What did most people think Facebook was doing... Keeping all the data locked away an never letting anyone make use of it? The interest in that data by political entities should have been especially obvious.
Additionally, this information about Cambridge Analytica came out months ago. I remember first hearing about it on a podcast that was mostly focused on the personality profiles. [1?] However, it was open about CA optaining the data via the survey. (I'll provide a link as soon as I dig it up again). Suddenly, months later, this story is exploding in media and political rhetoric.
It makes me wonder if this isn't more about a concerted effort to force regulations to give someone control over these platforms?
After seeing what happened in the 2016 elections around the world, I'd imagine many people became interested in ensuring social media would work for them next time around.
> Additionally, this information about Cambridge Analytica came out months ago.
Minor nit: Years ago.
The name Cambridge Analytica was being circulated in hacker circles since at least mid-2016. Thus far, the only new revelation was the Channel 4 reporting [1].
Security nerds have been complaining about Facebook's business model for years and it fell upon deaf ears.
Suddenly, the public gives a shit and I don't understand what changed.
Perhaps part of what's changed is that just a few weeks back Cambridge Analytica claimed — in writing, to the UK Parliament — that they did not harvest profiles from Facebook:
"On 8 February 2018 Mr Matheson implied that Cambridge Analytica "gathers data from users on Facebook." Cambridge Analytica does not gather such data." — Letter from Alexander Nix, CEO, Cambridge Analytica, to the Chair of the Committee, 23 February 2018 (PDF, linked from below page)
— And now, it's basically been 'proven' by FB that they do. Of course the ICO is gonna get involved now.
Edit: plus there's also this Channel4 investigation which went public today:
"An undercover investigation by Channel 4 News reveals how Cambridge Analytica secretly campaigns in elections across the world. Bosses were filmed talking about using bribes, ex-spies, fake IDs and sex workers."
They also testified to Parliament that they had no business in Russia, and an ex-founder (who left on bad terms, admittedly) has since come out and said that when he was still there, they were sending a Russian oil company information about how to target American voters.
Question from a [mostly] ignorant person (me, about these subjets):
Why would russian intelligence use an oil company as a shell ? Does Russia sell oil to the US ? If so do they market directly to individuals in the US ?
That I understand, but it seems like oil companies don't market directly to _people_, that they would collect data on individuals they don't market to seems highly suspicious in and of itself.
Nothing changed. What happened in many of these cases (Weinstein, Facebook) is that the story was thoroughly researched and reported in depth by a team of professional journalists working for the New York Times.
My only point (if there is one) is that, despite the massive proliferation of blogs and amateur media, it often takes a professional, salaried reporter to bring an important story into the public eye.
> the story was thoroughly researched and reported in depth by a team of professional journalists working for the New York Times
No. It was Ronan Farrow that originally broke the story. The NY Times took their sweet time before going after someone that was an ultra-major Democrat party donor. The Weinstein story was rejected by multiple "professional" news outlets.
The "professional" journalists working for the NY Times KNEW about the Weinstein story as far back as 2004, but spiked it under pressure from various Hollywood interests. Professional journalists aren't supposed to spike stories for political reasons and that's exactly that the Times did in 2004.
Weinstein's office in Tribeca was right downstairs from the Tribeca Film offices. It was on the 3rd floor. Spend a few hours in that building and you could probably have heard a dozen stories in whispered tones about Harvey. Some professional journalist from the NY Times should have had this story years ago. A high school journalist could have written this! And Kevin Spacey? Anyone who in Hollywood would have known about Spacey as far back as 2004, or perhaps earlier. It was an "open" secret. So open that it was a joke. It started becoming more "known" when Spacey was working with Sam Mendes on American Beauty in 1999.
Give me a fucking break. Professional journalists sat on this story, ignored it or conspired to crush it. It took a rookie, Ronan Farrow, trying to make a name for himself while on a personal mission against that horrible abuser Woody Allen for this to all break.
