When 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.
I'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.
I 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.
I 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.
> but it's that Cambridge Analytica wasn't Facebook's fault (users willingly granted access), but it was their problem.
In Careless People, they mentioned that this was a strategy they wanted to employ:
They wanted facebook to become a tool for winning elections so that they would have more leverage over the politicians in power.
For example, they were trying to fight the Indian government over internet.org initiative (essentially shipping out a stripped down version of the internet to impoverished areas where they could only use facebook and a couple other apps, subsidized by telecoms). They used facebook features to incite backlash against the Indian government.
to me it feels like the entire email exchange is scripted. Would Zuck really ask a question that would end up in a lawsuit over __email__ of all mediums?
Man, if I'd interviewed with FB and even heard the word "integrity" I'd have started laughing my ass off till I was covered in a puddle of my own piss. Not a single person at facebook has integrity, it's been that way since day one.
I am a fan of xcancel, havent used nitter. was just joking a bit. I do use X because its the only place where ML people share anything, but its a gross gross place for sure!
See 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 (start at 4:55 min)
But 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.
"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"
That 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.)
IMHO, 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.
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.”
I'd date it to around then, too, but for a different reason. Whether you think it was a good or bad thing, I don't think it's incorrect to characterize the pre-2010s web as "socially progressive libertarian". 2013 was the first time I (we?) saw unabashedly extremist right-wing sentiments break Stormfront/4chan containment (and as a deathly serious matter, rather than the ambiguously sardonic nature of the latter's meme-ing). Specifically, with the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman murder trial, and the way that that incident picked up a thread of America's deepest divide and dragged it into cyberspace. I had never heard people saying the things they were saying around that topic, things that would make an Xbox Live edgelord go, "Bro, dial it back," and certainly never from the people who were saying them. My parents never saw the need to give me "the talk", and that was my introduction to the fact that America was very much not "post-racial", in a real way, and often proudly so.
At the point, everything was on the table, and everyone was "welcome" into the everlasting flame war.
I won't dispute that 2015-2017 was a turning point in many areas, but "cause of the political polarization" is a huge stretch. Political polarization has been going up for most of my life. You could perhaps put a start of it at the 1994 midterms. It was raging in the 2000s too.
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.
> 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.
This happens to some extent, particularly in the US's electoral system. But I'd argue the incentive for divisive politics is coming mostly from the fleeting nature of our communication media (plus legitimate grievances that mainstream politicians were out of touch with for a long time).
Twitter was already a politically destabilizing force even before data analysis and manipulation caught up to it. The medium itself punishes constructive interactions and ideas.
The problem with "data" as discussed here it is that powerful organizations and people own it and common people don't. It's an instrument of power for the already powerful.
An equally cynical but opposite take is that data is what you turn to when you want to dispel with the mythology, hand-waving, and general bullshit that self-described “creatives” wrap themselves in in order to avoid admitting that they may not actually understand why something works or doesn’t work (and by extension, that their success may be dumb luck rather than talent).
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!
It is often not the beginning of processes but the end of them. This is the problem with a lot of AI, i.e. it takes data and mixes it up instead of doing things afresh.
The response is where creativity lives. Everything falls apart if you don’t have the juice to capitalize on the insights you got from the data.
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.
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.
It's part of the causal chain, but far from the beginning. The root problem, as far as humanly controllable things go, is the way we manufacture computer hardware. That's upstream of the centralized structure of the Internet which all of human civilization is beginning to mirror.
Computers can't replicate on their own, so they need entire corporations/societies to build them. A computer's reproductive locus of control is at the corporation/society level. Human individuals get sucked into that superorganism by evolutionary pressure and will eventually integrate (ENIAC -> desktop -> laptop -> smartphone -> wearables -> neural interface). Today it merely influences what you see on the phone, eventually it will be behavior-changing signals from the datacenter delivered straight into the brain. A similar thing happened in our evolutionary past when individual cells combined to form multicellular organisms.
