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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

#311

Post by brandall10 »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #217
TAForObvReasons wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bunch of individual scattered movements were under attack at once. Women's movements were crushed by this overt misogynist who bragged about sexual harassment. Minority movements were crushed by the overt racist who started his campaign on the idea that the overwhelming majority of Mexican-Americans were murderers and rapists. Many people believed that America as a whole would reject the regressiveness of Trump. Wh…

What you are saying doesn't really add up. If the environment is really that hostile because Trump was elected, it should not be fostering movements like #MeToo. It should have crushed dissent. A wake up call doesn't lead to something like that. There has to be some positive factor being overlooked.

We're a constitutional republic, not an authoritarian regime regardless of how much current administration wishes otherwise.

Good guys need villains, they need them to have purpose, to have focus. Without that ability to focus catalysts for change never amount to much.

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

#312

Post by mhneu »

colordrops wrote: post #244
8ytecoder wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are always different levels of privacy. Everybody knew Google was "reading" their emails. The understand of that was never that Google will expose your individual email to a company. Similarly people understood that Facebook used the data about them to monetize and advertise to them. I don't think anyone assumed they'd let someone else literally take that data.

> I don't think anyone assumed Everyone who worked at Facebook or on 3rd party integrations knew this for years.

So about 0.1% of the American populace knew that. (Ball park: call Facebook 30k employees. If you want to add a whole lot of digital marketers take that to even as high as 3M. That's still only 1% of the US population.)

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

#313

Post by karmelapple »

chatmasta wrote: post #203
karmelapple wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you define the term breach? Is it fair to use the term breach from the perspective of the user whose data has been acquired? Or is breach only in reference to what the company that collected the data intended to do with it? There’s also seemingly two types of breaches at play: 1. The idea of a security breach, where a company gets “hacked” 2. The idea of a breach of trust, where people had given a company d…

This is the difficult question at the heart of the matter. Certainly I am accustomed to hearing "breach" in the context of a "security breach," in which a third party accesses data without authorization by circumventing technical measures restricting such access. In this case, there was no such security breach. The Facebook API worked as designed, and returned all data according to spec, TOS, and API documentation. T…

Where does a Terms of Service violation fall in all of this? Because CA clearly violated the ToS.

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

#314

Post by MalcontentLout »

CiPHPerCoder wrote: post #207
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…

> Suddenly people started caring. Yes, but why? And why now, rather than years/decades ago? There's another layer to these stories that I'm very interested in.

Now that Facebook is being associated with Russia—and its connection with Trump—it is being thrown into the political froth that predominates the media spotlight right now. Normally, very few people would care about data retention policies, targeted advertising, or twitter bots, but when it is connected to a hotbutton issue it becomes more palatable to pundits and dinner tables alike. There is also the new energy that was culminated in Trump's election, caused by fear and shock by some and by lifting the malaise of seemingly immutable conventions and power structures to most (although that is perceived differently to different groups), as was what propelled Trump into office in the first place. This is why both those that identify as liberal and conservative have become more active than in the past, but I think this is just an uptake in a trend which started long before now. History doesn't happen in a vacuum, that is to say.

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

#315

Post by mhneu »

opportune wrote: post #174
TAForObvReasons wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think culturally we've accepted that political propaganda is different from run-of-the-mill corporate advertisement. Even the words we use are different: few people would call a TV spot "propaganda", even though both seek to influence people to act in a certain way. People understand and accept the concept and execution of advertisement. Propaganda is not received in the same way.

There's also the fact that political propaganda comes in a lot more veiled forms than corporate propaganda. Because it's in a sense natural for us to discuss politics face to face, or at least we recognize that some level of discussion about politics is necessary and good, we're mostly ok with things like celebrities endorsing a candidate. A candidate traveling around the country and speaking to potential voters is p…

I agree the problem is money, and I also agree that bad faith and disinformation are true measures of problematic political communication.