I was unaware of the Farrow article, thank you for noting it. Its role in publicizing the Weinstein scandal doesn’t diminish my point, however. Farrow is hardly an amateur; as a Rhodes Scholar and Yale Law graduate, he’s been published in numerous journals and works as an undercover journalist for NBC News. His article on Weinstein was carried by The New Yorker, a magazine with a stellar reputation for high journalistic standards. My point that it takes a pro to give credence to a big story still stands.
I understand your reluctance to credit the Times given how they sat on the news for years before finally publishing their expose. Nevertheless, the Times article came out on October 5, 2017 — five days before Farrow’s story hit the wire on newyorker.com. So technically the Times still gets the scoop — and most of the credit :-).
I don't know anything about the particulars here, but this explanation seems very strange? Do NYT have someone on the staff at New Yorker magazine to make sure they never get scooped by a weekly?
It is commendable that Farrow investigated his story independently, but that does not mean the NYT “took their sweet time” — certainly, I haven’t seen Farrow demean their work. The reporters and editors who worked on the NYT’s coverage were not on staff 13 years ago. Story ideas aren’t passed down from generation to generation.
NYT finally published because Ashley Judd went on the record. NYT knew just like so many others, but that was really mostly just based on rumors...how do you possibly publish something like that and risk the lawsuits? You need solid evidence to make taking the risk a responsible choice, and in a case like Weinstein's, that really means at a minimum someone needs to go on the record.
> The "professional" journalists working for the NY Times KNEW about the Weinstein story as far back as 2004, but spiked it under pressure from various Hollywood interests.
Would you care to stand that up? Because it seems unsubstantiated.
And yet, almost everyone continues to insist that the system is more or less clean, even though it is blatantly obvious news and politics is lies and propaganda from top to bottom.
Bring on the smug downvotes boys, but until all media, social networks, and the overall internet can be brought completely under government control, it will continue because there is simply too much criminal activity going on everywhere.
Quality authors afiliated to prominent prestigious publishers printed on the finest cloths imaginable. Not only were their words and the patterns extraordinarily beautiful, but in addition, this material had the amazing property that it was to be invisible to anyone who was incompetent or stupid.
That's because there's an army of people who are quick to discredit anything coming from blogs and lesser known sources as bunk while falling all over themselves for traditional news sources like NYT. Even when the big sources completely fail at their jobs and end up piggybacking on the story. Like you're doing in this thread.
My guess: Selling psychological data to advertisers is boring but if you get Bannon involved and rope it into the Trump news cycle, it suddenly gets a lot of people talking.
Selling psychological data to advertisers is boring, but when you get billionaires and foreign powers involved to elect a would-be autocrat who is degrading American democracy, it suddenly gets a lot of people talking.
Yup. It's not a surprise why people are interested in the role of data in modern public debate and democracy.
I have seen no evidence that the efforts of “foreign powers” were even remotely close to effective. Has anyone done a study proving that people either changed their votes or didn’t vote based upon the Russian campaign?
I think most people believe Russian hackers literally hacked voting machines to give Trump the election. Subtle manipulation of emotions it too complex for the public.
Wait until people find out American democracy is smoke and mirrors, then you'll see people talking. They better this situation under control soon or that might just happen.
Not just security nerds. Take for example Eben moglen, professor in law and history of law.
"So I was talking to a senior government official of this government (2012) about that outcome and he said well you know we've come to realize that we need a robust social graph of the United States. That's how we're going to connect new information to old information."
I suspect that the only reason we are hearing about the Trump campaign being the buyer is that the democrats already had the information. It is also why Facebook can not put the cards on the table since then they would not have any political allies left. Just like with the Snowden leak, privacy is not a issue for which the parties differentiates on. One can only hope that will change in the next election.
There's been evidence that the Trump campaign did a massively better job of taking advantage of Facebook than any other campaign, Republican or Democrat, had previously.
