is not ohnoing anything here. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if their algorithm boosts posts encouraging this kind of low-effort engagement.
  - jjoonathan 5y ago
    Yeah. Other parties get data, FB gets cold hard cash. I bet they're quite happy with those terms.
- sk2020 5y ago
  That the author is peddling the absurd “Russians hacked muh servers” popular myth makes the comment all the more poignant. Social networks tolerate fake traffic because it increases their perceived value. The real crime is the fictive usage and engagement metrics they use to set ad pricing.
  - GavinMcG 5y ago
    The "popular myth" is sourced to both independent security firms and multiple U.S. intelligence agencies, and isn't a partisan issue: https://www.wired.com/2017/03/marco-rubio-says-hack-attempts-russia-targeted/ https://www.wired.com/2017/03/marco-rubio-says-hack-attempts...
    - xqcgrek2 5y ago
      Oh it most definitely is a partisan issue. I'll wait for your evidence for if any votes were changed in machines, the only thing that could truly be construed as "hacking" a election.
aasasd 5y ago
1.4 million comments on a single post? Holy crap! I was previously wondering on Reddit, what kind of vapid self-importance compels people to comment in threads that already have over 100-200 comments—when new ones go straight to the bottom and no one sees them afterwards. But this is on scale of some mental illness, unless I seriously misunderstand something about Facebook comments.
- SPascareli13 5y ago
  Your friends will see your comment in fb, so there is an incentive to comment even when there is already millions of other comments.
- strulovich 5y ago
  Facebook shows comments from your friends highlighted in your feed. So if one of your friends comments with the one millionth comment, you can end up seeing the post and your friend’s comment In your feed. So while no one can read all comments - your friends are likely to see yours.
  - HaloZero 5y ago
    And then y'all can communicate in thread too. So it's a little microcosm.
  - cmg 5y ago
    I've seen a lot of this recently, both on the types of posts in the article and on the posts of controversial / extremist right-wing politicians like MTG.
  - aasasd 5y ago
    So it's actually sharing with added notes, like quote tweets. Indeed makes a bit more sense now, with this piece of knowledge. (Perhaps once upon a time I'll end up also finally figuring out how the hell comments on Tumblr work. Not that I'll have practical use for that anymore.)
- jjoonathan 5y ago
arbuge 5y ago
Just a note for those of you who were confused like I was upon reading this article: the author seems to be using the term "affiliate networks" in an unusual way - they're calling Facebook pages with some kind of commercial relationship between them "nodes" in an "affiliate network". The commonly accepted usage is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affiliate_network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affiliate_network
- cratermoon 5y ago
  I think the author's description is a completely accurate description of affiliate networks. The fact the the commercial relationship results in "likes" or "influence" for the affiliates rather than direct monetary compensation from the merchants is just the nature of social media.
LAC-Tech 5y ago
7 Tacos is a lot. Don't let someone you care about eat 7 Tacos, that's just enabling.
tarkin2 5y ago
So, there’s a network of popular accounts that are posting questions and harvesting the comments to psychologically analyse Facebook users and later politically target them and their social networks with disinformation that’s tailored to their psychological grouping? That’s what I gleamed.
tyingq 5y ago
My favorite is questions that appear to be roundabout ways to gather your password reset questions. Like "Your stripper name is: Your Favorite Color + Name of Your First Dog!". Never fails to get tons of responses.
whyenot 5y ago
It's becoming increasingly clear that social media needs to be more strictly regulated. How to do that in a free society is a difficult question. OTOH, if we take too long to figure this out, it may be too late. In fact, it may already be too late.
- jensensbutton 5y ago
  What regulation would help here?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - 93po 5y ago
    Taxation on services that are known to be detrimental to human health. These taxes can be spent on public health resources (counseling and so forth).
    - Pokepokalypse 5y ago
      That sounds like a very pragmatic, and politically-neutral idea, that would be portrayed as a "far-left nanny-state Marxist doctrine." . . .
    - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
      The problem is, those who need the counseling (to recover from overdosing on their echo chamber) won't seek it.
- CamperBob2 5y ago
  It might have been possible in the 1950s, but the modern "death of authority" phenomenon has ensured that no central regulation of social media can ever be imposed by the consent of the governed. The government would literally have to pull wires out of walls to stop Facebook and whatever inevitably follows it.
pkamb 5y ago
> Yes, a question-post invites more engagement than a simple comment, but there’s something else at work here. Is there? I've noticed wannabe influencers on Instagram including questions and polls with every one of their Stories. They're doing it to "juice the algorithm" by getting responses. That in turn theoretically gets them featured on the Explore Page or whatever. YouTubers do the same things, ending each video with a CTA question you should answer in the comments. The Facebook question pages that boomers answer seem to just be doing the same thing, attracting comments and interactions and thus boosting the page. The bigger question I have is why Facebook thinks I would be interested in seeing in my timeline that my 68 year old aunt has answered "Freddy Mercury" to some question about the best musical act they've seen live.
- fsckboy 5y ago
  I've never used Facebook so I can't pretend to know how it works or is laid out, but if I were tasked with creating a "timeline" for you on FB based on what I know, your aunt sharing that her favorite act was "Freddy Mercury" is exactly what I would share with you. What would be more apropos?
  - pkamb 5y ago
    If she typed that into a post of her own, sure. But this is more like surfacing every comment of hers on every random blog she reads. Those comments should be shared between her and the blog and its readers, not me. Also, I've strongly indicated that I don't want to see this content by clicking the "X" every time I see one of these "question reply" posts. That probably hides that Page forever. But the next meme question page reply by my next boomer relative will pop up tomorrow. Facbook isn't correlating the fact that I want to see nothing from any of these clickbait pages.
marcus_holmes 5y ago
I'm curious if the data harvested from this is skewed to older people, and more "naive" people. Most of my techie friends have uninstalled FB (like me), or rarely interact with it. And my smarter friends just don't interact with that kind of clickbait-y post. I wonder if marketing folks will even notice. Like Google Analytics, which is disproportionately blocked by smarter and more technical people. Marketers cheerfully ignore that, though. Will they even know that they're missing our data? Is the Venn diagram of FB enthusiastic data-donaters and people who don't block GA just a circle? If so, are public policies and corporate marketing strategies going to be designed to cater to them and not us?
bob229 5y ago
Who gives a hoot. Only an absolute moron use social media
CosmicShadow 5y ago
Was just talking about this the other night with my wife and how we should just start our own group sharing these baiting questions to see how quickly and largely we can grow it.
CosmicShadow 5y ago
The same type of people answer these as the people who get an email from Amazon or Home Depot about a product they bought with a question like "What are the dimensions" and they answer "I don't know". And for all time, everyone else is like WTF did you even answer the question if you don't know, it's not like your friend asked you in person, and that is the story of 80% of Q&A's on every product. *SIDE RANT OVER!
- ComputerGuru 5y ago
  The emails Amazon sends (or used to send) to randomly selected prior purchasers of a product when there’s a new unanswered question have a subject line along the lines of “David is asking you if xxx, can you help him?” They’re deliberately made to look like personal appeals to the individual specifically, and I don’t blame people for not understanding that it’s disgusting growth/engagement hacking.
  - CamperBob2 5y ago
    THANK YOU. That explains those maddening "I don't know" answers perfectly. I'm usually reasonably good at imagining the mechanisms behind stupid engagement-hacking phenomena like that, but the question of why people answer questions on Amazon product pages with "I don't know" has stumped me for years.
- Igelau 5y ago
  JerryInVA1948: Hi it's Jerry's wife again. We never measured it, so I don't know. Sorry!
gavin_gee 5y ago
isnt this already known as social engineering data collection for hackers for use in later attacks?
- mikey_p 5y ago
  That's not what the article is about. It points out that passwords for random folks aren't really worth much, and are probably out there on the dark web for purchase anyway, but the idea that psychographic profiles could be build by a third party that is scraping these comments off public posts.
captainmuon 5y ago
I think this is just a conspiracy theory. What's happening is that capitalism sets ridiculous incentives, so people are compelled to set up all these blogs and create these memes to maybe get fractions of cents per interaction. The real scandal is not that the Russians or the Chinese are attacking democracy this way, it is that we are waisting so much productivity on this (both users, and people working on such campaigns). PS: If the described tactic really works, I gotta try it out in order to take over the world.
micromacrofoot 5y ago
