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Mark Zuckerberg: "Cambridge Analytica" (2017)
- calldacopsidc 2mo agohttps://xcancel.com/TechEmails/status/2099214399840059428#m https://xcancel.com/TechEmails/status/2099214399840059428#m
- Cider9986 2mo agoFaster captcha: https://nitter.privacyredirect.com/TechEmails/status/2099214399840059428#m https://nitter.privacyredirect.com/TechEmails/status/2099214...
- zer0zzz 2mo agoWhat, yall don’t like X?
- Cider9986 2mo agoYou can't see comments without signing in and there's dickovers so it's nice to have a privacy respecting alternative.
- slumberlust 2mo agoSays tweet not found for me.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- dudefeliciano 2mo ago> This document is from In re Facebook, Inc. Securities Litigation (2026).
- rkrueger11 2mo agoYeah, I’d argue it shouldn’t have the (2017) added to it’s title, given that notation is supposed to be used when posting something which was published in the past, not something that simply occurred in the past.
- pbalau 2mo agoZuk asked how the thing worked. Boz answered. Might be a challenge to some, but one can find out things if they pay enough attention to data.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- whatever1 2mo agoThe “Only do evil” company
- jjtheblunt 2mo agocounterpoint : animal rescues and shelters benefit greatly in getting adoptable animals before people scrolling, for super low cost to them, but of course because the scrolling people are seeing ads.
- hedayet 2mo agocounter-counterpoint: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler_and_vegetarianism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler_and_vegetarianism
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- gruez 2mo ago[flagged]
- ares623 2mo ago> so does that mean we should be up and arms about the mamdani campaign? No, we should be up and arms about TikTok.
- gruez 2mo agoAnd what else? Cable news? Talk radio? Printing press?
- ares623 2mo agoUhh, until recently, didn't those three undergo exactly the same kind of scrutiny and have had the regulations we are talking about here put in place for them? Of course, all that existing regulation is being undone, thanks in part to TikTok, Facebook, etc.
- gruez 2mo ago>Uhh, until recently, didn't those three undergo exactly the same kind of scrutiny and have had the regulations we are talking about here put in place for them? Newspapers were never regulated, with "the press" being specifically mentioned in the first amendment. Talk radio and broadcast TV were only regulated because the airwaves were a shared resource and therefore subject to government regulation. Cable news was never subject to the fairness doctrine.
- ViktorRay 2mo agoThe only restriction currently[1] in place on newspapers in the United States is that you cannot write libel i.e you cannot knowingly falsely write something that hurts another’s reputation. This is the same restriction as in verbal speech where you cannot say slander which is like libel but spoken. [1] There have been other restrictions placed at various times but these other restrictions have over time been found to be contrary to the First Amendment.
- goshx 2mo agoIMHO, that was the beginning of the deep troubles we are in right now, and cause of the political polarization. The brainwash was very effective, not only in the US, but also in Brazil.
- TZubiri 2mo agoI'm not sure what the claim or charge would be. While I wouldn't feel comfortable participating in political campaigns for democracies of other countries, and I would feel defensive about attempts to influence elections in my country, in the end these 'attacks' rely on actual citizens to vote, so the citizen still holds the power and makes the final decision, so I don't think it's an issue of critical severity, and I don't think it's illegitimate to try to persuade citizens of another country to vote in such matter at a constitutional level (excluding specific laws), even if I personally would feel icky about it. Now there may be other potential issues that would elevate the matter, if disinformation is used, or if personal information about citizens is obtained illegitimately, then they could constitute crimes in their own right. Whether the crime is aggravated by its intent to subvert the democratic institution would be a legitimate question, but without the accessory crimes, I don't think political campaigns from non citizen actors are themselves illegal, just icky.
- TheOtherHobbes 2mo ago>Now there may be other potential issues that would elevate the matter, if disinformation is used, or if personal information about citizens is obtained illegitimately, then they could constitute crimes in their own right. Both of those happened. And are still happening. This is algorithmic behaviour modification using sophisticated psychological priming that most people - including people who consider themselves educated and rational - have no defences against. It very much was, and is, an issue of critical severity. CA and Nix specifically sold themselves as election fixers, but most people using FB would have been completely unware they were being influenced.
- cgio 2mo agoBut now people do, and it still works. How is this dissimilar to controlling the media in the past? Maybe can be more specialised, but superficially at least O don’t see significant content specialisation, rather the opposite, consumption herding.
- thih9 2mo ago> [This document is from In re Facebook, Inc. Securities Litigation (2026).] It looks like we only have access to this now? If yes, this would be development and I’d remove the “2017” from the title.
