Standard PSA: Cambridge Analytica electing Trump is not a true story. Cambridge Analytica absolutely broke Facebook's terms of service with its personality quiz scheme but it did not affect the 2016 election.
I'm an advertiser who has managed hundreds of millions of dollars for small startups and big corporations, brands, as well as a few small political campaigns.
Even at the time of the Trump election, the kind of ad targeting that Cambridge Analytica says they were offering through the personality quizzes was absolute garbage. There is a reason why the official response from Boz doesn't even mention the personality quiz stuff, because it was essentially irrelevant to the Trump campaign's performance on paid advertising on Meta. And I would go further to say that, except for his success in fundraising, all of his Meta advertising probably didn't move that many votes.
Cambridge Analytica, the organization, of course, loves to claim that they're the dark evil viziers behind the Trump campaign and they've advertised themselves as such to dictators all over the world. But that's just like Edward Bernays writing "Propaganda" back in the day, it is a way to sell their services. Trump digital director Brad Parscale said the campaign did not even use Cambridge Analytica’s controversial psychographic targeting.
Not to mention, the only reason that Cambridge Analytica had that open graph information available is because communities like Hacker News begged again and again for Facebook to open the graph and not have a walled web. After that they cut off that graph access.
If you go find the original ones it’s all about defending Facebook. Basically you can’t give our data to a competitor or build one. There’s a reason they had to quickly release a new ToS and its cause CA didn’t break it.
My understanding of the story [1] is the CA claimed it was collecting data for psychology research, then turned around and used the data for political consulting.
> Cambridge Analytica then arranged an informed consent process for research in which several hundred thousand Facebook users would agree to complete a survey for payment that was only for academic use.
I mean the data was collected in 2013 and then used in 2016 for political consulting. I have to imagine the guy actually did try doing psychology research and then realized it was a dead end (or that the psychology pointed out you could predict voters).
> the only reason that Cambridge Analytica had that open graph information available is because communities like Hacker News begged again and again for Facebook to open the graph and not have a walled web.
This isn’t true. All the early Facebook access revolved around engagement and anything even remotely related to data portability was verboten.
Anything remotely related to data portability was verboten?
Here is Facebook's own CTO in 2010 on HN itself saying “First, we genuinely support data portability: we want users to be able to use their data in other applications without restriction.”
> Anything remotely related to data portability was verboten?
Yes. Please read the entire sentence before replying:
> All the early Facebook access revolved around engagement and anything even remotely related to data portability was verboten.
2010 is years after the Facebook platform was launched.
Regardless, as people in that thread pointed out at the time, what he is referring to is not data portability. If you were building on the Facebook platform at the time, you would know that apps had pretty much free reign to soak up the personal info but the main thing people cared about in terms of data portability was the ability to use the social graph outside of Facebook. Facebook hated the idea because it would allow competitors to bootstrap their own social graph without having to find and re-add all their friends, so it was the one thing that everybody knew could get you booted off the platform.
*Guy that knows more than everybody else voice* Uhm actually it was called The Facebook at the time so this discussion by people that are embarrassingly ignorant of the nomenclature is very laughable to me, a expert
Facebook and Google were one of the first major online services offering an "takeout" feature in service of data portability. FB had multiple rss feeds. It's graph API was around quite early due to demand.
> Facebook and Google were one of the first major online services offering an "takeout" feature in service of data portability. FB had multiple rss feeds. It's graph API was around quite early due to demand.
There was a period of time years before the Graph API launched that was all over the place. Facebook couldn't decide how they wanted their platform to work, so they cycled through a bunch of ideas like APIs, FBML, etc. before “Operation Developer Love” and the Graph API happened. Until that point, you could access a load of personal info, but the data portability everybody cared about – the social graph – was off the table because competitors could use it to bootstrap their own social graph without users having to find and re-add all their friends again. You tried to mirror that, you risked losing your account.
My understanding of the internet is Google is extremely flawed but fair and they didn't try to hold you hostage
Facebook is not fair and they actively do (ever try deleting an account? surprise! it's back a few months later. look at how many users we have, as measure of our success)
Quizzes had like an 85% engagement rate on Facebook, they were legendarily effective paid eyeballs content. Adtech firm System1 aka OpenMail even merged with an adtech firm that owned a quiz content company, it made like $1m/2wks at small scale. I don't really know what Cambridge Analytica concretely did (to this day I have not seen a single screenshot of any of their creatives or a single concrete report of theirs) but I do know quizzes were really effective. For whatever purposes.
Yes they had a high engagement rate (due to how the platforms were structured at the time and how hyper-shareable it was) and you could make some money serving ads on quizzes because they had a high engagement rate. They were absolutely terrible as an ad targeting methodology.