It doesn't really matter if these posts are intentionally being used to gather data, someone's gathering it. Cross-reference some of the security question posts like "first car" with large data leaks and you're bound to get some matches eventually. Scammers in some countries can live for years off of one good bank account hit, and many of them make a living just reselling the data before it even gets that far. We need some serious public education about freely sharing information on the internet. Like "this is your brain on drugs" nationwide PSA campaigns.
pytlicek 5y ago
Something weird is happening on Facebook for a long time :/
pjdemers 5y ago
How many people choosing random answer would it take to muddy the data to the point it is useless?
Gollapalli 5y ago
Cambridge Analytica style targeted political messaging, and retailoring of political formulae to personality/moral-foundations/IQ profiles, in order to create coalitions is the future of political messaging and activism. In many ways, now that the gameboard has changed so drastically, it's unavoidable. This is how politics works now. It's not (just) Russia, or China, it's every political activism group or lobby that wants to achieve anything. Welcome to the new age.
- engineer_22 5y ago
  no different than it used to be, just more sophisticated.
  - Gollapalli 5y ago
    I think there is a qualitative difference. Previous means of influencing politics involved NGO's and political parties actively working different demographics in order to get them to vote in the organization's interest. These organizations may loosely be considered managerial bureaucracies, whether they are labor unions, or activist NGO's, or political parties. Even large scale media campaigns conducted via mass psychology are essentially managerial or bureaucratic in nature, using mass organizations at a large scale. The new means of manufacturing consent are not in this character. Rather than acting directly on mass groups using mass organizations, they operate by directly targeting individuals and niche groups leveraging algorithms and digital means. It's different paradigm: mass vs niche, mass media vs targeted media, mass psychology vs individual psychological profiling, large bureaucratic organizations vs smaller technologically enabled teams, the management of people vs the management of algorithms. It's two different approaches to power, and hence, two different elite groups. And when you have two different elite groups, you have conflict. It's a new world, a revolution in the making.
    - Apocryphon 5y ago
      Atomized power.
jollybean 5y ago
I wonder if it's even worth pondering the various kinds of dumpster fires that happen there? It's like we're caught watching a tornado hit a garbage pile ... while the 'exit' sign is clear for all of us to follow if we want. I think the answer to all questions Facebook-related is 'delete' / 'exit' / 'log off' and then to go ahead to Spotify and listen to some Ahad Jamal from 40 years ago to put it in context.
- JasonFruit 5y ago
  Off topic: I hadn't listened to Ahmad Jamal in years until a couple months ago, and he was a genius. So much creativity, with no sacrifice of lyricism, and an amazing way with silence.
jcims 5y ago
Some other interesting questions they should pose: - What's your mother's maiden name? - What street were you born on? - What was your first car? - What's your childhood's best friend's name?
- madrox 5y ago
  These do get shared, but usually in meme form where you turn your birthday into your "Werewolf name" and are encouraged to share in the comments. Because you're sharing in an altered, amusing form, you don't stop to consider someone can reverse your birthday from it.
  - jrochkind1 5y ago
    My birthday is literally already on my Facebook "about" page though, and shown to all my friends whenever it comes around, so they can post on my timeline.
    - pedalpete 5y ago
      But that doesn't automatically make it available to 3rd parties that have no connection to you.
- ctvo 5y ago
  "Being an American is a privilege few have. Let's share our American issued social security numbers!" <Over photo of a bald eagle>
  - mywittyname 5y ago
    My understanding is that a portion of the SSN is based on the ZIP of your birthplace. I'm sure some clever person could come up with a way to use birth location + a checksum that would reveal an SSN without actually typing it out. I'm thinking something like, "Add up all the individual numbers of your SSN and figure out what Founding Father you are!" Use some statistics to ensure that lots of people get good ones.
okareaman 5y ago
My FB feed is lousy with these sorts of things. My family & friends seem to enjoy answering questions like "What was the first concert you attended?" I don't think it's for advertising purposes because I have not noticed any improvement in the accuracy of targeted ads. I don't think it's for political purposes because that is much easier to figure out without these oblique questions. One group who would benefit from detailed life style profiles are life insurance companies. More detail is better for setting accurate premiums while remaining competitive with other life insurance companies. Edit: I almost forgot to mention a really popular one I've seen a lot of lately: "Have you ever had a DUI ? I'll wait." It's unbelievable to me that people would answer this question, but it definitely something insurance companies would like to know because their records don't go that far back into the paper age. A lot of people answer something like "No, but I should have."
- htrp 5y ago
  > "What was the first concert you attended?" That's literally a security question for a bank password reset.
  - okareaman 5y ago
    That's not a good example, which is why I added the DUI question. I've noticed most of my friends have stopped answering security type questions as they've been warned.
    - creaghpatr 5y ago
      I’ve seen the DUI question in my feed in the past week, along with several other examples from the article.
  - tbihl 5y ago
    And if your answer isn't a random string of three words, you're a good mark.
- matsemann 5y ago
  I've long wished for an opportunity to filter my feed, so that I only see what people post themselves. But I guess fb force these things down my throat because no one actually posts anything anymore, except big life events like weddings or announcing a child. So people would realize fb is dead when it comes to keeping in touch with friends and family.
PerkinWarwick 5y ago
Is it possible to set up Facebook to only give you people you know or people you follow on your feed? I'd consider an account if that were true, with the appropriate personal filters on of course given the spying the company does. It's a totally sleazy company, but it actually provides a valuable service at the same time.
md_ 5y ago
I’m confused. The premise of this post seems to be that this is some malicious attempt to deduce basic geographic data on Facebook users. But doesn’t Facebook let you target ads based on such data already? Why would I not just pay Facebook directly for such targeting?
- mikey_p 5y ago
  The implication is that comments on public posts could be scraped by a third party to build an off-FB psychographic profile, similar to how Cambridge Analytica tried to generate profiles for users by querying data through a third party Facebook app.
- deckar01 5y ago
  I believe the goal is to build a model that correlates public attributes that FB provides with hidden attributes learned from these probes. When the attacker is ready to target users matching specific hidden attributes, they can reverse the correlation into ranges of public attributes that FB will accept for targeting ad campaigns.
xenihn 5y ago
Not sure if AsianHustleNetwork (AHN) really falls into what's being described in this article, but it's one of the more insidious FB communities I've run across, in terms of members being milked for affiliate revenue. The content is overall wholesome and useful, but I'm assuming most members (both contributers and passive viewers/clickers) don't realize that they're lining the owners' pockets with their clickthroughs, along with whatever personal data is being collected through Facebook.
madrox 5y ago
This could be more benign than the article makes it out to be. Growing a content business in 2021 requires you to understand Facebook's algorithms and what will get your post amplified. Instagram famously only shows your posts to 10% of your followers by default [1]. The trigger points for your post to reach wider require certain engagement quotas, and if you're designing your post to get more comments then it'll hit them faster. Often accounts do these kinds of posts because their profile is about selling a single thing (like a book they wrote) or are dropshipping and focused on the marketing side. The real thing they want to get in front of users is the link in their bio. I think the real issue here is that it's impossible to tell the benign from the malignant. Is that cute mom blog going to start hawking ivermectin? What is my comment revealing about me that I don't authorize? There's no Better Business Bureau for Facebook pages. Maybe there should be. 1. https://www.thelovelyescapist.com/2018-instagram-algorithm/ https://www.thelovelyescapist.com/2018-instagram-algorithm/
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  What value does BBB bring to the world? Any “rating” organization whose value proposition is evaluating others and does not employ vast legions of laborers to continually test and retest their subjects is obviously a scam. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Business_Bureau https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Business_Bureau Not to mention the obvious conflict of interests when an organization gets paid by the test subjects to grade the test subjects.
  - madrox 5y ago
    What you're asking is a whole other topic, and one I'm not familiar enough with to weigh in on. I don't have any data on how effective such an organization is...only its role, and I'm not aware of any organization filling that role for Facebook pages today...except maybe Facebook, which is obviously a problem for the same reasons you point out about the BBB because the incentives aren't quite there.
badkitty99 5y ago
The 90's called and wants their chainmail back
cpr 5y ago
I stopped reading when the article repeated the thoroughly tired and debunked talking points about Russians stealing DNC server materials...
- jessaustin 5y ago