There's also evidence that Facebook's advertising models were a massive help -- the Trump campaign and affiliated organizations were paying much lower advertising rates than the Clinton campaign + affiliates, largely because Facebook's model prioritized the kind of controversy-and-outrage-generating stuff Trump was putting out there (since controversy and outrage drive engagement, and engagement is the metric Facebook cares about).
That’s a great statement on the issue almost always faced by security professionals. Almost impossible to impress upon people the stakes when you can do something, almost impossible to do anything once it’s too late.
What changed is that an attack vector has been found to take out Cambridge Analytica. The Democrats are in full political warfare with the Trump regime, and this is just another salvo.
p.s. Did you know Steve Bannon looked at tech workers as people he could bamboozle to be his political footsoldiers? That's why the Mercers completely fund Breitbart - to propagandize young, mostly tech, men and boys.
From Josh Greene's book:
"Yiannopoulos devoted much of Bretibart's tech coverage to cultural issues, particularly Gamergate, a long-running online argument over gaming culture that peaked in 2014. And that helped fuel an online alt-right movement sparked by Breitbart News.
"I realized Milo could connect with these kids right away," Bannon told Green. "You can activate that army. They come in through Gamergate or whatever and then get turned onto politics and Trump.""
Mercer spends around $10M per year funding Breitbart to spread that propaganda.
PS: And the democrats weaponize starry eyed, well-intentioned young progressive millennial and gen-xers. Why do you think the Russia-did-everything story sells so well when they were a bit player at most?
Sorry to burst your bubble, but everyone is in on it.
Democrats are moving to the center (e.g. right) while conservatives move further right. Meanwhile, young progressive millennial and gen-xers are trying to move democrats to the left and are in large power struggle.
Conservatives haven’t really moved anywhere since 2010. Most of the political movement is on the Left with many Democrats being targeted for things like intersectional politics, gender. This season of America is not one to miss.
The public does not "give a shit". If Trump's win tells us anything, it's that there is not necessarily a correlation between what gets trumpeted as national news and what people actually believe, accept, or experience.
There are major power players at work trying to a) exert control over the internet as a speech platform; and b) ensure that their political opponents can't win without establishment support. I discussed this some at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16616227 .
As for my grandma, my mom, and my sisters, like most of the public, they don't care about any of this, because this data was mostly already public-enough (friends list restricted) and they just want a platform where they know they'll be able to engage with friends and family.
There are always different levels of privacy. Everybody knew Google was "reading" their emails. The understand of that was never that Google will expose your individual email to a company. Similarly people understood that Facebook used the data about them to monetize and advertise to them. I don't think anyone assumed they'd let someone else literally take that data.
I've always been incredibly suspicious of the way Facebook handled it's user data. Remember back when every website on the internet had a box that showed "random" people that liked their website, and if you had any friends that liked it, they were in there?
How about all of the services using Facebook OAuth that subtly leak social graph information? For exactly this reason, Facebook OAuth is always my absolute last resort, and I'll almost always skip a service entirely if it's the only option.
Still, I always gave Facebook the benefit of the doubt and I figured that these things were handled by Facebook directly as a "plugin" to the app/website (I'm not a web developer, I don't know the details of how this would work), and the various services didn't actually see the data. It's pretty mind blowing to me that this is not actually the case. I always felt I was being absurdly paranoid about Facebook compared to most people I knenw, now it turns out I was not being even remotely paranoid enough.
Does anyone know if Google is similarly aggressive with user data sharing? I've never noticed information leakages similar to the above coming from Google (so I don't hesitate much to use Google OAuth) but me not noticing something during casual browsing is not a very high bar to clear.
It was blatantly obvious to me within a few years that FB had no interest in thinking through the implications of data sharing. There was a time when a friend liking a picture of their friend would show up in my news feed and clicking through it would expose the entire album to me - who is not even remotely connected to that person. That's the day I went frantically removing photos of friends and coworkers from FB and eventually all of mine as well. Facebook is very unlikely to earn back my trust ever.
