81–90 of 163 posts
Watch the mini documentary of the undercover op by channel 4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpbeOCKZFfQ This isn't just data mining, it's straight up misinformation, entrapment, and god knows what else.
Wow, the CEO of the company openly admitted to sending Ukranian hookers to opposition candidates' houses and hotel rooms and recording the interactions...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't disagree with you about at all about the ground truth of American polity. (I have a lot of family that voted for Trump.) From my perspective, the election sent the right message but through a profoundly dangerous messenger. For me, Russia and Cambridge Analytica are not scapegoats: they are other problems that need to be addressed which are not orthogonal to addressing the economic inequalities aggravated by…
It worth remembering though, that this messenger was deliberately picked from the crowd of 16 (!) people during primaries. Voters spoke when they abandoned Kasich, Jeb and the rest. It's not like they had no choice. They had.
This is a scandal, and we should not blur lines here. Facebook engages in surveillance capitalism. Cambridge Analytica engages in Orwellian practices of deliberate and targeted mass manipulation, actively deceiving users from the outset about it's intentions, and using lies as a means to an end. From the Facebook report on the reason CA was suspended: > Like all app developers, Kogan requested and gained access to in…
They're well beyond that. Once upon a time, there was no "news feed." Then they made one, and people were not happy, but at least it was strictly chronological. Then they made it subject to an opaque and ever-changing "news feed algorithm," which makes it possible to control what you see. Those creepy studies a few years ago about emotional manipulation weren't an accident. Facebook is in the Skinner Box business now.
This is a scandal, and we should not blur lines here. Facebook engages in surveillance capitalism. Cambridge Analytica engages in Orwellian practices of deliberate and targeted mass manipulation, actively deceiving users from the outset about it's intentions, and using lies as a means to an end. From the Facebook report on the reason CA was suspended: > Like all app developers, Kogan requested and gained access to in…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find it so hard to believe that everyone at Facebook is just shocked now to learn the realities of what they do. Their naivety and ignorance would have to be off the charts for it to be genuine.
Maybe it's a lot of young people fresh from college and they hear about the big five or whatever, and choose Facebook because they think of it as a social networking company and big, famous, and cool. Just an old guy's opinion - would not want to work there.
Some regulation I'd like to see for social network ads, at least for political ads: - Make all ads publicly viewable along with the targeting demographics. So everybody can see, for example, that a politician is pushing xenophobia to older people. - Some kind of ad "fake news" score associated with a campaign. This one is difficult, but I could imagine a score based on a mixture of "fake news scoring providers" from…
How about simply banning targeted advertisement? It's clearly toxic to society.
Remember when Google was proud of how its ads were targeted so you'd see actual useful things instead of endless shoes and cars? Internet ads really are much better now than in the late 90's.
This whole thing is just a convenient excuse for people to explain how Trump got into office. People uploaded their whole shitty lifes onto Facebook while everyone out there warns you to not do that. Yet people argued that they need a place to connect to their friends and all the other crap that FB-users come up with to explain this shitty move (much like cigarette-addicts). Also it is pretty clear how that data is s…
Those two dtatemts seem to be contradictory.
This is a scandal, and we should not blur lines here. Facebook engages in surveillance capitalism. Cambridge Analytica engages in Orwellian practices of deliberate and targeted mass manipulation, actively deceiving users from the outset about it's intentions, and using lies as a means to an end. From the Facebook report on the reason CA was suspended: > Like all app developers, Kogan requested and gained access to in…
Just because it's new technology doesn't make it bad. Hitler used PA speakers and radio advertisements to win the election. Politicians since then have all done the same. Then there was TV advertising, then Obama's targeted intelligent internet advertising, now this. Are you opposed to all political advertising? In that case, this is not the moment that it became bad. It started, well, with the beginning of human pol…
A wise man once said, "Drain the swamp." It's my civic duty to point out swampiness unabashedly and impartially.
Since CAs behavior, and by extension CAs customers, is inexcusable, swampy human behavior, I will stand against it. In the same way the DNCs actions against Bernie Sanders was inexcusable, the way the DNCs actions against Bernie Sanders was inexcusable, union corruption is inexcusable, corporate negligence is inexcusable, product misrepresentation is inexcusable, bullshit ICOs are inexcusable, authoritarian communism is inexcusable, the same way that history has been full of lying and deceitful politicians, priests, businessmen, lawyers, activists, messiahs I will stand against it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>>However, I'm not convinced what they did was really all that new or interesting. You say that as someone who frequents HN. Collectively we are probably the top 0.2% of the population in terms of technology awareness and know-how, to the point where we probably easily recognize this type of propaganda (then again, maybe not!) and understand how it works. The same cannot be said for the overwhelming majority of the p…
"We're smart enough to not fall for it but the proles stand no chance" doesn't pass the smell test as anecdotal evidence. What they are doing is what marketing people have done for years, only we know from years of data and experience that these "profile and target" ad campaigns are barely above baseline for RoI. The classic one is people who move house are more likely to go on to buy a new car in 12-24 months so the…
RoI is actually irrelevant. The two bigger issues are that this shouldn't be being attempted, and - more importantly in a genuine democracy - it shouldn't even be possible.
This is a scandal, and we should not blur lines here. Facebook engages in surveillance capitalism. Cambridge Analytica engages in Orwellian practices of deliberate and targeted mass manipulation, actively deceiving users from the outset about it's intentions, and using lies as a means to an end. From the Facebook report on the reason CA was suspended: > Like all app developers, Kogan requested and gained access to in…
The rest of your post makes it sound like the former, so I'll assume that's what you meant. In that case, I think you're giving Facebook far too much credit. What you describe in your post re: CA is accurate and scandalous, but I think it's naïve to think Facebook was not only aware and complicit, but rather that they actively encouraged and have essentially based their business on this exact system. Their decision to suspend CA is topical PR spin, an opportunity for them to be momentarily seen as enforcers amongst so many other negative headlines related to Facebook, data and voter manipulation.