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Labour HQ used Facebook ads to deceive Jeremy Corbyn during election campaign

thetimes.co.uk

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Re: Labour HQ used Facebook ads to deceive Jeremy Corbyn during election campaign

#121

Post by dibstern »

contravariant wrote: post #118
rankam wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if you are advertising to raise money/awareness for the poor/in-need? Is that unethical/immoral?

If you were to ask Kant, yes. Assuming he'd agree that advertising was immoral, which he arguably would as advertising manipulates people in a way that might not be in their best interests, thereby using them as means and not as ends in and of themselves. It's an interesting case though as merely informing people is not immoral, far from it, you have a moral duty to spread information that you think would help others…

You’re just arguing from Kant’s authority here. In my view (and in the views of many others, including many renowned philosophers and many important legal systems) Kant’s views are deeply flawed (anyone can argue from some authority). But this is my view because there are many situations in which otherwise ‘bad’ actions may be easily justified. Sure, ethics is currently a matter of opinion, but I think the fact that some opinions on ethics are more easily lambasted than others suggests that their quality differs. And yours is certainly a minority opinion, a good thing in my view.

Re: Labour HQ used Facebook ads to deceive Jeremy Corbyn during election campaign

#122

Post by [deleted] »

bumholio wrote: post #103
evrydayhustling wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And presumably they took the larger sum the 5k came from and spent it on something even less authorized!

I would expect it's easy to make the case of misappropriation when directing the money to an unauthorized advertising campaign; or to an authorized campaign, but for a different, unauthorized product. It's a lot harder to make that case here, with campaigns using unexpected copywritting and targeting, both of which were at the liberty of the people running the campaigns. Selecting those was literally their job and gi…

[deleted]

Re: Labour HQ used Facebook ads to deceive Jeremy Corbyn during election campaign

#123

Post by yamakadi »

notahacker wrote: post #74
y4mi wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The goal is the problem. The leaders of the corporations try to convince you to waste your money or time. This time the goal was to discredit someone.

The goal was to satisfy the boss that suggestions they didn't think would work were being carried out whilst spending the bulk of their ad budget on things they thought would work out. It's far closer to the case where workers send a board they think is clueless a link to some boilerplate code as the requested "blockchain" whilst continuing to implement the Postgres solution they're pretty convinced will work.

Political parties are not companies though. The workers in your example will eventually be held responsible if their preferred solution fails even though they might not get the credit if it succeeds. In Corbyn’s case, as the Labour leader, he has to stand behind the messages disseminated under his leadership with his name. Any positive impact on votes by the wider campaign will likely result in voter deception, since Corbyn will believe his message is what worked.

The most worrisome issue here is that Corbyn’s goals don’t align with his subordinates, yes, but deceiving a political leader isn’t just about that leader but the voters as well.

Re: Labour HQ used Facebook ads to deceive Jeremy Corbyn during election campaign

#124

Post by djrogers »

pasbesoin wrote: post #57
wpietri wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Switching off microtargeting is a really interesting idea. I'd also love to see more disclosure. At least, "Why am I seeing this?" and "Who else is seeing this?" reports. But hopefully a full public dump of who's pushing what messages to whom.

This is also something that lends itself to regulation. You can determine/define a minimum group size, and regulation that prohibits finer-grained targeting. This is something that happens in many other fields, for example to prevent insurance policies from becoming individualized cost-spreading (with front-loading) plus profit-margin. (Or, should be happening. And this is one of the battles around regulation. When p…

> This is also something that lends itself to regulation.

That may be the case in many countries, but in the US, the idea of restricting political speech is nearly universally prohibited. Looking at the history of related Supreme Court cases, I sincerely doubt a law like that would stand.

Re: Labour HQ used Facebook ads to deceive Jeremy Corbyn during election campaign

#125

Post by ascorbic »

TillE wrote: post #65
hellllllllooo wrote: post #7

Wow. We've seen people microtarget leaders and CEOs with ads on Facebook to get a job. http://twicsy-blog.tumblr.com/post/174063770074/how-i-target... This is a case where microtargeting the boss hopefully cost them their job. This is completely unethical.

I would assume it's also possibly illegal? They took 5000 pounds and spent it in a way that was clearly unauthorized. Seems like misappropriation to me.

The £5000 was part of a much larger sum allocated for targeted Facebook ads, and they had authority to place these ads. What they did was certainly dishonest and should cost them their job, but it's hardly illegal to use the wrong targeting rules.

Re: Labour HQ used Facebook ads to deceive Jeremy Corbyn during election campaign

#126

Post by ascorbic »

pertymcpert wrote: post #71
Rjevski wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they raised that limit recently, but again nothing prevents you from creating lots of fake profiles just to get past that limit, then targeting all those profiles + the real user you want to target.