So about 0.1% of the American populace knew that. (Ball park: call Facebook 30k employees. If you want to add a whole lot of digital marketers take that to even as high as 3M. That's still only 1% of the US population.)
Psychographic data (personalities and traits beyond simple demographics) has long been known and used before Facebook ever existed, it's just much easier now that so many people are feeding data to a centralized system with easy access.
Worldview Standard has a podcast called RawData where ep 1 of season 1 in 2015 talked about how a few likes on Facebook would let you know someone better than their own family, based on research from 2013: http://worldview.stanford.edu/raw-data/episode-1-uploaded
None of this is new. It was only either ignored or accepted before and has finally reached critical mass due to the amount of controversy and conspiracy today, along with the generally expected fatigue of social media and the now evident effects it makes on most people's lives.
Interestingly, according to the NYT Cruz campaign staffers did not think it worked:
"But Cambridge’s psychographic models proved unreliable in the Cruz presidential campaign, according to Rick Tyler, a former Cruz aide, and another consultant involved in the campaign. In one early test, more than half the Oklahoma voters whom Cambridge had identified as Cruz supporters actually favored other candidates. The campaign stopped using Cambridge’s data entirely after the South Carolina primary.
“When they were hired, from the outset it didn’t strike me that they had a wide breadth of experience in the American political landscape,” Mr. Tyler said."
This is in some sense an extension of the Myers-Briggs-type personality typing, which in its early days also grew out of data analysis.
People use the Myers-Briggs typing at work because it helps you work with (read persuade) people.
So you can make an argument this is at least 100 years old.
As for why we've reached critical mass - it seems likely the ability to influence democratic elections, and the efforts by enemies of the Western world to use it to undermine democracy, are getting people to notice.
No, the history of personality typing is a much more interesting story than that, and depends very specifically on data.
Myers/Briggs/Jung identified 4-5 personality "axes" on which people vary. How did they do that? They basically gave a bunch of people surveys with hundreds of questions and did PCA on the data. They found that 4-5 dimensions explained a lot of the variance. That was a new finding based on data, at the same time that the field of statistics was developing. And it gave insight into how people behave. It's important enough that we frequently use it as a heuristic in workplaces today.
In modern times, we can do the same on much larger data sets. Given Facebook "like" data for 50 million people, you can do dimensionality reduction on the data and extract personality "types". There's no question that this gives you information about people. The question is how well it can be weaponized - that's the debate around CA now.
> As for why we've reached critical mass - it seems likely the ability to influence democratic elections, and the efforts by enemies of the Western world to use it to undermine democracy, are getting people to notice.
American politicians of both stripes have realized the private sector now wields comparable propaganda power to that of the government, hence the post election "Russia" propaganda activity burst and full court press on the story by friendly newspapers to rein everyone in, before they are neutered.
Yes, I think that's right - Western societies need to think very carefully about the role of data, the power of private corporations, and the tension between profit-seeking and societal goals. Government regulation is the way we align societal goals with individual goals like profit seeking.
But the Russian state does spend billions on their secret services, and they consider America their "Main Enemy". Billions buys you something. I'd be shocked if there weren't more shoes to drop about Russia. But for now, we should be focused on domestic disinformation.
I think culturally we've accepted that political propaganda is different from run-of-the-mill corporate advertisement. Even the words we use are different: few people would call a TV spot "propaganda", even though both seek to influence people to act in a certain way.
People understand and accept the concept and execution of advertisement. Propaganda is not received in the same way.
> I think culturally we've accepted that political propaganda is different from run-of-the-mill corporate advertisement
I think we want to believe that but hasn't been true for many years. Presidents sell a brand unfortunately, just like large companies do their commercials. With the same psychological and rhetorical tricks.
One of my favorite examples I always bring up is this: http://adage.com/article/moy-2008/obama-wins-ad-age-s-market... notice how with much fanfare everyone was happily handing his campaign the marketing award. Normally that is not awarded to political candidates, it goes to Coke, Pepsi, Apple etc.