  I was torn on this one. I do agree with you, in that, if we can't trust them on stuff that was obvious in June of 2017, how can we trust the "facts" we can't check? However, this is at least an interesting hypothesis. The particulars are probably wrong, but all sorts of different parties might try "campaigns" like this for all sorts of different reasons. (Although GOP might not be my first suspect for dastardly clever schemes...) The most likely possibility seems that we have algorithms fooling algorithms with no humans in the loop. Sure, there might not be enough "real" (i.e. a real human purchasing a real product) revenue sloshing around here to make the whole effort worthwhile. However, there might be a poorly configured dashboard somewhere that makes it appear as if that's the case... Meanwhile FB laughs all the way to the bank.
- 93po 5y ago
  I find this propaganda in the weirdest of places. I was reading a physical book about artificial intelligence written by a CEO in the industry and it had multiple references to Russiagate (and stated as fact, of course). It had nothing to do with the subject matter and was mentioned off-hand, same as it is here.
twic 5y ago
First comment: > Generally speaking, people should become more and more wary of memes. I suppose memes which explicitly attack other memes had to emerge at some point.
throwawaymanbot 5y ago
Zuckerberg should be in an orange jumpsuit.
greenyoda 5y ago
> "Sure, that first post won’t accurately predict your birth year..." Actually it would have, in 2019. 66 + 1953 = 2019, subtract your age, and you get your year of birth.
brap 5y ago
Speaking of weird things happening on Facebook… I see a lot of official artist pages (usually artists who have been pretty successful a few years ago but no longer are, mostly rappers for some reason) that post A LOT of random “memes” (mostly just stuff stolen from Reddit) that are completely unrelated to their work, usually with very clickbaity captions (tag a friend etc). When you go on their page it doesn’t show up. Most comments seem to be from 2nd world countries (like my own). What’s that about?
- Nihilartikel 5y ago
  My guess is that their marketers are having them post generic memes as engagement sinks and then hiring out click farms to engage with them. Probably with the hope that it will game the Algo to rank them higher when they post something relevant to their business.
- quenix 5y ago
  Could you give an example? I'd like to see this for myself.
m0d0nne11 5y ago
Is there some way to delete/filter/downvote click-bait header lines on HN like this one?
- Igelau 5y ago
  Use the hide button.
mtnGoat 5y ago
some type of ad network of data gathering company is behind it. its pretty straight forward and easy to do. just promote one post to a certain targeted audience(say women only) then run another campaign targeting a specific region or an age group, now you have another dimension of data. Rinse and repeat a few times and you will have a decent data set that you can then cohort out and show targeted ads to on other ad networks. running tens of thousands of these campaigns will net you a lot of very useful data. since you are paying the platform to promote things, they don't care, its still revenue to them. the folks behind some of these things seem to be doing pretty well at it too, at least, their social profiles show a very lux life.
tbihl 5y ago
>Properly scrubbed, these answers could probably predict your ’16 and ’20 Election preferences with 90%+ accuracy. They could probably guess your preference, but prediction is way harder, as shown by the way so few people saw Clinton's loss coming in 2016.
- smackeyacky 5y ago
  It would appear that the old methods of political polling in places like the US and Australia don't work with the accuracy they used to: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/nov/11/opinion-poll-failure-at-australian-federal-election-systematically-over-represented-labor https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/nov/11/opini... A similar thing happened with Clinton in 2016 and with Brexit. Political polling has stopped working. It's not clear whether the polling organisations are simply asking the wrong people, or the wrong questions, or that people are no longer as fixed to their opinions as they used to be, or would prefer to hide their preferences. It would seem to me that a lot of the stranger activity on social media is an attempt to fix that problem.
  - tbihl 5y ago
    >It would seem to me that a lot of the stranger activity on social media is an attempt to fix that problem. To some extent, it seemed like the 2016 results were a response by people who wanted to resist lazy categorization. Granted, it's not hard to be subtler than "deplorables", but I expect some amount of people not wanting to be strategized with.
geitir 5y ago
It's actually a sentient AI trying to learn about humans. It knows exactly when to post in order to maximize engagement
rnoorda 5y ago
One variant of this that I've seen lately is some sort of wrong or easily-disproved assertion or challenge. "Bet you can't name an American city with an E!" or "95% of people can't name three European countries. Can you?" It drives engagement not only for people answering the question, but also for those talking about how stupid the post is- either way, it's engagement.
PaulHoule 5y ago
I think a lot of people are just that stupid.
zaroth 5y ago
> For context, compare the layout and content on an authentic blog like Scary Mommy with the spam, ads, and brain-numbing botspeak you’ll encounter on a MediaVine blog like the A Typical Mom. The difference is easy to spot. The ads seem much worse on Scary Mom. What am I missing?
- jonS90 5y ago
  I came here to ask the same...
aaroninsf 5y ago
It's past time to take a step back and consider as a society that the predominant mechanism for communication, hence the distribution of ideas and hence the formation of socially-dependent constructions of self, and belief systems, are now in the hands of companies like Facebook which by their own admission are driven all but exclusively by the necessary (sic) pursuit of growth via "engagement" at any cost. This system is not just capable of, but biased towards the amplification of exactly that content which maximizes limbic system engagement, i.e., triggers the sub-cognitive emotional brain. I.e. that content which enrages, titillates, and otherwise triggers reward centers. Let's look at that again, stripped to the core. Our society's primary mechanism for interpersonal communication, is social networks which by their own description, depend on the purist possible amplification of that content which triggers us the most, regardless of all other factors, including truthfulness, social benefit, coherency, utility to the commons, you name it, call it anything you like. The good. Naturally one can individually work hard to use these systems for the good. But the systems themselves have zero incentive to amplify you when you do; and every incentive to amplify the shit-posting trolls being paid by our enemies foreign and domestic. That's not hyperbole; that's a simple statement of fact. The end of this road is like e.g. the climate change that goes unaddressed in part because of these very mechanisms, approaching more rapidly than we think. A cognitive error to remember: we extrapolate linearly, and have no native ability to extrapolate exponential outcomes. The clearly visible end game in the US for unchecked perpetuation of bad-faith high-performing "engagement" on Facebook and its properties, in particular, is clearly civil war. Maybe it's cool for a while; maybe it's hot only in moments; but the edge of the cliff is visible and the intense push by bad actors of all kinds to push us off it is palpable. And the mechanism remains Facebook, steered as it is by an amoral culture which sprang from and is perpetuated by a literally emotionally truncated high-functioning sociopath. If you think that's wrong, the onus is on you to document how the company's behavior internal and external is distinguishable from one in which that is a precise definition. I've said it here many times, I'll say it again: If you work for them, it's time to quit. If you do business with them, it's time to quit. If you think think you can't because <reason>, you're wrong. The damage to yourself, and to our society, is profound and un-ending. We remain at memetic war and it is reifying into a culture war on the edge of becoming simply a war. Don't be part of the problem. Get off now, and work to get others off, and work to unmake this.
Cpoll 5y ago
Can I read/scrape all 1M comments on one of these posts, or does it only show responses from friends and/or people who have looser privacy settings? It'd be pretty interesting to collect and play around with all the same data this affiliate network is purported to be collecting.
fortran77 5y ago
A good way to get OPSEC data from high-value targets who are smart enough to be quiet on the internet is to go after their wives and children. I'm wondering if someone is trying to cast a wide net here to get information on people.
kderbyma 5y ago
the same thing happens on Reddit with the AskReddit. they have bots ask simple questions and then the answers I think are being used to train algorithms. Reddit is such that if you scroll on their app in the main feed for long enough it will always be ask Reddit's and they will all be those kind of questions
Raed667 5y ago
When I was in school (+6 years ago) I had classmates that were in the business of building and selling Facebook pages. This was before Facebook started showing the history of the page's title changes over time. As students who were broke and had lots of time on their hand they'd basically post all day a variation of cultural references, leading questions, polls, memes etc.. Anything that would drive the subscriber count up, which is the most important metric for how much they can charge for a page. I'm guessing the posts that got 1.4 million comments is just that but on steroids.
hyproxia 5y ago
I suggest to the author going outside and touching some grass. This is literally paranoia.
mclightning 5y ago
I will repeat it here again. Delete all your friends and content on facebook, and use it as a shell account for logins, events and messenger. Change starts with you. This is simple. I have done this 2 months ago. It works great so far. Most people have moved onto IG/Whatsapp already anyways. I know those are also FB owned, but do this as a protest.