- layer8 2mo agoContent: From: Mark Zuckerberg Sent: Monday, January 30, 2017 8:10:16 AM Subject: Cambridge Analytica I'm seeing more articles like this one come out claiming the Trump's campaign used FB and analytics in very precise ways that go beyond what others have done before: https://motherboard.vice.com/read/big-data-cambridge-analytica-brexit-trump https://motherboard.vice.com/read/big-data-cambridge-analyti... I can't tell how much of this is just a dramatic telling the best practices of marketing today seen through the lens of survivorship bias, or how much of what they're done is truly novel and interesting work, at least in the field of politics. Can someone explain to me what they actually did from an analytics and ads perspective, and how advanced it actually was? From: Andrew Bosworth Sent: Monday, January 30, 2017 9:58:03 AM Subject: Re: Cambridge Analytica My general understanding is the Trump campaign actually took all the advice we gave unlike Hillary. They used all our tools. That *is* surprisingly novel as most advertisers have a "way of doing things" and are slow to adapt but speaks more of our platform than CA. A few examples: - They ran tens of thousands of creatives and iterated quickly to find what was working, further sub segmenting audiences (using custom audiences) based on response. - They used different formats early but found video was most effective so were using that primarily by the end (90+%) - They were primarily fundraising on Facebook, which means rallying the base instead of trying to win over marginal voters. That was an effective strategy that lead to very low CPMs and makes iterating to find market fiit for your message much easier. The rumor is that they turned tens of millions spent on FB into hundreds of millions for the campaign, which they spent elsewhere. I've heard separately that their entire electoral strategy was to rally the base rather than send a broadly appealing message. Few marketers are interested in doing that so it stands to reason they would have unusual results. Net net, my guess is that CA did have to do some interesting work to quickly take results from campaigns and spin them into the next, and the campaign had to do some interesting work to generate so much creative, but I'm skeptical that Cambridge Analytica has any data or expertise that couldn't be replicated readily by someone else. I'm suspect we will find that the majority of the advantage was using our platform to the fullest. boz [This document is from In re Facebook, Inc. Securities Litigation (2026).]
- ShadowOfThePit 2mo agoWith xcancel down again, this was helpful. Thank you.
- dehrmann 2mo agoWhen I interviewed at Facebook in 2019, one interviewer was on an integrity team. I'm not sure if it was his take or what the org settled on, but it's that Cambridge Analytica wasn't Facebook's fault (users willingly granted access), but it was their problem. Not surprising some of the same techniques got used by others.
- twothreeone 2mo agoI'm pretty sure that is a mis-characterization of what actually happened: a 3rd party app collected user profile data from FB _through somebody's friend connection_ [1]. The Zuck then apologized for this undocumented API access leak and FB subsequently patched it out of their platform. It had nothing to do with running ads. We shouldn't let time paper over the details here. [1] "It also gathered data from their Facebook friends, which reportedly resulted in Kogan having access to the data of millions of Facebook profiles". https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/10/facebook-cambridge-analytica-a-timeline-of-the-data-hijacking-scandal.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/10/facebook-cambridge-analytica...
- chihuahua 2mo agoI know someone at FB who worked on a project whose entire goal was to use compiler/type checker technology to prevent intentional and unintentional leaking of personal data in FB back-end code. If you can believe that. The project had a fair amount of resources and high-level support. I don't know if it was a psy-op or deception campaign or what.
- dehrmann 2mo agoI think you're thinking of something else, but they also added "capabilities" to Hack (their main frontend language; it's a PHP fork) to make leaking data between requests or in logs painful.
- hitekker 2mo agoAgreed, though the GP's characterization likely stems from pre-2020 Facebook trying to help solve problems outside of its scope. To quote Zuckerberg: https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/11/mark-zuckerberg-says-hes-done-apologizing/ https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/11/mark-zuckerberg-says-hes-d... > But when reflecting on the biggest mistakes of his career, Zuckerberg said his largest one was a “political miscalculation” that he described as a “20-year mistake.” Specifically, he said, he’d taken too much ownership for problems allegedly out of Facebook’s control. “Some of the things they were asserting that we were doing or were responsible for, I don’t actually think we were,” said Zuckerberg. “When it’s a political problem… there are people operating in good faith who are identifying a problem and want something to be fixed, and there are people who are just looking for someone to blame.” TechCrunch then goes on to blame Zuckerberg by insinuation. As someone who dislikes Facebook and Zuckerberg, I think Big Tech is a rather convenient boogeyman for fallout from the 2016 election & beyond.