In the long run, this cannot be fought because it's the physical tendency of matter to gather and form more complex things. There is however a second path with equally strong evolutionary precedent, which is for the human individual to integrate vertically by taking the computer in as an endosymbiont, thereby preserving the human's individual sovereignty / bodily integrity. We can pull down the computer's reproductive locus of control to the individual level, instead of being pulled up by it to become part of a larger organism at the corporation/society level. In practice, this requires miniaturizing fab tech so that each person can manufacture a custom computer from raw materials using a fridge-sized chip fab + 3D printer home appliance. We will obviously not get there immediately, but the will exists, and attempts to diffuse fab tech are already underway (such as https://fab2.com/, which started as a DIY attempt to manufacture chips at home https://sam.zeloof.xyz/category/semiconductor/).
It's worth noting that any evolutionary path may fail, especially the horizontally integrating kind because it must solve the very hard problem of constituent individuals becoming less likely to reproduce as a result of the environment changing in the emerging superorganism's favor. Some people think they can sidestep this problem by automating humans out of the computer production loop entirely, which removes integration pressure and creates a new digital species. Best of luck to Elon and various other mostly Chinese companies making the attempt. But that's an extremely risky bet, and it's basically giving up on yourself/humanity. We ought to attempt all available paths at once instead of putting too much faith in any single one. And that includes preserving pockets of pre-digital civilization where life happens without much technology at all, rather than dragging everybody along.
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.
You can't expect that malicious actor would be fighting against malicious actors that are increase shareholder value. Tbh at this point it's governments fault. You can't expect British American Tobacco to fight against smoking. It's not really their job. Their job is increasing said shareholder value.
Just to be clear, I absolutely agree with you but corporations are made solely to create a profit and it tends to be lower when one is ethical. I would love if these companies act more responsibly, I would be very glad even for bare minimum eg. not causing harm actively but I just don't expect it. Because their sole existence is usually profit. Not public wellbeing. The "Increasing Shareholder value" is a joke because I noticed that some people are using this unironically.
Tobacco companies are responsible for not promoting to minors.
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.
I'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.
The thing that's really disturbing is not how far Cambridge Analytica actually got in terms of influencing American voters through the "campaigns" they were hired to perform. In the end it was hard to assess how much damage they did.
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...
Disinformation was used and it is NOT a "potential issue" that merely "elevates" the matter, it's profound offense that requires a harsh and comprehensive response.
>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.
But 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.
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 spot the US is in now with regards to political polarization started well before this, perhaps with the end of the fairness doctrine. After that, conservative interests were allowed to consolidate ownership of media outlets, like talk radio stations. This then led to consolidation of newspapers, local and cable news and even social media.
Yeah, 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.
Apparently 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
I 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
counterpoint : 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.
There 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.
People 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!
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.
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.
> 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.
Is it surprising or an indictment against democracy that reminding people the election is in N days makes them more likely to vote?
If you only remind people who are likely to vote the way you want, that's likely to swing the vote a little bit.
Maybe you do a little convincing with your reminder and that helps a little bit more.
Some jurisdictions have a blanket ban on political advertisement or media coverage as a way to reduce the effects of campaigning in an attempt to get a less influenced result. But we don't have that in the US and I suspect it would fall afoul of US free speech, and may be hard to enforce, anyway.
Yes there were. There were unscientific claims that the data was used to change the mind of voters in a complete magical and impossible way. Which later was proven entirely false.
Did you miss the entire event? Or are you so busy trying to be swarmy that you can’t remember it?
Using popularity contests to pick rulers is the flaw of democracy. I think Sortition would be better at selecting people to write our laws, at least under current circumstances.
There is a difference between historical institutions failing people, and monkey A getting to a wrench quicker than monkey B (exactly what that email points to)
traditional 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.
It doesnt quite imply democracy does not work. It implies that propaganda works. And if propaganda works, then that would mean that having the bulk of the ability to propagandize concentrated in a few hands in a threat to democracy, as it means that few people effectively have a much more powerful vote. Which, if you'll allow me to shortcut the rest of the argument, just brings us to the fundamental threat to democracy is concentrated wealth and concentrated power.