736 points by incomplete 5y ago

Clicked on the Cambridge Analytica story Vox ran that you linked. As quoted the author of the piece states "It’s not clear to what extent Cambridge Analytica helped".

Pokepokalypse 5y ago
The recorded sales-pitch with their CEO Nix that the BBC aired, revealed that effort as largely a Political Scam operation. The guy was supposedly the CEO of an AI research firm - but he was offering services to send underage prostitutes around to politicians to attempt to entrap them for extortion purposes. Whatever Cambridge Analytica actually DID, it was probably 90% snake-oil; (leveraging on the "AI" hype in the industry).

th0ma5 5y ago

Probably mapping spread vectors.

uptownfunk 5y ago
does that mean trying to understand how "virality" spreads?
- th0ma5 5y ago
  How to spread information... Who are the super connected people.

GoodJokes 5y ago

Delete Facebook. By god. How many articles do we need to write to communicate the same sentiment.

deleted 5y ago
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wutbrodo 5y ago
This article is more than just "Facebook is bad". It's proposing a specific phenomenon the author thinks it's noticed, and digging into what may be behind it.
spoonjim 5y ago
"Delete Facebook" is like saying "Delete drugs." The whole reason Facebook is dangerous is because its draw on the human psyche is stronger than that of the average person to resist, and that the people who do engage with it can harm the people who don't. There needs to be a national social media policy the way there is a national drug policy. We need to have the conversation about where we want to be as a country from "full ban" to "fully legal," just like people recognize that a country's drug policy can be somewhere between Singapore's and Portugal's.
- boppo 5y ago
  >national drug policy I'm not sure that's less harmful to society than no policy. It may be causing more people to use.
- GoodJokes 5y ago
  While we figure out a social media policy (cough, not for profit, cough) we can also delete Facebook. Facebook isn’t social media, it is a proven bad actor in the social media space. Any article that doesn’t begin and end with that seems pretty contextless to me.
- int_19h 5y ago
  To ban, you first need to accurately define what you're banning. How would you define it?
deleted 5y ago
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parksy 5y ago

Buvaz 5y ago

Its just me..collecting data to work out what will get my mom of her phone.

Johnny555 5y ago

I've been wondering what those posts are about, I keep seeing them in my feed, and they're always answered by the same 60+ year old relatives.

ogn3rd 5y ago
Many of those questions are used as 2FA as well.
- Johnny555 5y ago
  Those I understand, but I'm wondering about the "What's your perfect fall day" or "How old were you when you got your first job" questions that don't seem like they'd yield answers to security questions.
  - rubicon33 5y ago
    Those are thrown in there to make the general asking of these types of questions considered normal.
    - edoceo 5y ago
      Magician calls that mis-direction.
  - MikeTheGreat 5y ago
    "What's your perfect fall day" does not strike me as a good security question "How old were you when you got your first job" actually does seem like a good security question for many people. You're unlikely to forget it, after a while not many other people will know it, and it's a single number (whole number, most likely) so it's easy for a computer to parse (and hard for you to mess up by leaving out / adding too much detail). Depending on what you respond to on social media, and depending on if you've got any accounts that use this as a security question, you might want to go back and force the account to use a new question ;)

vidanay 5y ago

Facebook...Nuke it from orbit.

bondarchuk 5y ago

>This multi-billion dollar industry has to be getting revenue somewhere else. Wait, how do they know this is a multi-billion dollar industry in the first place?

Lammy 5y ago
https://www.statista.com/statistics/693438/affiliate-marketing-spending/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/693438/affiliate-marketi...

bovermyer 5y ago

The real question is, how do we discourage interaction with these bait posts on a scale that matters?

dqv 5y ago
Well you can take the approach that one TikToker’s mom took: comment on the post and say it’s datamining.
- wutbrodo 5y ago
  Would the segment of users who respond to content-free posts like these have much of a reaction to a comment saying that? I don't mean that as a snarky dismissal, but a sincere question. I know that plenty of people, especially among digital-natives, have instant negative reactions to being reminded of data collection. But the type of user answering "what was your first car" or "what do you call your grandchildren" do not strike me as having much overlap with the groups that are cynical about social media platforms.
  - dqv 5y ago
    I don't really think it's a legitimate or scalable way to inform people. On a smaller scale it could help people in the local social network to be aware of what those posts are doing. Another thing to do is to tell people "they're trying to use this information to get into your bank account". That will make them stop really fast. But as far as scalability goes, I don't think there's a way.
- Nition 5y ago
  I once saw an official Facebook blog post about some change to the T&C, with 80,000+ comments on it, most of them one of those meaningless copy-pastes about how they don't consent to Facebook using their data. More comments were appearing every second. Every 20th post or so, someone would be saying something like "Stop it you idiots, this stupid copy-paste doesn't do anything, you can't declare your rights like this." Then a bunch more copy-paste comments would appear before the next person telling the idiots to stop.

yabones 5y ago

My speculation: The exact same thing that happens with reddit accounts used for astroturfing... People will 'build up' a profile over the course of several months, reposting popular posts from months/years ago, etc. They're actually quite easy to spot, an account with high posting points and low comment points is usually one of these. Then, when it's nice and ripe, they will sell it to a troll farm which uses it to push a particular agenda. We saw this happen quite a bit in 2015-2016, and again starting in early 2020 (though it never really stopped). But, in this case, the product is the 'network' rather than individual accounts. Something that appears this 'organic' and 'homegrown' is a very valuable tool for a widespread disinfo campaign. Or, it could simply be the magician gang that makes viral posts of gross food. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/creators-countertop-spaghetti-hack-make-cooking-fun_n_609c2478e4b03e1dd384df0a https://www.huffpost.com/entry/creators-countertop-spaghetti...