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"I honestly look at [Obama's] campaign and I look at it as something that we can all learn from as marketers," said Angus Macaulay, VP-Rodale marketing solutions "To see what he's done, to be able to create a social network and do it in a way where it's created the tools to let people get engaged very easily. It's very easy for people to participate."
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Social network they say? They couldn't mean using Facebook,could they? But, I think they are. An unsurprisingly Obama's campaign used the same methods as CA did:
Any time people used Facebook’s log-in button to sign on to the campaign’s website, the Obama data scientists were able to access their profile as well as their friends’ information. That allowed them to chart the closeness of people’s relationships and make estimates about which people would be most likely to influence other people in their network to vote.
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> Propaganda is not received in the same way.
That's exactly why it is disguised not to be perceived as blatant propaganda. It works best when it is sneaking its way in via a seemingly unbiased publication, or news story, a comedy skit etc
The vast majority of people, and that includes HNers, don't think of that as propaganda. Well, if it was done by a Republican maybe you'd get somewhat better uptake, but I'm getting the feeling the American mind is highly resistant to any suggestion that things aren't as they're told they are. America is the Greatest Country of All Time, after all. It's starting to get very difficult to maintain this level of ignorance but most people are fighting the good fight, at least those who are even paying attention at all.
I think you're probably right. There's a different emotional impact between being manipulated to consume versus being manipulated in what you think. Of course at the end of the day it's exploiting a similar vulnerability in our wetware.
Also, when that propaganda is full of invented racist conspiracy theories and defamatory lies about the opposition, it starts getting pretty ethically gross.
If the propaganda was fundamentally truthful and respectful (e.g. sharing additional accurate factual analysis that people just didn’t know about), it wouldn’t have quite the same odious smell.
There’s not that much distance between some of the ads and fake news stories flashed in front of people before the election and e.g. ISIS recruiting materials or Nazi propaganda from the 1930s.
There's also the fact that political propaganda comes in a lot more veiled forms than corporate propaganda. Because it's in a sense natural for us to discuss politics face to face, or at least we recognize that some level of discussion about politics is necessary and good, we're mostly ok with things like celebrities endorsing a candidate. A candidate traveling around the country and speaking to potential voters is pretty much fine. A single person expressing their views honestly isn't really guilty of "propaganda".
The problem is when huge amounts of money get mixed up in it. In the US money doesn't buy you political power directly, but it does buy you a voice (in the form of advertisements using mass media). It's still up to the listeners to listen to your voice one way or the other, but the disproportionate loudness of people's voices ensures that arguments backed by money are supported much louder than those without money (this is the thesis of Manufactured Consent). Ok, this is less than ideal, but things probably aren't skewed that much regarding things like social issues.
Political advertisement, in my opinion, doesn't veer into the realm of propaganda until one of two things happen: either the source is dishonest about their intentions (e.g. a person fully aware of climate change publicly denying it for financial reasons) and true beliefs, or their arguments are veiled in a way such that they do not appear to be advertisement at all. For example, suppose out of 100 homicides in the US, 10 were committed by Green people against Purple people, but a news organization decides to cover 5 homicides this week, and focuses solely on the ones between green and purple people. That doesn't look like an ad, even though it is one. The problem is that there's big money in this type of propaganda; these days political power is all about controlling narratives. It allows for a type of "inception" of beliefs and values - for example, making Green people think they're on the bring of a race war with Purple people - by letting people come to conclusions themselves after being presented by a highly slanted distribution of input.
