https://www.technologyreview.com/2012/12/19/114510/how-obama...
This was in 2012.
These tools were used around the place. They have an influence. They don't decide who wins and what big issues are.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/facebook-acquires-israeli-app-...
2018 - Facebook tells Congress that it uses security app Onavo to analyze what people are doing in other apps
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/12/facebook-explains-to-congres...
Remember the Internet.org and FreeBasics movement which was used to muddy the Net Neutrality waters? Guess which startup was excited about Internet.org
> Onavo’s founders, Guy Rosen (CEO) and Roi Tiger (CTO), are on board with the plan. “We’re excited to join their team,” the two wrote, “and hope to play a critical role in reaching one of Internet.org’s most significant goals – using data more efficiently, so that more people around the world can connect and share. When the transaction closes, we plan to continue running the Onavo mobile utility apps as a standalone brand. As always, we remain committed to the privacy of people who use our application and that commitment will not change.”
At the point, everything was on the table, and everyone was "welcome" into the everlasting flame war.
Claim: Brainwash was very successful in Brazil. Reality: The government in power for 12 years turned out to be as corrupt as any they had previously criticized, generating a massive institutional crisis.
Data promised to improve lifes, it has done so in many aspects, but also has made countless things worse.
From physical and digital products squeezing the last cent instead of improving user's experience, algorithms getting every single second of your attention, from deciding the kind of music and tv shows getting produced, to the kind of dull ever repeating style of everything really on every corner of the planet from hotels to restaurant and menus it's all a data-driven conversion to the mean in boring-and-safe or money-squeezing fashion.
Data has entered sports and transformed them from the times of money ball. Basket, soccer, football, are all much less enjoyable and creative because again, it's all about applying data.
And yes, data has entered politics at a level it could not before computing power and data collection and our understanding of human manipulation didn't reach those levels.
It has understood you only need 50%+1 of the votes and efforts to get 50%+2 are a waste and less efficient.
So politicians, especially in weaker democracies characterized by winner-takes-all mechanics, are incentivized to be divisive, not representing the majority of the citizens.
Again, you only want 50%+1 of the votes, if you trying to get a single more you're dispersing your efforts and decreasing the chances to win.
I don’t think truth aligns with either extreme. Both are approaches that have their place. But if it was an “uncreative” with no ideas that simply took the time to look and discovered that the three point shot was absurdly more efficient than basically any other shot in basketball, what does that say about all the “creative” coaching geniuses who failed to discover it in half a century? And if basketball is now “less creative” because of it, that’s an indictment of the fact that the league refuses to address the underlying issue.
I think it’s telling that no one bemoans the fact that we design our medicine using data driven methods. I’m sure it would spice up our lives if the pharma companies dropped the boring data analysis and statistical methods and just slapped some compounds together through free-flowing creative passion!
something that data can't tell you either!
And you do that today with maths, algorithms and quick information analysis and response.
Trump’s team knew exactly where to focus their efforts for 2016. That was half of it
The other half was all the rallies and stops where he literally workshopped all of his slogans in front of an audience. That’s where “lock her up” and a dozen other creative insults and slogans were tested. Like a comedian on tour, he had to work on his material.
You can say a lot about him, but he is charismatic and none of that is data driven. He has instinct on how to hurt people. He has always been a salesman and con artist. These are creative skills
The data gave him the audience but the human angle got him those votes.
Social media was definitely the start of that downfall. Yeah people used to spread misinformation longer before social media was a thing. But what Facebook changed was the way how misinformation could be targeted with surgical precision.
But if we take a more relevant comparison: In the financial sector, banks are responsible for detecting abuse.
They’re not the only ones responsible, but they don’t get to absolve all responsibility because someone else committed a crime using the banks infrastructure.
If your "just increasing shareholder value" is found to cause damages to the public, you should be held to account for that.
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.
But that's not the real problem here.
The problem is that it has been demonstrated how ad-tech infrastructure can be re-purposed for political propaganda, disinformation, and misinformation. All of that power is now available to the highest bidder, and the infrastructure providers, as we are now know are utterly amoral, stronger and faster than any government regulations, beholden to their shareholders and nothing else even if the world burns.
> Now there may be other potential issues that would elevate the matter, if disinformation is used...
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.
In the same way dynamic personalized pricing in the supermarket is different from supermarkets being able to set prices before.