It doesn't require concentrated wealth, but if wealth is evenly distributed, then presumably the power to apply propaganda is also equally distributed. Propagandizing information effectively become a meta-level form of voting. With concentrated wealth and power, those with all of the resources hold all of these meta-level votes.
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:
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).]
They 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.
Before 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.
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.
I can't find the term 'substantial' in the linked source. So I think maybe you are editorialising.
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
> 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.
My "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).
> 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.
Another factor (which can also be seen in the "metaverse" business) is that how our investment/economy system makes these companies "need" [0] to always be a "growth stock" with something even bigger, even after they're already enormous quasi-monopolies.
Myspace had certain problems and probably didn't scale well, it had UX problems and management problems, combine that with the fact people wanted better granularity of privacy settings (though to be fair, Myspace was decent about it. There was a publically visible wall, but, still) and Facebook seemed to offer that, but of course Zuckerberg continually subverts the settings because he does not care about privacy (Facebook actively has switched people from 'friends only' to 'friends of friends' or 'public', multiple times), and also the fact Facebook apparently built a tool early on to import your contacts to Facebook from Myspace, but, of course, not the other way around
Google later offered a prompt in their own services, because Facebook was hoovering up contacts or... something, I forget
Zuckerberg actively wants a monopoly. He's, in my estimation, a sociopath. He got lucky, but 'lucky' also means 'internet 2006'. If you steal the Winklevoss' product (something he apparently also did with 'Metaverse'. The twins meant it in some sort of bitcoin sense, Zuckerberg co-opted it) you too can capture the literally entire global market, because the world was just coming online in those years
Facebook 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).
I 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.
In 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.
This 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
Cambridge 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.
When 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.
I'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...
I 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.
I 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.
> but it's that Cambridge Analytica wasn't Facebook's fault (users willingly granted access), but it was their problem.
In Careless People, they mentioned that this was a strategy they wanted to employ:
They wanted facebook to become a tool for winning elections so that they would have more leverage over the politicians in power.
For example, they were trying to fight the Indian government over internet.org initiative (essentially shipping out a stripped down version of the internet to impoverished areas where they could only use facebook and a couple other apps, subsidized by telecoms). They used facebook features to incite backlash against the Indian government.
to me it feels like the entire email exchange is scripted. Would Zuck really ask a question that would end up in a lawsuit over __email__ of all mediums?
Man, if I'd interviewed with FB and even heard the word "integrity" I'd have started laughing my ass off till I was covered in a puddle of my own piss. Not a single person at facebook has integrity, it's been that way since day one.
https://xcancel.com/TechEmails/status/2099214399840059428#m
Faster captcha: https://nitter.privacyredirect.com/TechEmails/status/2099214...
Says tweet not found for me.
What, yall don’t like X?
You can't see comments without signing in and there's dickovers so it's nice to have a privacy respecting alternative.
I am a fan of xcancel, havent used nitter. was just joking a bit. I do use X because its the only place where ML people share anything, but its a gross gross place for sure!
Xcancel is nitter.
Ahh I see, thanks!
> [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.
See 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 (start at 4:55 min)
But 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.
06:23
"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"
That 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.)
IMHO, 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.
I would date this beginning to 2013. That's around when Facebook feed ceased to be chronological. That's when everyone became rabid.
I'm old enough to remember when it was celebrated that 'big data' was being used to rally voters.
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.
2013 - Facebook acquired Israeli startup Onava
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.”
I'd date it to around then, too, but for a different reason. Whether you think it was a good or bad thing, I don't think it's incorrect to characterize the pre-2010s web as "socially progressive libertarian". 2013 was the first time I (we?) saw unabashedly extremist right-wing sentiments break Stormfront/4chan containment (and as a deathly serious matter, rather than the ambiguously sardonic nature of the latter's meme-ing). Specifically, with the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman murder trial, and the way that that incident picked up a thread of America's deepest divide and dragged it into cyberspace. I had never heard people saying the things they were saying around that topic, things that would make an Xbox Live edgelord go, "Bro, dial it back," and certainly never from the people who were saying them. My parents never saw the need to give me "the talk", and that was my introduction to the fact that America was very much not "post-racial", in a real way, and often proudly so.
