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The Secret Agenda of a Facebook Quiz

nytimes.com

101–110 of 114 posts

Re: The Secret Agenda of a Facebook Quiz

#101

>shocked by an election upset. NYTimes never strays from its own 'Secret agenda'. Half the population is always "upset" after an election. Only ones "shocked" by this are moronic NYTimes readers who still don't have the clue to get their heads out of their asses.

You should be well aware that such name calling is not OK on Hackers News. Please don't do this.

Re: The Secret Agenda of a Facebook Quiz

#102
post #10

I'm not impressed. Did anyone notice that Cambridge Analytics did not work for Ted Cruz? I mean he did win Texas and the great plains states, but those were his most-winnable locations from the beginning due to his consistent conservatism and other nominees dropping out. He even lost the south, which should have been his other target, presumably due to being off-wavelength with southern voters, something the analytic…

I'm late to this party, but I'd point to the fact that many of the states Cruz lost in the south have open primaries:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_primaries_in_the_United_S...

Actually, the following states were lost by Cruz and have open primaries:

Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina (All races' primaries open for unaffiliated voters only), South Carolina

Re: The Secret Agenda of a Facebook Quiz

#103
Is it just me starting to really have enough of "secret agendas" of Facebook and other internet giants? What the hell are the legislators doing? Even if you say that the advertising-based business model is OK where do you draw the line? Do they really need to know what kind of a psychologic personality I am and what kind of porn I watch ?! (exaggerating... but who knows nowadays)

Re: The Secret Agenda of a Facebook Quiz

#104
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've been warning friends and family about this for years. How did it work out? I tried the same too, but it was falling into deaf years. Most common response. "Sean beta (means son in hindi). You are being excessively paranoid. Facebook is a closed community, and I only share info with friends and family, so don't worry."

Nit: "falling on deaf ears" I will concede to typo/autocorrect, but wanted to make the comment in case someone reads your comment and assumes the phrase correct.

haha. Yes it was a typo/autocorrect. lol. thanks.

Re: The Secret Agenda of a Facebook Quiz

#105
post #57
post #56

And yet for all their magic, they were just as wrong about the outcome of the election: You might think from a casual reading of the Cambridge Analytica press release that they predicted the outcome of the election. They did not. A company spokesman called reporters before election day to say that Trump had only a 20 per cent chance of winning. Source: http://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/12/the-british-data-cruncher...

I'm not sure I get this logic. If I told someone they had a 16.6% chance of rolling a die and getting a 6, and then they proceed to roll the die and get a 6, would you laugh and tell me that I was wrong?

Well, the model at least does not maximize likelihood

Re: The Secret Agenda of a Facebook Quiz

#106
post #35
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain how an OCEAN score helps do that? Because I have yet to be convinced that knowing how open, agreeable, etc. someone translates into manipulation and the article did not even attempt to explain that, it just said this has some vague relation to Trump & Brexit and left us to assume it was a magic X factor.

It was pretty clear to me: "Mr. Trump’s digital team used [individually targeted] posts to serve different ads to different potential voters, aiming to push the exact right buttons. [...] A pro-gun voter whose Ocean score ranks him high on neuroticism could see storm clouds and a threat: The Democrat wants to take his guns away. A separate pro-gun voter deemed agreeable and introverted might see an ad emphasizing tra…

So the danger here is that they might find something they agree with Trump on?

Re: The Secret Agenda of a Facebook Quiz

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially quizzes like "where was your first job?" or "what's your favorite movie?" all sounded like phishing for security question answers.

Just got an evil idea.. You can target on fb and Google by email lists. You create some stupid web app with questions and promise something in return, a prize, or make it worthwhile to play and target them with all the security questions email accounts or whatever might ask. Could be that this is being done for phising already if the victims are being targeted specifically and don't have 2fa.

I've been seeing a lot more articles blocked by "surveys" these days. Normally there's a skip option. The mirror group of sites are especially bad for this.

Re: The Secret Agenda of a Facebook Quiz

#108
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think everybody agrees that something went wrong and many people think that something should be done (although I personally think that medias inability to interpret and report on polling errors and uncertainty did greatly exasperate the situation). I just haven't seen any good articles making a strong argument about what went wrong and how to fix it

I don’t know, I’m under the impression that people here think that winning with a 20% predicted chance of winning isn’t indicative of anything wrong with the polls, because it’s like predicting the outcome of a die, and therefore nothing should be done at all. This false analogy is precisely what I’m trying to disprove. I agree that there are currently no strong arguments about what were wrong and how to fix it, but…

You're conflating the polls with the predictive models. The polls never said Trump had a 20% chance of winning because the is not how polls work.

There where a dozen or so models which took the polls as input (some added other inputs as well) and produced a probability of a candidate winning. Some of those models where garbage (Huffington post I had Trump at ~1.5-2%) and some where pretty good (fivethirtyeight had Trump at ~30% and trending upwards). The question about how you should interpret these numbers is a more open one. What does it mean to give numeric probabilities to events which are completely unique and will only occur once (cue discussion of Bayesian vs Frequentist inference here).

Admittedly the question about if the model was right or wrong is difficult to disentangle from the question about bad polling. No model can work correctly if you feed it garbage data. The only criticism you could make is that they should have been even more critical of data they where getting from certain polls than they where.

Now as to was there something wrong with the polls? Obviously. But the interesting question is what went wrong. They where pretty good at forecasting the national popular vote, while at the same time getting certain mid-western swing states dramatically wrong. So there is obviously something in their methodology which seems to works fine when looking at the country but fails when looking at certain states.

But like you I look forward to seeing more detailed investigations coming out in the next few month.

Re: The Secret Agenda of a Facebook Quiz

#109
> In this election, dark posts were used to try to suppress the African-American vote. According to Bloomberg, the Trump campaign sent ads...

Really? Sending ads is suppressing the vote of certain people? Like the soviet union suppressed dissenters by sending them to the gulag?

I don't think so. But I think the New York Times has a secret agenda of its own, I just don't know what it is. Portraying the election as somehow "unfair" could result in civil unrest, who could possibly want that?

Re: The Secret Agenda of a Facebook Quiz

#110
post #106
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was pretty clear to me: "Mr. Trump’s digital team used [individually targeted] posts to serve different ads to different potential voters, aiming to push the exact right buttons. [...] A pro-gun voter whose Ocean score ranks him high on neuroticism could see storm clouds and a threat: The Democrat wants to take his guns away. A separate pro-gun voter deemed agreeable and introverted might see an ad emphasizing tra…

So the danger here is that they might find something they agree with Trump on?

I don't know if there is danger, but I find the idea very scary that there is an organization that collects very intimate data on me without my knowledge and uses that to manipulate me. They are not really trying to find points that people agree on with Trump. They are trying to create a strong emotional image that works with the person in question and connect it to Trump.
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