Which I also think is overblown. The one thing that people can actually agree on is that dynamically setting sticker prices is bad, but nobody actually does this. There's less consensus on whether coupons (targeted or otherwise) are okay, even though they have the exact same effect (ie. $10 w/ $2 targeted coupon vs a Dynamic Price™ of $8).
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...
I don't know if it was a psy-op or deception campaign or what.
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.
If campaign spending is strictly regulated, I imagine it would be difficult for such work.
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.
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.
But we know that propaganda works. That doesn't sit well with your claims.
I’m having a hard time imagining you didn’t know this.
For example many players in the civil rights movement were not wealthy and did “good” propaganda which others refuse to call it as such.
The prohibition movement was a second example.
Might be a challenge to some, but one can find out things if they pay enough attention to data.
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.
I think people wanted to believe there was some external hand at work, and it suited CA to pretend they were more capable than they were.
Cummings spoke about using normal Facebook ad segmentation to target some demographics.
Cambridge Analytica had substantial discussions with Leave.EU, the campaign associated with Arron Banks and Nigel Farage. It attended meetings, appeared at a Leave.EU press event, prepared proposals, and discussed using data and psychological profiling. At the time, both Leave.EU figures and Cambridge Analytica publicly made statements suggesting a working relationship.
Here is the actual text from 4.7.
> We have investigated the allegation that Cambridge Analytica provided data analytics services to Leave.EU. Our focus has been on the use of personal data and whether Leave.EU breached the DPA98. We served Information Notices on Leave.EU and Cambridge Analytica to gather evidence as part of our investigation.
> Information placed in the public domain by some of those subject to investigation suggested a relationship between Cambridge Analytica and Leave.EU, and both sides have acknowledged there was an initial exploration of how to work together during the Referendum campaign. Brittany Kaiser, Director of Program Development at Cambridge Analytica, appeared at a Leave.EU news conference in 2015. Statements by representatives of Leave.EU made in 2016 also indicated that Cambridge Analytica had worked for them. Senior Cambridge Analytica staff also claimed they worked with Leave.EU.
> In response to Information Notices served on them, both parties have stated that only preliminary discussions took place, and the relationship did not move forward when Leave.EU failed to attain the designation as the official Leave campaign. In evidence provided to the ICO, Leave.EU stated that four meetings took place:
> 23 October 2015 representatives of Leave EU met with CA staff, this was a basic introductory meeting to express interest in potentially working together
> 18 November 2015 CA appeared at a press conference with Leave.eu
> 20 November 2015 CA went to Leave.EU’s Bristol offices and pitched their product.
> 8 January 2016 representatives of Leave.EU met CA in London, and CA presented a proposal for future work together.
The ICO report does not specify that any work was carried out, or what exactly that work was.
Also worth noting that the pdf in interim report The related findings of the final report after 3 year investigation are summerised here
https://cy.ico.org.uk/media2/migrated/2618383/20201002_ico-o...
> From my review of the materials recovered by the investigation I have found no further evidence to change my earlier view that SCL/CA were not involved in the EU referendum campaign in the UK - beyond some initial enquiries made by SCL/CA in relation to UKIP data in the early stages of the referendum process. This strand of work does not appear to have then been taken forward by SCL/CA.
(And no, I don't know if they'll reach AGI, my uninformed bet is: no).
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).
To create evidence that he didn't know about it?
Because it was shady, deception is deception.
From: Mark Zuckerberg
Sent: Monday, January 30, 2017 8:10:16 AM
Subject: Cambridge Analytica
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
- 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).]
A: Yo! did we do anything wrong?
B: No. someone else messed up. we're good.
Whatever it was some amazing insight is irelevant!
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.
- white
- Christian
- rural
- guns
- lower and upper class
The upper class votes on taxes, so that is an easy one.
The rest are relatively easy to target.
The Democratic Party tries to capture everyone else, which is more people but hugely diverse. There’s hardly a single message (or single digit number of them) that resonates universally.
Identifying someone as Republican gives your clear signal for targeting if you want to get out the base, as Trump did.
Identifying someone as Democratic means they could care about a huge range of things, but you don’t know what.
And I don't know what "low class" means but if you're referring to socioeconomic status that doesn't match what you said either. According to Pew the bottom quintile (<36k/yr) is about 60/35 Democrat. The top quintile (215k/yr+) is about 53/46. Upper-middle ($144-215k/yr) is the only one with a Republican edge, and the other two (36-48, 48-144) are within the margin of error to 50/50.
I think of all your examples you probably have the strongest case to make with "rural" but I've met plenty of rural Dems in my life.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/04/09/partisan-coa...