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
bink 5y ago
I've never understood this logic. Very few subs limit posts by karma and those that do certainly don't require the insane amounts of karma that these bots are farming. I know I don't go back through someone's post history before voting on their comments and I don't really care about their aggregate karma values.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  It just takes one person to do that though and say "you made a new account for this you troll?" before everyone gets it.
  - josefx 5y ago
    That would work if the moderators of various subs weren't part of it, quite a few subs will hand out temp. bans when you "accuse someone of shilling". Even if the account was created the day a story went public, didn't post anything until weeks later when the story hit reddit and never backed up its attempts to discredit one side of the conflict. Some fun oriented subs will however happily ban spam bots that just automate imgur reposts if you point one out early enough.

TheSockStealer 5y ago

Some of these questions are similar to those questions you would see in an identify verification challenges. What is your first car, pet name, city you were born in. I am not saying this is the "only" answer, but could be one of them.

wodenokoto 5y ago
The article directly addresses this point and claims that the password is worthless, while somehow also claiming that the data they can scrape about you after you interact with them is where the money is made.

giansegato 5y ago

I don't get it. What do these people would be doing with such data? Ok, they know that a certain Facebook account named John Doe is likely to be a male, between 40 and 50 years old, voted for Trump both in 16 and 20. So what? It's not like you can retarget said account through ads. I fail to see the purpose.

bink 5y ago
In 2016 it was used to target these specific types of people with outrage. Get them riled up against their opponents and make them more likely to vote for your candidate or issues and more likely to spread your propaganda for you. AFAIK you absolutely can target (or could target) groups of people based on very specific criteria.
akersten 5y ago
There is extreme value in knowing who your most-prospective marks are. If you had a population of 1,000 people, and had to sell something (read: convince to vote a certain way) to 400 of them, wouldn't you like to know the subset of those people who are already predisposed to your position and just need a little more nudging with a narrowly-tailored meme , instead of making a dartboard attempt against all 1,000? That was the entire value-add of Cambridge Analytica , whose Facebook-API data-gathering loophole has now been replaced by just engaging suckers via the platform itself and a tiny bit of NLP/sentiment analysis.
- obelos 5y ago
  I suspect there's also value in avoiding showing some forms of persuasive/propagandistic content to those who are unlikely to be amenable to it. This allows the content to circulate with less suppressive feedback from a target's peers.
  - AlexAndScripts 5y ago
    You can also avoid targeting people who already support you. Or, in the case of Cambridge Analytica's brexit manipulation, identify those who have never voted before (using hundreds of indicators) and introduce them to politics... Their first information being propaganda from the leave campaign.

___luigi 5y ago

Social platforms amplifies all of our human qualities, and our interaction habits. Since old ages, people were striving to seek attention and show their work [1] [2]. After reading this book [3] indistractable, I started to reflect on how our educational systems are not designed to prepare students to live in this digital age, yesterday it's FB, today it's TikTk and tomorrow there will be something else. FB is just one Pawn in this game. I know that siding with FB is one of these topics that are very controversial in HN, but I am not finding excuses for the practices of these companies, my point is that our kids will live in a different age than the one we lived in, educational systems should keep up with these challenges and find innovative way to prepare people to efficiently manage that. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu%27allaqat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu%27allaqat [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_of_ancient_Rome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_of_ancient_Rome [3]: https://www.nirandfar.com/indistractable/ https://www.nirandfar.com/indistractable/

jsnell 5y ago

With those comment counts, something dodgy is obviously happening. The interesting question here is whether Facebook is somehow accidentally amplifying it. Certainly it is not in Facebook's interest to allow this kind of data harvesting. If it hurts you to think that Facebook somehow isn't maximally evil, at least consider that this is data that could be only Facebook's. Allowing somebody else to harvest it is money straight out of Facebook's pocket. So, given FB should not be complicit, what mistake could they be making to allow the system to be haunted? The obvious guess is that they have a feedback loop in the ranking algorithm. It values comments very highly as a signal of good engagement, but they weren't prepared for "content" that is this good at eliciting low effort comments and have wide appeal demographically. As long as one of these reaches a critical mass, it'll be shown to tens or hundreds of millions of people just by any engagement feeding even more engagement. Is there anything less obvious?

NineStarPoint 5y ago
A quick point I’d make is that it may not be a mistake (from facebooks perspective) to allow others to exploit a given system as long as they’re gaining enough value from it to outweigh that. If whatever is being exploited doubles how much they can charge for ads, they might accept some of their data being stolen until they could find a way to have their cake and eat it too.
cratermoon 5y ago
> The interesting question here is whether Facebook is somehow accidentally amplifying it. Someone somewhere found a way to exploit what FB's engagement metrics do. Is it 'accidental' that FB amplifies things if their system is designed to do exactly what it does when gamed?
jaywalk 5y ago
It has been this way for years, so it's definitely no accident. Posts that elicit more comments absolutely end up getting ranked higher by The Algorithm™.
captainmuon 5y ago
I always thought that FB is somewhat complicit (not out of evilness necessarily). I see a lot of "viral" posts - some like those mentioned in the article, but also a ton of odd woodworking, cooking, and "resin art" videos. The videos are quite repetitive and not really interesting so I wonder if they are maybe hidden ads, but they are not marked as such, and it is not clear what they are selling. (Well maybe they are trying to sell resin, which is really expensive.) Anyway, it seems like they are different kinds of posts on FB. Some stay close to their point of origin, and only rarely get shown to other people who have not liked a page or are friends themselves. And other posts which, if somebody commented on or interacted in any way with them, get shown to their friends and friends-of-friends. After running a charitable cause / political FB page for a while, I'm convinced that internally there are actually different categories of posts - ones that are shown to followers, and ones that are allowed to float or go viral. I really wonder what the mechanism is to get into the floating category. It doesn't seem to be based on quality, nor on money spent. Maybe it is some interaction metric that somebody learned to game?

throwawaywindev 5y ago

Those look like phishing for answers to account security questions.

ergot_vacation 5y ago

"Oh no the Skinner box we built to exploit and manipulate people is being used to exploit and manipulate people!" "But why is that-" "Because OTHER people are doing it!" "Oh no!"

Kiro 5y ago
Facebook is not ohnoing anything here. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if their algorithm boosts posts encouraging this kind of low-effort engagement.
- jjoonathan 5y ago
  Yeah. Other parties get data, FB gets cold hard cash. I bet they're quite happy with those terms.
sk2020 5y ago
That the author is peddling the absurd “Russians hacked muh servers” popular myth makes the comment all the more poignant. Social networks tolerate fake traffic because it increases their perceived value. The real crime is the fictive usage and engagement metrics they use to set ad pricing.
- GavinMcG 5y ago
  The "popular myth" is sourced to both independent security firms and multiple U.S. intelligence agencies, and isn't a partisan issue: https://www.wired.com/2017/03/marco-rubio-says-hack-attempts-russia-targeted/ https://www.wired.com/2017/03/marco-rubio-says-hack-attempts...
  - xqcgrek2 5y ago
    Oh it most definitely is a partisan issue. I'll wait for your evidence for if any votes were changed in machines, the only thing that could truly be construed as "hacking" a election.

aasasd 5y ago

1.4 million comments on a single post? Holy crap! I was previously wondering on Reddit, what kind of vapid self-importance compels people to comment in threads that already have over 100-200 comments—when new ones go straight to the bottom and no one sees them afterwards. But this is on scale of some mental illness, unless I seriously misunderstand something about Facebook comments.