I don't know how you would be able to tell, you've never won an election, how would you know what is important for being elected? It's not something a chatbot knows about either.
You're right that the tools were hype, and that they didn't work. So why, despite knowing that Cambridge Analytica tools were useless, did Trumo keep paying it?
Well, Robert and Rebekah Mercer were primary backers of the Trump campaign, and they also owned a major stake in Cambridge Analytica. Giving something like $49 million dollars to Trump and Co.
There were actual crimes but it was essentially the Russian government hacking email campaigns related to Hillary Clinton and drip-feeding them to the press. On the ad side there's none that I'm aware of.
From the article: "Jurors also found Facebook misled the public about investigations into data brokers following the Cambridge Analytica scandal, finding the company liable for over 2 million violations."
A jury just found that there were more than 43 million crimes (total) committed on the ad side. I think you're saying that the illegal data collection wasn't related to the advertising end, but it was. That's why they did it. Whether it was actually useful or not is irrelevant.
More importantly to me, the billionaires using it to launder their bribes to the US president probably won't ever be convicted, but that does not mean they aren't just low class crooks who can afford good lawyers.
That’s just a link to full Wikipedia page for the company. I must admit that I would be personally interested in seeing a vaguely scientific analysis of the effect they had. For all the talk on the subject I have yet to see any real analysis backed by data on the subject.
Well please share. CA sold a service to anyone who would pay. The world of advertising is full of expensive solutions that don’t really do anything. In many ways politics is harder than selling an actual product since everyone already knows their options and the choice costs them nothing. For all the hype I have yet to see anyone contest the null hypothesis that it was yet another waste of marketing spend.
> Cambridge Analytica, the organization, of course, loves to claim that they're the dark evil viziers behind the Trump campaign and they've advertised themselves as such to dictators all over the world.
Could not agree more. Attitudes like the authors are incredibly destructive to society. Essentially all gains to human life satisfaction have come from tech innovation.
His only condition for going back to the states is a fair trial, in which he can make his case in front of a jury. Something that the constitution guarantees, but is "prohibited" under the Espionage Act. He's not asking for anything close to a pardon, just basic due process. Yet the government denies him of that basic right.
He's got more moral integrity than all of us combined. But nice high horse you have there.
The Constitution guarantees Snowden an impartial jury trial on the criminal charges against him. It does not guarantee him the right to have the jury decide whether breaking the law was morally justified or beneficial to society. The Sixth Amendment requires a jury to determine the elements of the crimes; it doesn't constitutionalize every defense a defendant would like to make.
Taking refuge in a country isn't an endorsement of their political system or leadership. He was fleeing political persecution. Most of us would do the same thing in his place
Right? The charge that "he took refuge, incredibly hypocritically" is a blatant lie, and then the GP moves the goalposts. As we all know, including the blatant liar, Russia was not Snowden's destination and he was trapped in the airport because the U.S. cancelled his visas. The claim that choosing to accept Russian citizenship months later as an alternative to spending a lifetime in a U.S. prison is hypocritical is vile.
As a professional advertiser: yes. Gambling ads should be illegal. Big issue is supreme court said states cant ban gambling ads due to first amendment.
Funnily enough cigarette ads were banned in 1970 before the Supreme Court regime that says you can't ban ads for a given legal product. If someone were to take the case to the Supreme Court, they could probably get cigarette ads un-banned.
Intra-species dominance is very different from group raiding. Chimps team up to slaughter other chimps all the time. Raid style warfare was the norm for humans
No it isn't, and I invite you to read the book to find out why. Murderous raids are the exception when the more widespread norm of ritual combat or tit-for-tat kidnappings with limited casualties had broken down.
Sure, you can go in to kill everyone, and sometimes they did, but only when they were OK with almost as many of their own group dying as the enemy. There's no big technological or tactical advantage to be had in the stone age. Maybe, if you're really lucky, only one of you die for every two of theirs?
(Attacking them in their beds, pah, don't you think maybe the neighboring tribe thought about that and had someone on watch?)
"The Cutting-Off Way: Indigenous Warfare in Eastern North America, 1500-1800" by Wayne Lee is a good read that describes a similar kind of warfare. It doesn't necessarily prove (nor does it set out to prove) that all non-industrial warfare followed this model but it does provide decent evidence for population-limited societies generally preferring deadly ambush to pitched battle.
When running away is a big part of the tactic, it's not a "kill everyone" tactic. You don't have the advantage for long. And even if you did succeed, the next tribe over could just as easily do the same to you (and they probably would, seeing what you're like), so there's a strong reason to develop norms, rules of engagement limiting this sort of thing.