A principle we could rely on is openness. Just disclose who is paying for what. And disclose the ads. If Trump/CA/Russia targeted an ad at you distorting HRC's record, we should know who paid for it. Up until now, political ads - TV, billboards, even direct mail - were discoverable to the American public, so big distortions could be called out (even if they sometimes were not, as with GWB's racist attacks in SC on McCain's adopted kid.)

But the current setup, where Facebook ads are effectively secret, is a big big problem. How do we know the ads were all honest? Let's just have FB release the 2016 ads so we America has time to figure out what to do before 2018.

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

#316

Post by arca_vorago »

phy6 wrote: post #245
arca_vorago wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, do you have a source on that. I would like to see the agreement researchers have to agree to to use fb data. I'm guessing this includes private profile information not public? Or is it a platform level EULA or something like that? I wonder how FB views public scraping. Shades of webcrawlers.

NY Time article "The technique had been developed at Cambridge University’s Psychometrics Center. The center declined to work with Cambridge Analytica, but Aleksandr Kogan, a Russian-American psychology professor at the university, was willing. Dr. Kogan built his own app and in June 2014 began harvesting data for Cambridge Analytica." https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/technology/facebook-cambr...

Thank you.

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

#317

Post by dang »

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?

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16624887 and marked it off-topic.

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

#318

Post by mhneu »

olivermarks wrote: post #84
weirdstuff wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the elephant in the room. U.S. based interests spent billions to influence public opinion here and abroad. But less than $1 million spent by a Russia media organization (to maybe attract viewers?) and some trolls tossed the election? I’m more than skeptical. This is a distraction campaign if here ever was one.

i360 Themis have been far more invasive for far longer in influencing US elections. Why aren't they being investigated and outed by a pitchfork and flaming pikes mob?

Good question, as they are equally undemocratic (they hew to the goals of the billionaires that control the GOP - which is to destroy the gov't to cut taxes on the rich.) To be fair, Obama's team also used data. But right now the threats come from billionaires or foreign powers. i360 should be the next subject of scrutiny. And they as well as think tanks and 'nonprofits' like Jud Watch should disclose who donated each and every dollar.

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

#320

Post by rdtsc »

TAForObvReasons wrote: post #106
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…

I think culturally we've accepted that political propaganda is different from run-of-the-mill corporate advertisement. Even the words we use are different: few people would call a TV spot "propaganda", even though both seek to influence people to act in a certain way. People understand and accept the concept and execution of advertisement. Propaganda is not received in the same way.

> I think culturally we've accepted that political propaganda is different from run-of-the-mill corporate advertisement

I think we want to believe that but hasn't been true for many years. Presidents sell a brand unfortunately, just like large companies do their commercials. With the same psychological and rhetorical tricks.

One of my favorite examples I always bring up is this: http://adage.com/article/moy-2008/obama-wins-ad-age-s-market... notice how with much fanfare everyone was happily handing his campaign the marketing award. Normally that is not awarded to political candidates, it goes to Coke, Pepsi, Apple etc.

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"I honestly look at [Obama's] campaign and I look at it as something that we can all learn from as marketers," said Angus Macaulay, VP-Rodale marketing solutions "To see what he's done, to be able to create a social network and do it in a way where it's created the tools to let people get engaged very easily. It's very easy for people to participate."

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Social network they say? They couldn't mean using Facebook,could they? But, I think they are. An unsurprisingly Obama's campaign used the same methods as CA did:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/business/economy/face...

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Any time people used Facebook’s log-in button to sign on to the campaign’s website, the Obama data scientists were able to access their profile as well as their friends’ information. That allowed them to chart the closeness of people’s relationships and make estimates about which people would be most likely to influence other people in their network to vote.

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> Propaganda is not received in the same way.

That's exactly why it is disguised not to be perceived as blatant propaganda. It works best when it is sneaking its way in via a seemingly unbiased publication, or news story, a comedy skit etc

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