SPascareli13 5y ago
Your friends will see your comment in fb, so there is an incentive to comment even when there is already millions of other comments.
strulovich 5y ago
Facebook shows comments from your friends highlighted in your feed. So if one of your friends comments with the one millionth comment, you can end up seeing the post and your friend’s comment In your feed. So while no one can read all comments - your friends are likely to see yours.
- HaloZero 5y ago
  And then y'all can communicate in thread too. So it's a little microcosm.
- cmg 5y ago
  I've seen a lot of this recently, both on the types of posts in the article and on the posts of controversial / extremist right-wing politicians like MTG.
- aasasd 5y ago
  So it's actually sharing with added notes, like quote tweets. Indeed makes a bit more sense now, with this piece of knowledge. (Perhaps once upon a time I'll end up also finally figuring out how the hell comments on Tumblr work. Not that I'll have practical use for that anymore.)
jjoonathan 5y ago

arbuge 5y ago

Just a note for those of you who were confused like I was upon reading this article: the author seems to be using the term "affiliate networks" in an unusual way - they're calling Facebook pages with some kind of commercial relationship between them "nodes" in an "affiliate network". The commonly accepted usage is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affiliate_network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affiliate_network

cratermoon 5y ago
I think the author's description is a completely accurate description of affiliate networks. The fact the the commercial relationship results in "likes" or "influence" for the affiliates rather than direct monetary compensation from the merchants is just the nature of social media.

LAC-Tech 5y ago

7 Tacos is a lot. Don't let someone you care about eat 7 Tacos, that's just enabling.

tarkin2 5y ago

So, there’s a network of popular accounts that are posting questions and harvesting the comments to psychologically analyse Facebook users and later politically target them and their social networks with disinformation that’s tailored to their psychological grouping? That’s what I gleamed.

tyingq 5y ago

My favorite is questions that appear to be roundabout ways to gather your password reset questions. Like "Your stripper name is: Your Favorite Color + Name of Your First Dog!". Never fails to get tons of responses.

whyenot 5y ago

It's becoming increasingly clear that social media needs to be more strictly regulated. How to do that in a free society is a difficult question. OTOH, if we take too long to figure this out, it may be too late. In fact, it may already be too late.

jensensbutton 5y ago
What regulation would help here?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- 93po 5y ago
  Taxation on services that are known to be detrimental to human health. These taxes can be spent on public health resources (counseling and so forth).
  - Pokepokalypse 5y ago
    That sounds like a very pragmatic, and politically-neutral idea, that would be portrayed as a "far-left nanny-state Marxist doctrine." . . .
  - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    The problem is, those who need the counseling (to recover from overdosing on their echo chamber) won't seek it.
CamperBob2 5y ago
It might have been possible in the 1950s, but the modern "death of authority" phenomenon has ensured that no central regulation of social media can ever be imposed by the consent of the governed. The government would literally have to pull wires out of walls to stop Facebook and whatever inevitably follows it.

pkamb 5y ago

> Yes, a question-post invites more engagement than a simple comment, but there’s something else at work here. Is there? I've noticed wannabe influencers on Instagram including questions and polls with every one of their Stories. They're doing it to "juice the algorithm" by getting responses. That in turn theoretically gets them featured on the Explore Page or whatever. YouTubers do the same things, ending each video with a CTA question you should answer in the comments. The Facebook question pages that boomers answer seem to just be doing the same thing, attracting comments and interactions and thus boosting the page. The bigger question I have is why Facebook thinks I would be interested in seeing in my timeline that my 68 year old aunt has answered "Freddy Mercury" to some question about the best musical act they've seen live.

fsckboy 5y ago
I've never used Facebook so I can't pretend to know how it works or is laid out, but if I were tasked with creating a "timeline" for you on FB based on what I know, your aunt sharing that her favorite act was "Freddy Mercury" is exactly what I would share with you. What would be more apropos?
- pkamb 5y ago
  If she typed that into a post of her own, sure. But this is more like surfacing every comment of hers on every random blog she reads. Those comments should be shared between her and the blog and its readers, not me. Also, I've strongly indicated that I don't want to see this content by clicking the "X" every time I see one of these "question reply" posts. That probably hides that Page forever. But the next meme question page reply by my next boomer relative will pop up tomorrow. Facbook isn't correlating the fact that I want to see nothing from any of these clickbait pages.

marcus_holmes 5y ago

I'm curious if the data harvested from this is skewed to older people, and more "naive" people. Most of my techie friends have uninstalled FB (like me), or rarely interact with it. And my smarter friends just don't interact with that kind of clickbait-y post. I wonder if marketing folks will even notice. Like Google Analytics, which is disproportionately blocked by smarter and more technical people. Marketers cheerfully ignore that, though. Will they even know that they're missing our data? Is the Venn diagram of FB enthusiastic data-donaters and people who don't block GA just a circle? If so, are public policies and corporate marketing strategies going to be designed to cater to them and not us?

bob229 5y ago

Who gives a hoot. Only an absolute moron use social media

CosmicShadow 5y ago

Was just talking about this the other night with my wife and how we should just start our own group sharing these baiting questions to see how quickly and largely we can grow it.

CosmicShadow 5y ago

The same type of people answer these as the people who get an email from Amazon or Home Depot about a product they bought with a question like "What are the dimensions" and they answer "I don't know". And for all time, everyone else is like WTF did you even answer the question if you don't know, it's not like your friend asked you in person, and that is the story of 80% of Q&A's on every product. *SIDE RANT OVER!

ComputerGuru 5y ago
The emails Amazon sends (or used to send) to randomly selected prior purchasers of a product when there’s a new unanswered question have a subject line along the lines of “David is asking you if xxx, can you help him?” They’re deliberately made to look like personal appeals to the individual specifically, and I don’t blame people for not understanding that it’s disgusting growth/engagement hacking.
- CamperBob2 5y ago
  THANK YOU. That explains those maddening "I don't know" answers perfectly. I'm usually reasonably good at imagining the mechanisms behind stupid engagement-hacking phenomena like that, but the question of why people answer questions on Amazon product pages with "I don't know" has stumped me for years.
Igelau 5y ago
JerryInVA1948: Hi it's Jerry's wife again. We never measured it, so I don't know. Sorry!

gavin_gee 5y ago

isnt this already known as social engineering data collection for hackers for use in later attacks?

mikey_p 5y ago
That's not what the article is about. It points out that passwords for random folks aren't really worth much, and are probably out there on the dark web for purchase anyway, but the idea that psychographic profiles could be build by a third party that is scraping these comments off public posts.

captainmuon 5y ago

I think this is just a conspiracy theory. What's happening is that capitalism sets ridiculous incentives, so people are compelled to set up all these blogs and create these memes to maybe get fractions of cents per interaction. The real scandal is not that the Russians or the Chinese are attacking democracy this way, it is that we are waisting so much productivity on this (both users, and people working on such campaigns). PS: If the described tactic really works, I gotta try it out in order to take over the world.

micromacrofoot 5y ago

It doesn't really matter if these posts are intentionally being used to gather data, someone's gathering it. Cross-reference some of the security question posts like "first car" with large data leaks and you're bound to get some matches eventually. Scammers in some countries can live for years off of one good bank account hit, and many of them make a living just reselling the data before it even gets that far. We need some serious public education about freely sharing information on the internet. Like "this is your brain on drugs" nationwide PSA campaigns.

pytlicek 5y ago

Something weird is happening on Facebook for a long time :/

pjdemers 5y ago

How many people choosing random answer would it take to muddy the data to the point it is useless?