This type of belief-inception is precisely what Cambridge Analytica specialized in. By knowing demographic information, they could target individuals based on issues they knew they would be sensitive to, and slowly indoctrinate them with desired views. I'll use my race example again, because Robert Mercer is essentially an unapologetic racist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Mercer_(businessman)#Ra.... You start by painting a narrative picture, highlighting race-related conflicts and painting a picture of deteriorating race relations. Like a self-fulfilling prophecy, this stokes racial tensions, creating more incidents for you to curate. By misrepresenting the relative frequency of these types of occurrences, people gradually come to the conclusion that you want them to: in this case, that black people are becoming more racist towards white people. You can use this to bring over working-class white people to the Republicans. Another good example of this type of indoctrination was Gamergate (which essentially birthed Breitbart / the alt-right) being used to galvanize frustration with the social justice sphere into creating a community of young male "race-realists"
I agree the problem is money, and I also agree that bad faith and disinformation are true measures of problematic political communication.
A principle we could rely on is openness. Just disclose who is paying for what. And disclose the ads.
If Trump/CA/Russia targeted an ad at you distorting HRC's record, we should know who paid for it.
Up until now, political ads - TV, billboards, even direct mail - were discoverable to the American public, so big distortions could be called out (even if they sometimes were not, as with GWB's racist attacks in SC on McCain's adopted kid.)
But the current setup, where Facebook ads are effectively secret, is a big big problem. How do we know the ads were all honest? Let's just have FB release the 2016 ads so we America has time to figure out what to do before 2018.
I agree with you in principle, but I'm not sure how feasible this given that I literally can't think of how to implement it. Political advocacy groups use complex hierarchies of shell companies and revolving payments to get money from super-donors into advertising. FB can't just release an invoice saying something like (Payment: 106,000; Sender: Robert Mercer) or "paid for by the Russian Federation". It would say things like "paid for by the Committee to Improve America", which receives money from the Pro-Families Committee, funded by the Traditionalists Group, an advocacy arm of the Peers Think Tank, which has ~100s of wealthy donors.
Then we require that all money spent on politics (AND related political influencing, like money to Jud Watch and Cit U and Cato and AEI and Bradley Fdn and Am First and Koch Found and Americans for "Prosp" and the NRA) requires public disclosure of who's behind it.
We already do much of this for direct campaign donations and in real estate. It's just a matter of political will. And one side has spent 4 decades and hundreds of billions on creating this money-first system, so they are very invested in not changing it. If you care, the first thing to do is get Congress to pass a law rescinding most of Cit U decision.
> This type of belief-inception is precisely what Cambridge Analytica specialized in.
The DNC and their friends in the media are no slouches at it either. Or was it someone else hinting that a Nazi revival was underway, not to mention some sort of equivalent movement of misogynists who were determined to put women back in the kitchen where they belonged?
> I'll use my race example again, because Robert Mercer is essentially an unapologetic racist
Is there more to the "unapologetic racist" charge than the 2 sentences in your link? If not, most any Libertarian is probably guilty of "unapologetic racist" level crimes as well. Idiot may be a more appropriate label, but each to his own.
> By misrepresenting the relative frequency of these types of occurrences, people gradually come to the conclusion that you want them to: in this case, that black people are becoming more racist towards white people.
The far more common narrative in this election was: that white people are becoming more racist towards black people. And not just mildly racist, but full on Nazi racist. The disparity between what you see on TV and read in the newspaper vs what you see when you actually get off the couch and go look around makes it pretty clear how much the media is not lying, but selectively choosing stories, and frequencies of stories. Selective and deceptive reporting is shamelessly obvious in right wing media (let's not kid ourselves, the viewers are not too bright), but there is plenty in liberal media as well, it's just extremely well done.
> You can use this to bring over working-class white people to the Republicans. Another good example of this type of indoctrination was Gamergate (which essentially birthed Breitbart / the alt-right) being used to galvanize frustration with the social justice sphere into creating a community of young male "race-realists"
Here there is some substance, except hardly anyone knows about Gamergate, I've heard of it, but have no idea what it is. But I do know that there is a non-imaginary new social justice movement who hold many utterly delusional beliefs that they love to shout at the top of their lungs given any opportunity, I think that had a MAJOR effect on pushing a lot of people to the right.