- Tycho 2mo agoThere was that leaked video of a Cambridge Analytica exec bragging that they came up with the handcuffs in the Crooked Hillary meme. Except that was hardly a big thing. The phrase Crooked Hillary was arguably “linguistic killshot” by Trump; CA’s little riff on it was insignificant - and that was them trying to sell their services with their most impressive feats.
- ZeroGravitas 2mo agoPeople seem to love attributing the success to memes rather than a decades long campaign to destroy the media, the legal system, education, political checks and balances and unlimited funding by billionaires. When future supreme court judges are writing their manifesto to business interests on how to stop Ivy League graduates from caring about the environmental impacts of capitalism in the 70s, le funny memes were not mentioned. On Hillary specifically, she was the subject of the the movie that the Citizens United court case was about! https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/citizens-united-explained https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/citi... Trump and Cambridge Anlytica are just unpleasant, cancerous symptoms of this.
- firasd 2mo agoThis was a fake scandal. "Democrats seem to like Harry Potter" is not some genius psychographic ad targeting strategy. The Cambridge Analytica people were selling snake oil That said they did buy user data from a quiz app which is not really how you were supposed to use the Facebook Platform so that still wasn't really FB's fault I think So the real issue was just people trying to blame the 2016 election (adverse to their interests if they were anti-Trump) on Zuck. Heck to this day Ben Shapiro is one of the biggest podcasts and Tucker's show is even bigger than him so the right wing is a real force in American politics and not just propped up by FB's old newsfeed algo
- throw83940484 2mo agoThey were selling private hacked data. It is amazing they are not all in prison. Whatever it was some amazing insight is irelevant!
- cm2012 2mo ago[flagged]
- gghhzzgghhzz 2mo agoWe had the same issue with Brexit It was in CA's interest to have people believe they had some sort of magic algorithm. And it was on the losing side's interest to believe that they would have won the vote if not interference by magic. The Information Commissioner Office carried out an extensive investigation and concluded that CA were not involved at all with either of the two leave supporting organisations. But this fact is simply ignored and undefined campaign by CA still used as the simple excuse for why they lost.
- upupupandaway 2mo agoIt's pretty incredible that people claim CA was somehow running the world and magically turning elections and brainwashing masses.
- devonsolomon 2mo agoCambridge Analytica developed a database for The Trump campaign that classified 3.5 million Black Americans as “Deterrence”, used as audiences in FB advertising intended to discourage voting. We know Cambridge Analytica weren’t afraid to subvert the core principle of democracy like that because we have documents from their campaigns in Trinidad and Tobago to do the same thing, presenting not voting as an act of youth rebellion with the aim of reducing turnout among young Black Trinidadians. (Discouraging black people from voting seems to be a theme) Sure, as Mark says, anyone with the voter data and capital could likely create that audience and run those ads, but anyone with integrity wouldn’t. The story is not about unbelievable sophistication, it’s about using the tools Facebook provided to subvert democracy. Mark is right that they’re nothing special. But that doesn’t dismiss them, the fact that they’re nothing special is the scary part.
- brcmthrowaway 2mo agoThe amount of media furore over this at the time, really made me think CA was doing something illegal. Was that just Gawker/Buzzfeed journalism?
- gruez 2mo agoThey had a facebook app (disguised as a quiz) that scraped the profile data of the user using it, as well as their friends. It's the latter part that was considered shady, but it was all allowed by facebook. Moreover it's not too different than similar "growth hack" tactics that other startups use to this day, eg. linkedin scraping your contacts data. Their clients being right-wing didn't help, either.
- noir_lord 2mo ago> It's the latter part that was considered shady Because it was shady, deception is deception.
- brcmthrowaway 2mo agoShady business practices are accepted now.
- hedayet 2mo agotl;dr; an internal thread that goes in the line, A: Yo! did we do anything wrong? B: No. someone else messed up. we're good.
- hugodan 2mo agoBefore Trump they practiced on Brexit and the whole Leave.EU movement. This link at best shows us Mark Zuckerberg playing his standard card of victim and faking (again) that he didn't know about anything, while all evidence point that he actively played a role in it.
- johndhi 2mo agoWhat evidence shows he wanted this? Why would he play the victim internally?
- qarl 2mo ago> Why would he play the victim internally? To create evidence that he didn't know about it?
- hugodan 2mo agoFacebook knew about the Kogan/CA transfer in 2015 and failed to respond adequately, instead they relied largely on deletion assurances rather than immediately auditing, and users weren't informed until 2018. But more, CA was created as consequence and a way to profit out of the 2012 Six4Three scandal, after Mark Zuckerberg personally designed/approved the permissive data-sharing ecosystem specifically for these use cases (as several internal mails show).