At the point, everything was on the table, and everyone was "welcome" into the everlasting flame war.
> I would date this beginning to 2013. That's around when Facebook feed ceased to be chronological. That's when everyone became rabid.
I'm not sure how old you are, but I remember things being pretty rabid in the 1980s.
I won't dispute that 2015-2017 was a turning point in many areas, but "cause of the political polarization" is a huge stretch. Political polarization has been going up for most of my life. You could perhaps put a start of it at the 1994 midterms. It was raging in the 2000s too.
Social media + engagement algorithms = societal cancer.
I think you're missing the forest for the tree.
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.
> 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.
This happens to some extent, particularly in the US's electoral system. But I'd argue the incentive for divisive politics is coming mostly from the fleeting nature of our communication media (plus legitimate grievances that mainstream politicians were out of touch with for a long time).
Twitter was already a politically destabilizing force even before data analysis and manipulation caught up to it. The medium itself punishes constructive interactions and ideas.
The problem with "data" as discussed here it is that powerful organizations and people own it and common people don't. It's an instrument of power for the already powerful.
Data is what uncreatives turn to when out of ideas.
An equally cynical but opposite take is that data is what you turn to when you want to dispel with the mythology, hand-waving, and general bullshit that self-described “creatives” wrap themselves in in order to avoid admitting that they may not actually understand why something works or doesn’t work (and by extension, that their success may be dumb luck rather than talent).
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!
> admitting that they may not actually understand why something works or doesn’t work
something that data can't tell you either!
Data is what neurotic people hide behind because they can't stand not being in control. Often to disastrous results.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy
It is often not the beginning of processes but the end of them. This is the problem with a lot of AI, i.e. it takes data and mixes it up instead of doing things afresh.
Creativity doesn't win elections. Getting 50%+1 of the votes does.
And you do that today with maths, algorithms and quick information analysis and response.
The response is where creativity lives. Everything falls apart if you don’t have the juice to capitalize on the insights you got from the data.
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.
>but also in Brazil
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.
It's part of the causal chain, but far from the beginning. The root problem, as far as humanly controllable things go, is the way we manufacture computer hardware. That's upstream of the centralized structure of the Internet which all of human civilization is beginning to mirror.
Computers can't replicate on their own, so they need entire corporations/societies to build them. A computer's reproductive locus of control is at the corporation/society level. Human individuals get sucked into that superorganism by evolutionary pressure and will eventually integrate (ENIAC -> desktop -> laptop -> smartphone -> wearables -> neural interface). Today it merely influences what you see on the phone, eventually it will be behavior-changing signals from the datacenter delivered straight into the brain. A similar thing happened in our evolutionary past when individual cells combined to form multicellular organisms.
In the long run, this cannot be fought because it's the physical tendency of matter to gather and form more complex things. There is however a second path with equally strong evolutionary precedent, which is for the human individual to integrate vertically by taking the computer in as an endosymbiont, thereby preserving the human's individual sovereignty / bodily integrity. We can pull down the computer's reproductive locus of control to the individual level, instead of being pulled up by it to become part of a larger organism at the corporation/society level. In practice, this requires miniaturizing fab tech so that each person can manufacture a custom computer from raw materials using a fridge-sized chip fab + 3D printer home appliance. We will obviously not get there immediately, but the will exists, and attempts to diffuse fab tech are already underway (such as https://fab2.com/, which started as a DIY attempt to manufacture chips at home https://sam.zeloof.xyz/category/semiconductor/).