If you're talking cattle, you're talking a different time of history entirely. That allowed collecting and concentrating enough wealth that some could engage in that sort of thing without worrying about immediately falling victim to it themselves. In the paleolithic, that wasn't possible.
I think this makes the common mistake that all "primitive" cultures have the exact same behavior -- I suppose you're not speaking from PNG right? (although likewise I have no such specific knowledge) As the article cites, in this specific place (and in many other similar cultures), I don't think there's motive to wage large scale wars or take large amounts of territory, that would justify something like raiding and wiping out other groups. I suppose that could happen in the huge number of other cultures, ones that had more centralized leadership or competing more unified cultures. The conflicts in the case of PNG might have been localized dispute over borders and such.
In nonhuman animals, even in fierce disputes over territory and mating, killing is rare, because it's quite costly: you eliminate completely a healthy individual, and usually would run the risk of serious injury yourself, making both dying likely. Usually they e.g. resolve mating with displays of beauty/fitness, and territory with displays of force (chimpanzees for example have lots of display of force rituals, specially around selecting leadership, I believe) and sometimes non-lethal conflict (some species evolve apparatus just for this kind of conflict, e.g. antlers, so they can engage in conflict with low chance of injury).
Since we're referring to human cultures, something distinct we have is memory and communication -- information can get out on reputation, behavior, etc. of a group. I think if a group just goes out and murders another in their sleep (which TBF is not so easy), then I imagine for example word would also go out of their actions and may get into trouble with other groups, I'm sure spiritual traditions would also have a say about it, in favor of some sort of "spiritual revenge". But I suppose it's difficult to generalize.
I do think it's interesting to consider some forms of morality, or just metaphysical and logical understanding around ethics, as a kind of technology that enables people to live longer and enable more secure conditions, including preventing large scale conflict that can bring destruction on an industrial scale to entire societies (although misguided moral arguments ironically are also misused sometimes to enact destruction). Although I guess morality alone is not enough (because not everyone seems to internalize it well), and other mechanisms are also helpful to achieve more social stability.
(Also of note is that there can be such thing as too much stability -- for example, for some new more interesting and maybe more worthwhile forms of culture to emerge, old ones have to be replaced, so stability should be balanced with cautious openness to new ideas, technologies, methods, peoples (ethnicity), cultures, ..., and worldviews -- of course, as long as change is in the direction of improving our lives collectively. For example in some cases religious fundamentalism advocates for an absolutist cultural stagnation; we just shouldn't need one group to murder another to spread about new things)
Different cultures of course have different norms. There were even hunter-gatherer societies that practiced extreme forms of pacifism - Moriori would be one example (and their eventual fate shows why this isn't more common).
In general, though, pre-agricultural societies tend to have very high mortality rates from armed conflict with outgroups. In PNG in particular, as I recall, it gets to the point where >20% of all males die from enemy action. Similarly, pre-agricultural societies rarely take prisoners, and often target what we would consider non-combatants (i.e. there's no separation between "enemy warrior" and "enemy civilian", even in principle).
And this makes a lot of sense when you consider what motivates this warfare. Pre-agricultural societies are bounded by the output of the wildland that they forage on, and a single human requires a lot of land to live off in this manner. This is why those bands tend to be small - very few biomes can sustain a foraging band of even few hundred. But conversely it means that any other band of humans foraging off the same land is literally starving you out. It doesn't matter if they are otherwise hostile or not, and there's no potential compromise to be achieved even in theory if you have a plot of land that can sustain, say, 100 people, but now it has 150 feeding off it. The only way for one group to survive is to either kill or drive off the entirety of the remaining group, so it doesn't matter if it's women or children that you're killing. The point is to convince the other group that they are more likely to survive by going elsewhere by making it so precarious for them to remain, or if that is not possible, then to wipe them all entirely. Raids do exactly that.
This is also why prisoners are rarely taken and often ritually killed right away - every prisoner you take is an extra mouth to feed. In an agricultural society, an extra mouth can feed itself because it requires comparatively little land to do so, but for pre-agriculturalists an extra pair of working hands is worthless if the land is already at capacity wrt what can be extracted from it (which is usually the case since populations grow until they reach that point).
Stuff like ethics of warfare, spiritual tradition, reputation etc is derived from all this. Cultures that practice this kind of raid warfare generally glorify it. A war leader who leads a successful raid to massacre an unprotected enemy village is a hero, not just to his own people, but more broadly as a model for other aspiring warriors in the larger culture. So things that we might consider as "disreputable" are not necessarily seen as such there.
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