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Facebook Security Chief Said to Leave After Clashes Over Disinformation

nytimes.com

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Re: Facebook Security Chief Said to Leave After Clashes Over Disinformation

#231

Post by traek »

gdulli wrote: post #14
minimaxir wrote: post #3

Stamos had been actively engaging with security researchers on Twitter over the past few days about CA with heated discussions: > I have deleted my Tweets on Cambridge Analytica, not because they were factually incorrect but because I should have done a better job weighing in. https://twitter.com/alexstamos/status/975069709140877312 Archive of those deleted tweets: https://twitter.com/aprilaser/status/975078309930311…

I can easily see how FB wants to throw CA under the bus and make it look like data theft while the truth FB wants to draw attention away from is that this is the system working as intended. Or if not technically "intended" then well within the boundaries of what FB is willing to tolerate as long as it's making them money.

It’s obviously not within the boundaries of what Facebook was willing to tolerate, given that they changed how the APIs worked 3 years ago to prevent this behavior.

Re: Facebook Security Chief Said to Leave After Clashes Over Disinformation

#232

Post by UncleEntity »

CiPHPerCoder wrote: post #199
RpFLCL wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This fact has me more confused than anything. What did most people think Facebook was doing... Keeping all the data locked away an never letting anyone make use of it? The interest in that data by political entities should have been especially obvious. Additionally, this information about Cambridge Analytica came out months ago. I remember first hearing about it on a podcast that was mostly focused on the personality…

> Additionally, this information about Cambridge Analytica came out months ago. Minor nit: Years ago. The name Cambridge Analytica was being circulated in hacker circles since at least mid-2016. Thus far, the only new revelation was the Channel 4 reporting [1]. Security nerds have been complaining about Facebook's business model for years and it fell upon deaf ears. Suddenly, the public gives a shit and I don't under…

> Suddenly, the public gives a shit and I don't understand what changed.

Not the public per se but the media suddenly cares.

My guess it's the runup to the US midterm elections, it's never too early to start the mudslinging...

Re: Facebook Security Chief Said to Leave After Clashes Over Disinformation

#233

Post by swebs »

opportune wrote: post #214
ekianjo wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Propaganda is not received in the same way. Nothing new here, seriously. Propaganda from both sides before elections has existed for as long as there were political debates and political campaigns. The fact that we have now systems to make Propaganda more targeted may make it more effective than before, but that's all. In the end, believing or not in Propaganda is the individual's responsibility.

I highly disagree. It's easier to simply disallow veiled political advertisements (propaganda) for both platforms and propagandists. Nobody has a "right" to spread propaganda, just like nobody has a right to defraud people simply because they aren't able to spot a scam

>Nobody has a "right" to spread propaganda

It's literally the first amendment.

Re: Facebook Security Chief Said to Leave After Clashes Over Disinformation

#234

Post by dictum »

hueving wrote: post #221

>who started his campaign on the idea that the overwhelming majority of Mexican-Americans were murderers and rapists. This is blatantly false. Where did you get this idea and why doesn't it raise a red flag for being so rediculous when you repeat it?

"When do we beat Mexico at the border? They’re laughing at us, at our stupidity. And now they are beating us economically. They are not our friend, believe me. But they’re killing us economically.

The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems.

Thank you. It’s true, and these are the best and the finest. When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people."

Some (qualified with the half-hearted I assume) is pretty much the opposite of the overwhelming majority.

http://time.com/3923128/donald-trump-announcement-speech/

Re: Facebook Security Chief Said to Leave After Clashes Over Disinformation

#235

Post by opportune »

swebs wrote: post #233
opportune wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I highly disagree. It's easier to simply disallow veiled political advertisements (propaganda) for both platforms and propagandists. Nobody has a "right" to spread propaganda, just like nobody has a right to defraud people simply because they aren't able to spot a scam

>Nobody has a "right" to spread propaganda It's literally the first amendment.

There's a difference between me telling you my opinion on an issue and me knowingly spreading false information at a mass scale for personal gain. I think that specifically (in my layman's interpretation of law) does not fall under the first amendment's interpretation of allowing freedom of expression since the expression is not genuine, in the same way that fraud is not genuine. You would not be prosecuted for fraud for unwittingly spreading false information, but you would be for doing so wittingly and with incentive for making money

Re: Facebook Security Chief Said to Leave After Clashes Over Disinformation

#236

Post by TAForObvReasons »

dpwm wrote: post #228
TAForObvReasons wrote: post #206

People have been openly complaining about sexual impropriety in Hollywood for decades. There were comedic references to Harvey Weinstein [1] and Kevin Spacey [2] in shows like 30 Rock and Family Guy. Suddenly people started caring. What changed was the cultural moment of the 2016 election. Specifically with Cambridge Analytica and Facebook, the Mueller investigation may have taken a turn towards them in recent months…

There's also the fact that we now have two people telling mutually exclusive versions of the truth: the whistleblower and the CEO. At most one of these two people can be correct. At least one of them must be wrong. If the whistleblower is correct then the CEO has lied to a parliamentary select committee in the UK. Now that the CEO appears to have been marketing some of the things that CA and its partners (possibly SC…

Donald Trump is a cartoon-villain figure of sorts -- Biff Tannen from Back to the Future was based on Trump.

Re: Facebook Security Chief Said to Leave After Clashes Over Disinformation

#237

Post by Spooky23 »

oh_sigh wrote: post #126
jstalin wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who remembers how the Obama campaign's social media analytics and strategy were breathlessly praised ?

Sure do. This kind of double speak is rampant. One that bubbles to the top of my head is that when some people were targeted for anti-HRC messages(I think specifically it was Haitian Americans on the gulf coast), then that was labeled as "voter suppression", but targeting likely voters for Trump and spreading negative information about him, say the access Hollywood tapes, is "informing the voters"

There’s a difference between implying that a racial/ethnic group will get hassled or deported, etc due to their race and saying that Trump said douchey things in an interview.

Voter suppression is a term of art that means something. Democrats generally don’t engage in it because more people voting usually translates to more people voting democrat.

Re: Facebook Security Chief Said to Leave After Clashes Over Disinformation

#238

Post by nullbyte »

oflannabhra wrote: post #170

My greatest hope with all of the noise surrounding this, is that the engineers and employees at Facebook realize that Facebook and Zuckerberg’s vision does not line up with reality. Zuckerberg believes that Facebook will connect people and change the fabric of society and communities for good in a way that was heretofore impossible. Between Facebook’s political issues and the happiness-depressing effects of its use,…

> "heretofore"

Re: Facebook Security Chief Said to Leave After Clashes Over Disinformation

#240

Post by Spooky23 »

jdminhbg wrote: post #147
danso wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a Twitter thread by someone who worked on Obama's campaign talking about her firm's use of Facebook data. It was tweeted by Julian Assange so I'm assuming it's one of the more damning examples of the Obama campaign using social media data: https://twitter.com/cld276/status/975564499297226752 https://twitter.com/cld276/status/975568130117459975 This person asserts that people from Facebook gave them their bless…

> I ran the Obama 2008 data-driven microtargeting team. How dare you! We didn’t steal private Facebook profile data from voters under false pretenses. OFA voluntarily solicited opinions of hundreds of thousands of voters. We didn’t commit theft to do our groundbreaking work. But isn't the bigger problem sucking up the entire social graph from a small seed of users, not how those users signed up in the first place? If…

Really?

You don’t see “Sign up for this quiz to find out your true personality” as different than “sign up to support change and spread the word about Barack Obama”?

Facebook is a cesspool, but shady onboarding tactics makes a far more dangerous cesspool.

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