Gollapalli 5y ago

Cambridge Analytica style targeted political messaging, and retailoring of political formulae to personality/moral-foundations/IQ profiles, in order to create coalitions is the future of political messaging and activism. In many ways, now that the gameboard has changed so drastically, it's unavoidable. This is how politics works now. It's not (just) Russia, or China, it's every political activism group or lobby that wants to achieve anything. Welcome to the new age.

engineer_22 5y ago
no different than it used to be, just more sophisticated.
- Gollapalli 5y ago
  I think there is a qualitative difference. Previous means of influencing politics involved NGO's and political parties actively working different demographics in order to get them to vote in the organization's interest. These organizations may loosely be considered managerial bureaucracies, whether they are labor unions, or activist NGO's, or political parties. Even large scale media campaigns conducted via mass psychology are essentially managerial or bureaucratic in nature, using mass organizations at a large scale. The new means of manufacturing consent are not in this character. Rather than acting directly on mass groups using mass organizations, they operate by directly targeting individuals and niche groups leveraging algorithms and digital means. It's different paradigm: mass vs niche, mass media vs targeted media, mass psychology vs individual psychological profiling, large bureaucratic organizations vs smaller technologically enabled teams, the management of people vs the management of algorithms. It's two different approaches to power, and hence, two different elite groups. And when you have two different elite groups, you have conflict. It's a new world, a revolution in the making.
  - Apocryphon 5y ago
    Atomized power.

jollybean 5y ago

I wonder if it's even worth pondering the various kinds of dumpster fires that happen there? It's like we're caught watching a tornado hit a garbage pile ... while the 'exit' sign is clear for all of us to follow if we want. I think the answer to all questions Facebook-related is 'delete' / 'exit' / 'log off' and then to go ahead to Spotify and listen to some Ahad Jamal from 40 years ago to put it in context.

JasonFruit 5y ago
Off topic: I hadn't listened to Ahmad Jamal in years until a couple months ago, and he was a genius. So much creativity, with no sacrifice of lyricism, and an amazing way with silence.

jcims 5y ago

Some other interesting questions they should pose: - What's your mother's maiden name? - What street were you born on? - What was your first car? - What's your childhood's best friend's name?

madrox 5y ago
These do get shared, but usually in meme form where you turn your birthday into your "Werewolf name" and are encouraged to share in the comments. Because you're sharing in an altered, amusing form, you don't stop to consider someone can reverse your birthday from it.
- jrochkind1 5y ago
  My birthday is literally already on my Facebook "about" page though, and shown to all my friends whenever it comes around, so they can post on my timeline.
  - pedalpete 5y ago
    But that doesn't automatically make it available to 3rd parties that have no connection to you.
ctvo 5y ago
"Being an American is a privilege few have. Let's share our American issued social security numbers!" <Over photo of a bald eagle>
- mywittyname 5y ago
  My understanding is that a portion of the SSN is based on the ZIP of your birthplace. I'm sure some clever person could come up with a way to use birth location + a checksum that would reveal an SSN without actually typing it out. I'm thinking something like, "Add up all the individual numbers of your SSN and figure out what Founding Father you are!" Use some statistics to ensure that lots of people get good ones.

okareaman 5y ago

My FB feed is lousy with these sorts of things. My family & friends seem to enjoy answering questions like "What was the first concert you attended?" I don't think it's for advertising purposes because I have not noticed any improvement in the accuracy of targeted ads. I don't think it's for political purposes because that is much easier to figure out without these oblique questions. One group who would benefit from detailed life style profiles are life insurance companies. More detail is better for setting accurate premiums while remaining competitive with other life insurance companies. Edit: I almost forgot to mention a really popular one I've seen a lot of lately: "Have you ever had a DUI ? I'll wait." It's unbelievable to me that people would answer this question, but it definitely something insurance companies would like to know because their records don't go that far back into the paper age. A lot of people answer something like "No, but I should have."

htrp 5y ago
> "What was the first concert you attended?" That's literally a security question for a bank password reset.
- okareaman 5y ago
  That's not a good example, which is why I added the DUI question. I've noticed most of my friends have stopped answering security type questions as they've been warned.
  - creaghpatr 5y ago
    I’ve seen the DUI question in my feed in the past week, along with several other examples from the article.
- tbihl 5y ago
  And if your answer isn't a random string of three words, you're a good mark.
matsemann 5y ago
I've long wished for an opportunity to filter my feed, so that I only see what people post themselves. But I guess fb force these things down my throat because no one actually posts anything anymore, except big life events like weddings or announcing a child. So people would realize fb is dead when it comes to keeping in touch with friends and family.

PerkinWarwick 5y ago

Is it possible to set up Facebook to only give you people you know or people you follow on your feed? I'd consider an account if that were true, with the appropriate personal filters on of course given the spying the company does. It's a totally sleazy company, but it actually provides a valuable service at the same time.

md_ 5y ago

I’m confused. The premise of this post seems to be that this is some malicious attempt to deduce basic geographic data on Facebook users. But doesn’t Facebook let you target ads based on such data already? Why would I not just pay Facebook directly for such targeting?

mikey_p 5y ago
The implication is that comments on public posts could be scraped by a third party to build an off-FB psychographic profile, similar to how Cambridge Analytica tried to generate profiles for users by querying data through a third party Facebook app.
deckar01 5y ago
I believe the goal is to build a model that correlates public attributes that FB provides with hidden attributes learned from these probes. When the attacker is ready to target users matching specific hidden attributes, they can reverse the correlation into ranges of public attributes that FB will accept for targeting ad campaigns.

xenihn 5y ago

Not sure if AsianHustleNetwork (AHN) really falls into what's being described in this article, but it's one of the more insidious FB communities I've run across, in terms of members being milked for affiliate revenue. The content is overall wholesome and useful, but I'm assuming most members (both contributers and passive viewers/clickers) don't realize that they're lining the owners' pockets with their clickthroughs, along with whatever personal data is being collected through Facebook.

madrox 5y ago

This could be more benign than the article makes it out to be. Growing a content business in 2021 requires you to understand Facebook's algorithms and what will get your post amplified. Instagram famously only shows your posts to 10% of your followers by default [1]. The trigger points for your post to reach wider require certain engagement quotas, and if you're designing your post to get more comments then it'll hit them faster. Often accounts do these kinds of posts because their profile is about selling a single thing (like a book they wrote) or are dropshipping and focused on the marketing side. The real thing they want to get in front of users is the link in their bio. I think the real issue here is that it's impossible to tell the benign from the malignant. Is that cute mom blog going to start hawking ivermectin? What is my comment revealing about me that I don't authorize? There's no Better Business Bureau for Facebook pages. Maybe there should be. 1. https://www.thelovelyescapist.com/2018-instagram-algorithm/ https://www.thelovelyescapist.com/2018-instagram-algorithm/

lotsofpulp 5y ago
What value does BBB bring to the world? Any “rating” organization whose value proposition is evaluating others and does not employ vast legions of laborers to continually test and retest their subjects is obviously a scam. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Business_Bureau https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Business_Bureau Not to mention the obvious conflict of interests when an organization gets paid by the test subjects to grade the test subjects.
- madrox 5y ago
  What you're asking is a whole other topic, and one I'm not familiar enough with to weigh in on. I don't have any data on how effective such an organization is...only its role, and I'm not aware of any organization filling that role for Facebook pages today...except maybe Facebook, which is obviously a problem for the same reasons you point out about the BBB because the incentives aren't quite there.

badkitty99 5y ago

The 90's called and wants their chainmail back

cpr 5y ago

I stopped reading when the article repeated the thoroughly tired and debunked talking points about Russians stealing DNC server materials...

jessaustin 5y ago
I was torn on this one. I do agree with you, in that, if we can't trust them on stuff that was obvious in June of 2017, how can we trust the "facts" we can't check? However, this is at least an interesting hypothesis. The particulars are probably wrong, but all sorts of different parties might try "campaigns" like this for all sorts of different reasons. (Although GOP might not be my first suspect for dastardly clever schemes...) The most likely possibility seems that we have algorithms fooling algorithms with no humans in the loop. Sure, there might not be enough "real" (i.e. a real human purchasing a real product) revenue sloshing around here to make the whole effort worthwhile. However, there might be a poorly configured dashboard somewhere that makes it appear as if that's the case... Meanwhile FB laughs all the way to the bank.
93po 5y ago
I find this propaganda in the weirdest of places. I was reading a physical book about artificial intelligence written by a CEO in the industry and it had multiple references to Russiagate (and stated as fact, of course). It had nothing to do with the subject matter and was mentioned off-hand, same as it is here.

twic 5y ago

First comment: > Generally speaking, people should become more and more wary of memes. I suppose memes which explicitly attack other memes had to emerge at some point.

throwawaymanbot 5y ago

Zuckerberg should be in an orange jumpsuit.

greenyoda 5y ago

> "Sure, that first post won’t accurately predict your birth year..." Actually it would have, in 2019. 66 + 1953 = 2019, subtract your age, and you get your year of birth.

brap 5y ago

Speaking of weird things happening on Facebook… I see a lot of official artist pages (usually artists who have been pretty successful a few years ago but no longer are, mostly rappers for some reason) that post A LOT of random “memes” (mostly just stuff stolen from Reddit) that are completely unrelated to their work, usually with very clickbaity captions (tag a friend etc). When you go on their page it doesn’t show up. Most comments seem to be from 2nd world countries (like my own). What’s that about?