- dash2 2mo agoYou’re arguing with a conspiracy theorist. Don’t do it, it’s not worth the effort!
- netsharc 2mo agoMy "expert" (/s) conclusion of Zuck is that he's a kid who knew some PHP and got really lucky that a website he made went "viral". He's got billions but is clueless, e.g. blowing a lot of money on animated VR avatars "because it's the future", and then blowing lots of money on AI. To be fair that's what the other dumb tech billionaires are doing too, they're building datacenters full of GPUs because they think throwing money at LLM will get them AGI, and they're desperate to be first. (And no, I don't know if they'll reach AGI, my uninformed bet is: no).
- tsunamifury 2mo agoTo argue that Facebook somehow magically tricks humans into voting against their will and overrides democracy is to argue that democracy itself inherently does not work. It’s amazing that so many people don’t understand that. It seems far harder to accept that people simply voted for trump because historical institutions had failed them so completely. This would force the other party to recon with the failed parts of their platform. Which they still never have.
- srean 2mo agoBoth could be true.
- tsunamifury 2mo agoWilling to concede that point. But parties should understand then what they are arguing for
- JMiao 2mo agotraditional media was already failing democracy well before social media. irrelevant news is the gateway to fake news. journalism was a prestige career that relied on access to advance, and access means you cannot always speak the truths required to inform voters.
- qarl 2mo ago> To argue that Facebook somehow magically tricks humans into voting against their will and overrides democracy is to argue that democracy itself inherently does not work. But we know that propaganda works. That doesn't sit well with your claims.
- TechTechTech 2mo agoSee this video for how Alexander Nix (former CEO) presented the data he had on every adult in the united states https://youtu.be/APZUrj8SN0M?t=297 https://youtu.be/APZUrj8SN0M?t=297 (start at 4:55 min)
- gruez 2mo agoBut your video doesn't show that? It's just shows high level aggregations. It doesn't say "homer simpson living at 123 evergreen terrace, springfield" is 47 years old, votes republican, earns $50.1k, and rates 3/5 on agreeableness.
- TechTechTech 2mo ago06:23 "We could see where these people are on the map. if we wanted to drill down further, we could resolve the data to an individual level where we have close to 4000-5000 data points on every adult in the United States"
- gruez 2mo agoThat seems more of a case of someone trying to hype up their product, than something that's actually real. What's likely actually happening is that they got a vaguely complete list of adults somehow (eg. voter rolls or DMV registrations), then the rest of the attributes are filled in using guesswork (eg. the name "Homer Simpson" probably implies he's white and male, the zip code he lives in implies he's middle class, etc.)
- jameson 2mo agoI wonder how much this relates to existence of Super PACs and lobbying in US. If campaign spending is strictly regulated, I imagine it would be difficult for such work.
- zer0zzz 2mo agoI really feel the news media in their crusade against tech really did the public a disservice by not explaining what happened precisely. It’s not about whether these companies are in the right or not, but more about how we as a society address the consequences of how their products operate. When the media mischaracterizes this stuff it makes the public perception's of what’s going on frankly becomes ridiculous and makes it easy for corporations to dismiss detractors as kooks.
- zer0zzz 2mo agoIn this specific case it also takes some of the burden away from Feckless political campaigns that failed to effectively use the tools at their disposal. The public then doesn’t have as clear of a picture of who might actually be capable Of winning next time.
- matrix87 2mo agoApparently they used facebook to incite backlash against the Indian government to bully them into allowing their Internet.org initiative to continue there (essentially a stripped down, anti-net-neutrality version of the internet which only allows people to use facebook and a couple other sites). This was mentioned in Careless People. It seems like they wanted to use facebook as an electoral tool pretty early on because it gives them leverage over politicians. They might not have been deliberately involved in CA, but this is probably exactly what they wanted
- alex1138 2mo agoI don't remember this but I do know about their Free Basics nonsense where people had letters supplied on their behalf by Facebook to India's telecom authority That and a lot else Facebook does is a primary sin, end of story. This isn't conservative vs liberal. It's one very cynical man's view of humanity. I have very little respect for Mark Zuckerberg, and much contempt for him
- numitus 2mo agoWhy do people consider the use of targeted advertising in elections to be unethical, while using the same advertising to push people into buying things is considered ethical? Personally, I find all advertising unethical because it is an attempt to exploit the brain's vulnerabilities for the benefit of whoever paid for the ad.