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I'm an ex-Facebook exec: don't believe what they tell you about ads

theguardian.com

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Re: I'm an ex-Facebook exec: don't believe what they tell you about ads

#11

Post by moomin »

Wow, I can't decide if this guy is more morally or intellectually bankrupt. Seriously, "sometimes data behaves unethically"?

Data doesn't do anything. Not even analysis or deep learning does anything. People (or programs written by people) execute decisions on the basis of data. It's still the people being unethical. Big data isn't some magic wand that absolves you of moral responsibility, but it's extremely interesting that at least one marketer at Facebook seems to believe it does.

And that's just one of the many things that manage to be simultaneously offensive and just plain incorrect in what is frankly, a pretty short article.

Re: I'm an ex-Facebook exec: don't believe what they tell you about ads

#12

Post by hkon »

agd wrote: post #2

"And knowing the Facebook sales playbook, I cannot imagine the company would have concocted such a pitch about teenage emotions without the final hook: “and this is how you execute this on the Facebook ads platform”. Why else would they be making the pitch? The question is not whether this can be done. It is whether Facebook should apply a moral filter to these decisions. Let’s assume Facebook does target ads at depr…

Don't worry, it's only the data that is unethical.

Re: I'm an ex-Facebook exec: don't believe what they tell you about ads

#13

Post by Mendenhall »

lucasmullens wrote: post #10
Mendenhall wrote: post #9

Ahh the old "so what" argument. So what if I can target recovering alchoholics with alchohol ads? So what if I target gambling addicts with my gambling platform? So what?

There are alcohol and gambling ads on Facebook? Those two in particular often aren't allowed on ad networks.

That defeats his whole "so what" argument, Because if those 2 matter others do as well.

Re: I'm an ex-Facebook exec: don't believe what they tell you about ads

#14

Post by NumberCruncher »

metastart wrote: post #4

"The fact that Facebook could easily throw the election by selectively showing a Get Out the Vote reminder in certain counties of a swing state, for example, was a running joke." Woah. They're asking to be regulated.

Exactly, like newspapers and TV channels. Oh, they are already in good hands...

Re: I'm an ex-Facebook exec: don't believe what they tell you about ads

#15

Post by lucasmullens »

>Why should those examples of targeting be viewed as any less ethical than, say, ads selling $100 Lululemon yoga pants targeting thirtysomething women in affluent postal codes like San Francisco’s Marina district?

Because one can cause poverty and the other doesn't.

Re: I'm an ex-Facebook exec: don't believe what they tell you about ads

#18

Post by the_common_man »

agd wrote: post #2

"And knowing the Facebook sales playbook, I cannot imagine the company would have concocted such a pitch about teenage emotions without the final hook: “and this is how you execute this on the Facebook ads platform”. Why else would they be making the pitch? The question is not whether this can be done. It is whether Facebook should apply a moral filter to these decisions. Let’s assume Facebook does target ads at depr…

Sorry, but did you learn anything new after reading that quote? Seems like a blinding flash of the obvious...

Re: I'm an ex-Facebook exec: don't believe what they tell you about ads

#19

Post by eridius »

fnbr wrote: post #6
ThrustVectoring wrote: post #3

Advertisers and Facebook don't have to try to target emotionally troubled teens in order to target emotionally troubled teens. All they have to do is have an advertisement that works well on emotionally troubled teens, have sufficiently correlated targeting tools, and run an optimization algorithm like gradient descent. To take a slightly different example: it doesn't matter if Facebook doesn't offer racial targeting…

The main problems they're talking about are PR problems, not ethical problems (if you assume that advertising itself is ethical, which I don't necessarily think is true). Specific types of targeting are then bad because of the optics, not because of their efficacy. Put another way, there's no ethical problem with recommending that people who follow Jay-Z should follow Obama, but there's a PR problem there.

> Put another way, there's no ethical problem with recommending that people who follow Jay-Z should follow Obama, but there's a PR problem there.

I agree with that specific statement, but I would say there is an ethical problem with the similar situation of recommending payday loans to poor people.

The difference is recommending Obama to Jay-Z followers isn't harmful to those followers, but recommending payday loans to poor people is.

Re: I'm an ex-Facebook exec: don't believe what they tell you about ads

#20

Post by apozem »

> Let’s assume Facebook does target ads at depressed teens. My reaction? So what. Sometimes data behaves unethically.

Stop right there. Data has no behavior. You behave unethically. Data informs a decision, but you are making the decision. Take responsibility.

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