I think you're mostly bang on with your ideas, but I think you have a filter on and don't realize it. I'm sure I do as well, but I'm perfectly comfortable to acknowledge and discuss it, unlike most of my ideological opponents on the other side of the fence.
Interesting times.
Oops.....look like the censors finally caught up to me so it will be a while before I can submit this comment. No hard feelings, all's fair in the political propaganda war, gotta control that narrative after all!
The difference is deception, lies, secrecy, AND the amount of money behind it.
Look at the Koch network, Mercer, Adelson, Murdoch, and how much they spend on politics and related disinformation (Heritage, ALEC, SPN, Cato/Koch Fnd, NRA, Americans for "Prosp", Reason, Federalist, Breitbart, NY Post, WSJ ed, Fox, Bos Herald, Wash Ex, IJR, Daily Caller, Prager "U" etc etc. - all controlled by billionaires, and that's leaving out Limbaugh and Hewitt and Levin who are just after personal profit)
There is a huge huge difference between the sides. And that difference gives a huge advantage to one group: billionaires who can use their money to lobby to retain more wealth from the economy.
The billionaires who control what news the public sees aren't limited to the right end of the political spectrum though. Let's see if the data "leveraging" the Obama campaign was so proud about makes the mainstream news shall we? Maybe then I'll start to question my stance.
I personally call it "brainwash", as "propaganda" tends to have political connotations (which I think may be a reason you don't see it associated with typical advertising).
Nothing new here, seriously. Propaganda from both sides before elections has existed for as long as there were political debates and political campaigns. The fact that we have now systems to make Propaganda more targeted may make it more effective than before, but that's all. In the end, believing or not in Propaganda is the individual's responsibility.
I highly disagree. It's easier to simply disallow veiled political advertisements (propaganda) for both platforms and propagandists. Nobody has a "right" to spread propaganda, just like nobody has a right to defraud people simply because they aren't able to spot a scam
The point is that fraud is illegal, and prosecuted when found, this is made very clear to begin with. Spreading information or misinformation is not, and it is up to the recipient to use critical thinking. If you believe people are being manipulated because they can't seen through blatant lies, then the problem is not in the lies.
Sure, and in my opinion we should make (knowingly) spreading disinformation in political contexts illegal, just as we have made spreading disinformation in financial contexts illegal. To me there seem to be almost direct parallels between the two, and I (without a law degree, of course) believe knowingly spreading misinformation could use similar arguments as libel and slander as precedents for its relationship with the first amendment
I agree that we need better education or something of the like to also work towards hardening people against propaganda, but I don't see these different approaches to the same problem as mutually exclusive. And while I would want more funding / different methods to be explored in education independently of this, and believe it could yield amazing benefits for society as a whole, I recognize that the first option might be more cost effective
That will be hard, but we might eventually get there.
In the meantime, it's easy and possible today to require that all political spending MUST come with disclosure of funding. No more secret donations to Super PACs or Heritage or Hillsdale.
There's a difference between me telling you my opinion on an issue and me knowingly spreading false information at a mass scale for personal gain. I think that specifically (in my layman's interpretation of law) does not fall under the first amendment's interpretation of allowing freedom of expression since the expression is not genuine, in the same way that fraud is not genuine. You would not be prosecuted for fraud for unwittingly spreading false information, but you would be for doing so wittingly and with incentive for making money
Why are you assuming that the information spread is false? Propaganda is not necessarily false, in fact, it is better if it is true.
Platforms like Facebook would be well within their rights to try and prevent politically targeted advertising, even if it would be a fool's errand. Outlawing it would be unconstitutional.
If they try to prevent "spreading of false information" by political advertisers I've no doubt they will simply be harsher on the propagandists who have a political aim at odds with Facebook's interests, one of which is stopping these hit pieces by those angry that Trump won.
Nobody would be talking about this if Cambridge Analytica worked with Hillary. They simply want to stop their opponents from using the useful tool that is targeted advertising.
