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Google, Facebook may have to reveal deepest secrets

politico.com

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Re: Google, Facebook may have to reveal deepest secrets

#31

Post by blatherard »

mc32 wrote: post #24
askvictor wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't dismiss a (even much) smaller amount; if properly targeted it can be a lot more effective than the crop dusting approach that traditional advertising takes.

That's ridiculous. There is no way that a crack Russian/Ukranian team understand or have better info on the American public than American "pundits" and campaign professionals. Why couldn't Bernie buy 200k of highly targeted ads and beat Hillary or why couldn't a very well connected Hillary (who has good connections to Russia as well) not buy highly targeted and effective ads? I don't buy that narrative. There is no w…

One of the questions being investigated is how such targeting might have been achieved. There just happened to be a data operation run by Jared Kushner, who is at the center of Mueller's investigation.

Re: Google, Facebook may have to reveal deepest secrets

#32

Post by adventured »

mc32 wrote: post #24
askvictor wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't dismiss a (even much) smaller amount; if properly targeted it can be a lot more effective than the crop dusting approach that traditional advertising takes.

That's ridiculous. There is no way that a crack Russian/Ukranian team understand or have better info on the American public than American "pundits" and campaign professionals. Why couldn't Bernie buy 200k of highly targeted ads and beat Hillary or why couldn't a very well connected Hillary (who has good connections to Russia as well) not buy highly targeted and effective ads? I don't buy that narrative. There is no w…

Sure, it's a fake prop to enable tighter political regulations online. The entire thing is a sham that Facebook and Google are gleefully willingly going along with. There is a long, disgusting history of powerful corporations in the US working with politicians to achieve mutually beneficial goals that relate to carving up the economic or political spheres.

The sums are laughably trivial, precisely because anything larger would be too difficult to set the fraud up for (anything that could be considered business significant, millions of dollars, would be too easy to tightly audit; plus the smaller sums play to the angle that it's easy for it to get lost in the overall, so the company doesn't look too extremely negligent; no doubt that was part of the deal Facebook and Google made in helping with the setup).

Re: Google, Facebook may have to reveal deepest secrets

#33

Post by joshuamorton »

rtpg wrote: post #19
pm90 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every major country does this, every election, to every other major country. It's something we live with and I don't get the overreaction. Please don't normalize this kind of behavior. Every country does not do "this". There is no major news agency supported directly by US Federal Funds, except perhaps NPR, but that has been openly critical of the US all the time. And that is perhaps the test of truly independent n…

Pedantic, but Voice of America is basically a US "propaganda" outfit. But a lot of countries do not really have this. RT is totally at a different scale. It's clearly being used as a political outfit. Other state-owned media in many countries have rules about editorial independence. RT clearly does not.

>Voice of America

Anecdotally, I've literally never heard of this before.

Re: Google, Facebook may have to reveal deepest secrets

#34

Post by seventytwo »

mc32 wrote: post #2

$1.5 billion was spent in the federal election season. 100k was bought by Russian interests and were questioning those 100k when we spend much more destabilizing other governments we oppose. Still, we should look into why a campaign season wastes 1.5 billion on one contest and no one bats an eye, or some do a little but the media couldn't care less. It's one of their cash cows.

$100k is only what's been proven so far. I highly doubt that's the entirety of the Russian influence campaign...

Re: Google, Facebook may have to reveal deepest secrets

#35

Post by joshuamorton »

sib wrote: post #21
pm90 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fraction of income that goes into research is not that large for the companies that you mention. Lets remember that these are not traditional monopolies, in the sense of Standard Oil. They are much worse, as they are so embedded in the lives of people today. Their status as monopolies will be tolerated by society only as far as they don't exhibit anti-competitive practices.