That's not at all true. The biggest contradiction is on trade. The "business" faction is against tariffs, but the worker base was for it. Same for immigration. Business is generally for it, the worker base is against it.
Just because this is worded ambiguously, to clarify the "they" is Facebook. CA on the other hand was effectively the Trump's digital ad campaign.
> 2. the trump campaign did targeted marketing better (ie. targeting the base rather than the marginal voter)
This ignores that a lot of what made CA different is that they used microtargeting to discourage turnout via fake news stories.
3. "I'm skeptical that Cambridge Analytica has any data or expertise that couldn't be replicated readily by someone else"
After CA's methods and actions became public, FB massively limited what you could do via their API.
Given that "cambridge analytica" wasn't even mentioned in my comment, and "facebook" was the last subject mentioned (ie. "facebook was ..."), I don't see how anyone could have interpreted "they" to mean cambridge analytica.
>This ignores that a lot of what made CA different is that they used microtargeting to discourage turnout via fake news stories.
What does this have to do with the email? Everything you mentioned was already known before this email was released. Is the complaint that boz didn't also tell zuckerberg "btw cambridge analytica works with conservatives are are super evil"?
>After CA's methods and actions became public, FB massively limited what you could do via their API.
Was the email sent before or after they locked down the API? Also, this feels like a nitpick, eg. suppose a mass shooter killed a bunch people with an assault rifle, and then the government banned assault rifles, it would still be correct to say "anyone could bought the weapons the mass shooter used", even though it wasn't true in the present.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...
If that was the advice, it seems pretty terrible.
Where's the lie?
>If that was the advice, it seems pretty terrible.
If you read either my comment or the email, you'd know what the advice was.
No, we should be up and arms about TikTok.
Of course, all that existing regulation is being undone, thanks in part to TikTok, Facebook, etc.
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.
[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.
What's going on is that this is a very early email, and it's being brought up during discovery on a current legal proceeding (and it's not necessarily the first time it's made public).
It's also clear to anyone that knows about the case that this isn't an accurate explanation of what Cambridge Analytica was doing and why it was causing concern. There's no mention of Facebook Apps unrelated to politics being used to collect user data, and there's no mention of the data being collected not only of the users that install these apps, but also their friends (which would lead to the revision of the Graph API and the implementation of minimum demographic controls).
So to me it reads like a document that Meta puts forward to prove that Zuckerberg:
- Had no idea at the time of what was going on
- Was making efforts to understand what was going on
I haven't checked which party used this document as an exhibit in an argument, although this might be available information, but I'd wager a guess that it will or has been used by Meta.
So if you are looking at this document as "the truth uncovered", I'd suggest to look for more nuance instead of easy answers.
What was revealed that we didn't already know?
>I'd suggest to look for more nuance instead of easy answers.
Shouldn't you be looking for said answers and presenting them, instead of chastising me for not having the answers?
Oh quit clutching your pearls, he was perfectly civil.
You're the one trying to downplay things we know weren't at all covered in full by these emails (and we've known that for quite a long time). And know about them since you're downplaying them in other comments in this thread (things like exploring the quizz apps and how Facebook knew CA had exploited the API since 2015, how CA initially said the data was for academic purposes, etc).
The latter part of your comment ("how far should we go, the invention of the printing press?") shows me you're not only crying about being corrected but being disingenuous to push a narrative based on lies. Since you're doubling down and running cover for Facebook/CA/Trump's campaign all over the thread it suggests there's more than plain stupidity and dishonesty as motives.
I'm not criticizing him for not being "civil", I'm criticizing him for criticizing me for a failing that he himself is committing.
>You're the one trying to downplay things we know weren't at all covered in full by these emails (and we've known that for quite a long time). And know about them since you're downplaying them in other comments in this thread (things like exploring the quizz apps and how Facebook knew CA had exploited the API since 2015, how CA initially said the data was for academic purposes, etc).
>The latter part of your comment ("how far should we go, the invention of the printing press?") shows me you're not only crying about being corrected but being disingenuous to push a narrative based on lies. Since you're doubling down and running cover for Facebook/CA/Trump's campaign all over the thread it suggests there's more than plain stupidity and dishonesty as motives.
You can't seem to distinguish between me questioning the importance/implication of this email with me "downplaying" facebook or cambridge analytica's ill deeds, and unlike the parent commenter, are not being civil. I think most people got the first part, otherwise they would replied with "yeah, but facebook and cambridge analytica is still evil/destroys democracy because of all the other things we know".