First, I agree propaganda is not always false, but if you read a post I made earlier, you'll see that the reason's it's a problem is that it controls narratives and creates curated biases that give people inaccurate beliefs (e.g. by focusing heavily on single small issues to further a controversy). For example, consider that Russia created fake BLM-related twitter accounts to stoke tensions and drive controversy on both sides of the issue: http://faculty.washington.edu/kstarbi/examining-trolls-polar.... This is somewhat different, less propaganda and more astroturfing, but the effect is the same regarding propaganda: to direct the narrative into something convenient for those behind the strings.
Outlawing political advertising is not what I propose. I believe propaganda is different in its intent: in my opinion direct disinformation or dishonesty (with intent) would be a sufficiently high barrier, given that it would require a high barrier of proof that the supporters were seeking to manipulate opinion with lies. This would ensure nobody would be prosecuted except in the most egregious of cases. I also believe this could be a valid exception to the first amendment in the same vein as libel or slander: spreading false information, with intent, possibly for personal gain. The parallels certainly exist.
Furthermore, I believe I would be just outraged if Hillary did this, and I think this is a pointless distraction. I didn't vote for her and I know that she also had her own shady internet propagandists working too. I think we should do our best to make sure political discussions happen organically, from real people.
I think that kind psychological profiling you can do with a Facebook profile is not obvious to most people. It’s not even clear to to most people that they are under 24/7 surveillance by using the Facebook app. There has been some raised eyebrows of creepy targeted advertisements, but it’s a different ball game of knowing that there is a company that has profiled you as an individual and then manipulated you with targeted political advertising using your most deepest fears.
Sure, but companies do this sort of thing too, and in ways that are almost certainly illegal. Using Race/Sexual orientation to better target individuals, the biggest difference between now and before, is that when running pre internet ad campaigns, you couldn't AB test well and measure direct impressions.
The fact that computers are placing digital picture ads (that are cheap to produce), allows such extreme cases as we've seen to happen.
> Most people couldn't understand ToS agreements if they had the energy to read them, which they don't.
It's easy to understand, however, the business model of companies like Facebook if you don't pay for the service. That's what Facebook users should realize by themselves.
The "easy-to-understand" business model of a service like Facebook is that they show ads on it. That's pretty different from what we're talking about here.
Because I still have Al Gore's voice in my head. I assumed they took this data and put it in a "Lock-box". You see, we need to take it all in and put it in a "Lock-box".
Most people think Facebook is a convenient way to keep in touch with family and friends, and most of my friends and family are bemused that I don't have a FB account, and think that any concerns I have about privacy are overblown.
I’d like some explaination of $1.2 billion is spent on Clinton some of which came from Saudi, Canada, UK, Australia, Norway and that’s all well and good! But $500,000 spent against her is “influencing elections”.
Is Facebook advertising that effective!?
I’d really appreciate if people stopped using the term “influencing elections” that’s the whole point of campaigning. In related news, you don’t have to like him, but Trump won fairly.
I don't like any of those. I do my best to avoid being manipulated by ads. And I especially avoid political ads. I want unbiased information for choosing.
Restricting political advertising is not such an unprecedented concept. The risks are just too fundamental.
What did most people think Facebook was doing... Keeping all the data locked away an never letting anyone make use of it? The interest in that data by political entities should have been especially obvious.
Additionally, this information about Cambridge Analytica came out months ago. I remember first hearing about it on a podcast that was mostly focused on the personality profiles. [1?] However, it was open about CA optaining the data via the survey. (I'll provide a link as soon as I dig it up again). Suddenly, months later, this story is exploding in media and political rhetoric.
It makes me wonder if this isn't more about a concerted effort to force regulations to give someone control over these platforms?
After seeing what happened in the 2016 elections around the world, I'd imagine many people became interested in ensuring social media would work for them next time around.
[1] https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/wnyc/note-to-self/e/5231252... (not -the- podcast I was trying to find, but still has the info as far back as November)