It's worth noting that any evolutionary path may fail, especially the horizontally integrating kind because it must solve the very hard problem of constituent individuals becoming less likely to reproduce as a result of the environment changing in the emerging superorganism's favor. Some people think they can sidestep this problem by automating humans out of the computer production loop entirely, which removes integration pressure and creates a new digital species. Best of luck to Elon and various other mostly Chinese companies making the attempt. But that's an extremely risky bet, and it's basically giving up on yourself/humanity. We ought to attempt all available paths at once instead of putting too much faith in any single one. And that includes preserving pockets of pre-digital civilization where life happens without much technology at all, rather than dragging everybody along.
And in Europe too.
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.
You can't expect that malicious actor would be fighting against malicious actors that are increase shareholder value. Tbh at this point it's governments fault. You can't expect British American Tobacco to fight against smoking. It's not really their job. Their job is increasing said shareholder value.
You can't expect me to stop selling crack to kids on the streets. My job is to feed my family.
I would be glad if you didn't do it but I wouldn't expect nothing else from childrens crack dealer.
I think it's fair to hold the government to account, but it's good to be cognizant of how entrenched corporatism is in our modern governance.
If your "just increasing shareholder value" is found to cause damages to the public, you should be held to account for that.
Just to be clear, I absolutely agree with you but corporations are made solely to create a profit and it tends to be lower when one is ethical. I would love if these companies act more responsibly, I would be very glad even for bare minimum eg. not causing harm actively but I just don't expect it. Because their sole existence is usually profit. Not public wellbeing. The "Increasing Shareholder value" is a joke because I noticed that some people are using this unironically.
Tobacco companies are responsible for not promoting to minors.
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.
People seem to have forgotten how soulless cigarette companies were:
> As a 1984 R.J. Reynolds report stated:1819
> “Younger adult smokers are the only source of replacement smokers… If younger adults turn away from smoking, the industry must decline.”
Brainwash on what subjects?
I'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.
The thing that's really disturbing is not how far Cambridge Analytica actually got in terms of influencing American voters through the "campaigns" they were hired to perform. In the end it was hard to assess how much damage they did.
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.
Disinformation was used and it is NOT a "potential issue" that merely "elevates" the matter, it's profound offense that requires a harsh and comprehensive response.>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.
But 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.
> How is this dissimilar to controlling the media in the past?
In the same way dynamic personalized pricing in the supermarket is different from supermarkets being able to set prices before.
>dynamic personalized pricing in the supermarket
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 spot the US is in now with regards to political polarization started well before this, perhaps with the end of the fairness doctrine. After that, conservative interests were allowed to consolidate ownership of media outlets, like talk radio stations. This then led to consolidation of newspapers, local and cable news and even social media.
> brainwash
You have been brainwashed. Or was it Russia as well?
Everything started much longer ago. You can't go along in life just assuming everything will converge to some whig paradise.
I 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.
> This document is from In re Facebook, Inc. Securities Litigation (2026).
Yeah, 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.
Apparently 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
I 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
Zuk 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.
The “Only do evil” company
counterpoint : 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.
counter-counterpoint: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler_and_vegetarianism
There 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.
People 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/citi...
Trump and Cambridge Anlytica are just unpleasant, cancerous symptoms of this.
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.
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.
> 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.
propaganda needs some truth
Is it surprising or an indictment against democracy that reminding people the election is in N days makes them more likely to vote?
If you only remind people who are likely to vote the way you want, that's likely to swing the vote a little bit.
Maybe you do a little convincing with your reminder and that helps a little bit more.
Some jurisdictions have a blanket ban on political advertisement or media coverage as a way to reduce the effects of campaigning in an attempt to get a less influenced result. But we don't have that in the US and I suspect it would fall afoul of US free speech, and may be hard to enforce, anyway.
Nobody is suggesting that Facebook magically tricked people into voting against their will.
Maybe you were alive or aware in 2016-2022 but this is exactly what was suggested.
I’m having a hard time imagining you didn’t know this.
Narrator: there were no allegations of magic.
Yes there were. There were unscientific claims that the data was used to change the mind of voters in a complete magical and impossible way. Which later was proven entirely false.