Nihilartikel 5y ago
My guess is that their marketers are having them post generic memes as engagement sinks and then hiring out click farms to engage with them. Probably with the hope that it will game the Algo to rank them higher when they post something relevant to their business.
quenix 5y ago
Could you give an example? I'd like to see this for myself.

m0d0nne11 5y ago

Is there some way to delete/filter/downvote click-bait header lines on HN like this one?

Igelau 5y ago
Use the hide button.

mtnGoat 5y ago

some type of ad network of data gathering company is behind it. its pretty straight forward and easy to do. just promote one post to a certain targeted audience(say women only) then run another campaign targeting a specific region or an age group, now you have another dimension of data. Rinse and repeat a few times and you will have a decent data set that you can then cohort out and show targeted ads to on other ad networks. running tens of thousands of these campaigns will net you a lot of very useful data. since you are paying the platform to promote things, they don't care, its still revenue to them. the folks behind some of these things seem to be doing pretty well at it too, at least, their social profiles show a very lux life.

tbihl 5y ago

>Properly scrubbed, these answers could probably predict your ’16 and ’20 Election preferences with 90%+ accuracy. They could probably guess your preference, but prediction is way harder, as shown by the way so few people saw Clinton's loss coming in 2016.

smackeyacky 5y ago
It would appear that the old methods of political polling in places like the US and Australia don't work with the accuracy they used to: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/nov/11/opinion-poll-failure-at-australian-federal-election-systematically-over-represented-labor https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/nov/11/opini... A similar thing happened with Clinton in 2016 and with Brexit. Political polling has stopped working. It's not clear whether the polling organisations are simply asking the wrong people, or the wrong questions, or that people are no longer as fixed to their opinions as they used to be, or would prefer to hide their preferences. It would seem to me that a lot of the stranger activity on social media is an attempt to fix that problem.
- tbihl 5y ago
  >It would seem to me that a lot of the stranger activity on social media is an attempt to fix that problem. To some extent, it seemed like the 2016 results were a response by people who wanted to resist lazy categorization. Granted, it's not hard to be subtler than "deplorables", but I expect some amount of people not wanting to be strategized with.

geitir 5y ago

It's actually a sentient AI trying to learn about humans. It knows exactly when to post in order to maximize engagement

rnoorda 5y ago

One variant of this that I've seen lately is some sort of wrong or easily-disproved assertion or challenge. "Bet you can't name an American city with an E!" or "95% of people can't name three European countries. Can you?" It drives engagement not only for people answering the question, but also for those talking about how stupid the post is- either way, it's engagement.

PaulHoule 5y ago

I think a lot of people are just that stupid.

zaroth 5y ago

> For context, compare the layout and content on an authentic blog like Scary Mommy with the spam, ads, and brain-numbing botspeak you’ll encounter on a MediaVine blog like the A Typical Mom. The difference is easy to spot. The ads seem much worse on Scary Mom. What am I missing?

jonS90 5y ago
I came here to ask the same...

aaroninsf 5y ago

It's past time to take a step back and consider as a society that the predominant mechanism for communication, hence the distribution of ideas and hence the formation of socially-dependent constructions of self, and belief systems, are now in the hands of companies like Facebook which by their own admission are driven all but exclusively by the necessary (sic) pursuit of growth via "engagement" at any cost. This system is not just capable of, but biased towards the amplification of exactly that content which maximizes limbic system engagement, i.e., triggers the sub-cognitive emotional brain. I.e. that content which enrages, titillates, and otherwise triggers reward centers. Let's look at that again, stripped to the core. Our society's primary mechanism for interpersonal communication, is social networks which by their own description, depend on the purist possible amplification of that content which triggers us the most, regardless of all other factors, including truthfulness, social benefit, coherency, utility to the commons, you name it, call it anything you like. The good. Naturally one can individually work hard to use these systems for the good. But the systems themselves have zero incentive to amplify you when you do; and every incentive to amplify the shit-posting trolls being paid by our enemies foreign and domestic. That's not hyperbole; that's a simple statement of fact. The end of this road is like e.g. the climate change that goes unaddressed in part because of these very mechanisms, approaching more rapidly than we think. A cognitive error to remember: we extrapolate linearly, and have no native ability to extrapolate exponential outcomes. The clearly visible end game in the US for unchecked perpetuation of bad-faith high-performing "engagement" on Facebook and its properties, in particular, is clearly civil war. Maybe it's cool for a while; maybe it's hot only in moments; but the edge of the cliff is visible and the intense push by bad actors of all kinds to push us off it is palpable. And the mechanism remains Facebook, steered as it is by an amoral culture which sprang from and is perpetuated by a literally emotionally truncated high-functioning sociopath. If you think that's wrong, the onus is on you to document how the company's behavior internal and external is distinguishable from one in which that is a precise definition. I've said it here many times, I'll say it again: If you work for them, it's time to quit. If you do business with them, it's time to quit. If you think think you can't because <reason>, you're wrong. The damage to yourself, and to our society, is profound and un-ending. We remain at memetic war and it is reifying into a culture war on the edge of becoming simply a war. Don't be part of the problem. Get off now, and work to get others off, and work to unmake this.

Cpoll 5y ago

Can I read/scrape all 1M comments on one of these posts, or does it only show responses from friends and/or people who have looser privacy settings? It'd be pretty interesting to collect and play around with all the same data this affiliate network is purported to be collecting.

fortran77 5y ago

A good way to get OPSEC data from high-value targets who are smart enough to be quiet on the internet is to go after their wives and children. I'm wondering if someone is trying to cast a wide net here to get information on people.

kderbyma 5y ago

the same thing happens on Reddit with the AskReddit. they have bots ask simple questions and then the answers I think are being used to train algorithms. Reddit is such that if you scroll on their app in the main feed for long enough it will always be ask Reddit's and they will all be those kind of questions

Raed667 5y ago

When I was in school (+6 years ago) I had classmates that were in the business of building and selling Facebook pages. This was before Facebook started showing the history of the page's title changes over time. As students who were broke and had lots of time on their hand they'd basically post all day a variation of cultural references, leading questions, polls, memes etc.. Anything that would drive the subscriber count up, which is the most important metric for how much they can charge for a page. I'm guessing the posts that got 1.4 million comments is just that but on steroids.

hyproxia 5y ago

I suggest to the author going outside and touching some grass. This is literally paranoia.

mclightning 5y ago

I will repeat it here again. Delete all your friends and content on facebook, and use it as a shell account for logins, events and messenger. Change starts with you. This is simple. I have done this 2 months ago. It works great so far. Most people have moved onto IG/Whatsapp already anyways. I know those are also FB owned, but do this as a protest.