Top spending by US companies on R&D (latest fiscal year): Amazon: $16.1B Alphabet: $13.9B Intel: $12.7B Microsoft: $12.3B Apple: $10.0B For most of these companies, they are spending more than their income on R&D (but less than revenue, of course.) (Recode/FactSet data)

Revenue numbers for comparison:

Amazon: 136B

Alphabet: 90B

Intel: 60B

Microsoft: 90B

Apple: 214B

----------------

And Gross Income:

Amazon: 58B

Alphabet: 55B

Intel: 36B

Microsoft: 55B

Apple: 83B

Re: Google, Facebook may have to reveal deepest secrets

#36

Post by mc32 »

seventytwo wrote: post #34
mc32 wrote: post #2

$1.5 billion was spent in the federal election season. 100k was bought by Russian interests and were questioning those 100k when we spend much more destabilizing other governments we oppose. Still, we should look into why a campaign season wastes 1.5 billion on one contest and no one bats an eye, or some do a little but the media couldn't care less. It's one of their cash cows.

$100k is only what's been proven so far. I highly doubt that's the entirety of the Russian influence campaign...

Then why are the likes of P&G rethinking their digital ads?

You know, even if the amount were $10 million, in the face of over $1 Billion, it's still peanuts.

If it were that easy, we'd be toppling regimes all over the world for pennies on the dollar but we're not because that's dreamland stuff.

Re: Google, Facebook may have to reveal deepest secrets

#37

Post by tw04 »

zeep wrote: post #9
alehul wrote: post #6

It was apparently $100k spent by RT to promote news stories. Why is it so unusual for a news company to spend money promoting news stories on social media sites? This is nothing out of the ordinary (including if a government did try small actions to impact an election), and yet it has become such an intense witch hunt during the 2016 election.

They are just overdoing it with this Russian witch hunt, it will end up costing them the election again if they keep up with it...

Who is "they"? If this isn't a bipartisan issue, that's a travesty and a mockery of our democracy. Another nation interfering in our elections shouldnt be a partisan issue.

Re: Google, Facebook may have to reveal deepest secrets

#38

Post by dmach »

blatherard wrote: post #31
mc32 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's ridiculous. There is no way that a crack Russian/Ukranian team understand or have better info on the American public than American "pundits" and campaign professionals. Why couldn't Bernie buy 200k of highly targeted ads and beat Hillary or why couldn't a very well connected Hillary (who has good connections to Russia as well) not buy highly targeted and effective ads? I don't buy that narrative. There is no w…

One of the questions being investigated is how such targeting might have been achieved. There just happened to be a data operation run by Jared Kushner, who is at the center of Mueller's investigation.

I also like to direct people to the following https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/07/the-great... Also "no way a rag-tag team beats.." is straight from the plot of the movie Moneyball which is what we're talking about here. Also no-one is talking about GDPR which could stop this (please see below).

Re: Google, Facebook may have to reveal deepest secrets

#39

Post by Caveman_Coder »

tw04 wrote: post #37
zeep wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are just overdoing it with this Russian witch hunt, it will end up costing them the election again if they keep up with it...

Who is "they"? If this isn't a bipartisan issue, that's a travesty and a mockery of our democracy. Another nation interfering in our elections shouldnt be a partisan issue.

> "Another nation interfering in our elections shouldnt be a partisan issue."

When you say "interfering," are you talking about buying ads?

Re: Google, Facebook may have to reveal deepest secrets

#40

Post by noncoml »

sabalaba wrote: post #10
noncoml wrote: post #3

FB, Amazon and Google have to be split up. It is not in the interest of the society or safe to have such huge companies with such huge power. For Google at the very least the search engine has to become a separate independent entity with restrictions on how and what information is exchanges with the rest.

Many of the valuable projects that we get from FB (AI Research), Amazon (Echo, Kindle, etc.), Google (Brain, Waymo, GMail, Android, etc.), are due to their strong market position and a product that throws off cash. They have this market position because they are the best at what they do. These companies don't have monopolies because of government mandate, they have them because they make the best products. It's frigh…

So much power concentrated in a single entity cannot be good for democracy in the long run.

For example look at the web. Google has pretty much free pass to crawl and index any website, while smaller players get blacklisted and blocked immediately. Paywalled websites open their door if the link comes from Facebook. If you get black listed by gmail, your emails have no chance of reaching user’s inboxes. And the list goes on.

In the same way the ancient Athenians used to exile citizens who were getting too powerful, it’s a good idea to split up companies that become too powerful. Even if they haven’t violated any laws.

I don’t think that any research gap will left unfilled by smaller startups if they get split up.

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