Did you miss the entire event? Or are you so busy trying to be swarmy that you can’t remember it?
Friend - there are always going to be crazy people. You can't cite them as evidence that the craziness was widespread.
And you shouldn't call names. HN does not like that one bit.
That was the entire basis of the hearings. I assume you simply are unaware rather than ill intent here.
I believe the hearings were based in the language of propaganda- not magic.
I could be wrong. Do you have a citation for the magic?
I believe you're straw manning the situation.
Using popularity contests to pick rulers is the flaw of democracy. I think Sortition would be better at selecting people to write our laws, at least under current circumstances.
There is a difference between historical institutions failing people, and monkey A getting to a wrench quicker than monkey B (exactly what that email points to)
Both could be true.
traditional 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.
Willing to concede that point. But parties should understand then what they are arguing for
It doesnt quite imply democracy does not work. It implies that propaganda works. And if propaganda works, then that would mean that having the bulk of the ability to propagandize concentrated in a few hands in a threat to democracy, as it means that few people effectively have a much more powerful vote. Which, if you'll allow me to shortcut the rest of the argument, just brings us to the fundamental threat to democracy is concentrated wealth and concentrated power.
Poor logic. The existence of propaganda working does not require concentrated wealth. It simply has more interest in it currently.
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.
It doesn't require concentrated wealth, but if wealth is evenly distributed, then presumably the power to apply propaganda is also equally distributed. Propagandizing information effectively become a meta-level form of voting. With concentrated wealth and power, those with all of the resources hold all of these meta-level votes.
Prohibition was a common man’s propoganda that led to horrible outcomes and almost upended America.
We are all capable of being stupid.
Content:
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-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?
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).]
With xcancel down again, this was helpful. Thank you.
The amount of media furore over this at the time, really made me think CA was doing something illegal. Was that just Gawker/Buzzfeed journalism?
They 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.
> It's the latter part that was considered shady
Because it was shady, deception is deception.
Shady business practices are accepted now.
Before 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.
A large ICO investigation concluded that they were not involved in Brexit at all.
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.
See 4.7 in https://ico.org.uk/media2/migrated/2259371/investigation-int...
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.
I can't find the term 'substantial' in the linked source. So I think maybe you are editorialising.
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.
My "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).
> 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.
Another factor (which can also be seen in the "metaverse" business) is that how our investment/economy system makes these companies "need" [0] to always be a "growth stock" with something even bigger, even after they're already enormous quasi-monopolies.
Myspace had certain problems and probably didn't scale well, it had UX problems and management problems, combine that with the fact people wanted better granularity of privacy settings (though to be fair, Myspace was decent about it. There was a publically visible wall, but, still) and Facebook seemed to offer that, but of course Zuckerberg continually subverts the settings because he does not care about privacy (Facebook actively has switched people from 'friends only' to 'friends of friends' or 'public', multiple times), and also the fact Facebook apparently built a tool early on to import your contacts to Facebook from Myspace, but, of course, not the other way around
Google later offered a prompt in their own services, because Facebook was hoovering up contacts or... something, I forget
Zuckerberg actively wants a monopoly. He's, in my estimation, a sociopath. He got lucky, but 'lucky' also means 'internet 2006'. If you steal the Winklevoss' product (something he apparently also did with 'Metaverse'. The twins meant it in some sort of bitcoin sense, Zuckerberg co-opted it) you too can capture the literally entire global market, because the world was just coming online in those years
There were a lot of factors involved in Brexit. The BBC played a large part in it although it will never admit it.
What evidence shows he wanted this? Why would he play the victim internally?
Facebook 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).
You’re arguing with a conspiracy theorist. Don’t do it, it’s not worth the effort!
> Why would he play the victim internally?
To create evidence that he didn't know about it?
I 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.
In 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.
tl;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.
This 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
They were selling private hacked data. It is amazing they are not all in prison.
Whatever it was some amazing insight is irelevant!
It's pretty incredible that people claim CA was somehow running the world and magically turning elections and brainwashing masses.
Cambridge 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.