Wait, what? You can target someone using their email address?

I believe that the majority of political microtargeting uses custom audiences. It's the way they assemble these lists that is really dodgy, and is the thing Cambridge Analytica is in trouble for.

Re: Labour HQ used Facebook ads to deceive Jeremy Corbyn during election campaign

#127

Post by ascorbic »

NeedMoreTea wrote: post #41

I'm fascinated to see the apparently limitless efforts that both the media and his own party went to in order to brand Corbyn as an extreme and dangerous left winger and undermine his progress. His policies were comparable to, and sometimes to the right of, those of the SDP. The SDP being the right of the Labour party who split in the 1980s and later merged with the Liberals to give today's LibDems. He was more of th…

This article is the exact opposite of what you're claiming. Labour HQ was trying to make him appear less left wing than he is, by refusing to run the more extreme ads that he was demanding.

Re: Labour HQ used Facebook ads to deceive Jeremy Corbyn during election campaign

#128

Post by ascorbic »

PunchTornado wrote: post #79

I'm confused. Jeremy Corbyn could have clicked on the button "why do I see this ad" and find out he was targeted.

He'd see that he was targeted as part of a custom audience, which is exactly what he'd expect, as I'd assume that that's what most of the Labour Party ads used.

Re: Labour HQ used Facebook ads to deceive Jeremy Corbyn during election campaign

#129

Post by Nadya »

rankam wrote: post #104
andrepd wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point exactly. Advertising is unethical/immoral, plain and simple.

What if you are advertising to raise money/awareness for the poor/in-need? Is that unethical/immoral?

Depending how the advertising is done - yes. Many campaigns that advertise for what are sometimes great causes rely heavily on emotional manipulation in their advertisements. Try watching just 10 seconds of this ad and tell me it isn't meant to be emotionally manipulative [0]. Or this other UNICEF advertisement [1] which is amazingly well made - but also very emotionally manipulative.

In my eyes - the only morally decent advertisement are advertisements that are solely education of a product or service you may need exists. Such as a boring infomercial without the manipulative sense of urgency "buy now and receive blah blah blah". But because these ads aren't manipulative of the human psyche, they would be terrible at driving sales to the product/service especially when competing with advertisements that are manipulative. Which is why nobody makes ads like that - they all rely on manipulation.

Advertisements, for centuries, have been a competition to see who is best at manipulating the human psyche - and I find that repugnant and immoral no matter the reason for doing so. Many advertisements today aren't to improve your life, but to fix flaws that don't actually exist but the company needs you to think they do exist so that you'll buy their "solution" to the often non-existent or heavily exaggerated problem. The best companies do this in subtle ways that many people don't realize. Memorable jingles, catchy slogans, smiling, happy, attractive people.

What are you waiting for? Choose happiness [2]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEtYsKCWnME

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEtI-MzRwkM

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1veWbLpGa78

Re: Labour HQ used Facebook ads to deceive Jeremy Corbyn during election campaign

#130

Post by NeedMoreTea »

notahacker wrote: post #117
NeedMoreTea wrote: post #41

I'm fascinated to see the apparently limitless efforts that both the media and his own party went to in order to brand Corbyn as an extreme and dangerous left winger and undermine his progress. His policies were comparable to, and sometimes to the right of, those of the SDP. The SDP being the right of the Labour party who split in the 1980s and later merged with the Liberals to give today's LibDems. He was more of th…

Corbyn branded himself as a radical leftwinger for most of his career, including when it suited him during his leadership campaign. Nobody remotely familiar with Corbyn would attempt to characterise his views as "fringe in his youth " or compare him with Blunkett unless they were being deliberately disingenuous. We're talking about someone with a lifelong dedication to "anti-imperialist" foreign policy causes who cou…

Always an anti-imperialist and pacifist; but neither exactly unusual views on the left of centre.

That he met with Hamas is no different to his meetings with Adams and others of Sinn Fein years before. Both seem consistent with seeking peace. I could easily classify it as naive and unlikely to achieve much outside of government.

Then again, considering both Major era Tories and Blair era Labour including Mo Mowlam met Sinn Fein regularly and that ultimately led to the Good Friday Agreement, who knows if those meetings helped any.

No peace will come to Palestine without all parties reaching agreement and some resolution of Israel's illegal occupation and settlements. That has to start with someone meeting Hamas and Israel - though I doubt he could make a difference. I'm not sure I call the stop the war coalition a tiny fringe audience though.

Blunkett was far out on the loony left with Derek Hatton's Militant Liverpool. That Blunkett managed to reinvent himself as a right-wing Tory the moment he got a ministry perhaps shows that he didn't mellow through the years as go so far left as to reappear on the right. He's remained well to the right since leaving politics. I don't see anything disingenuous about the comparison or that his views are somewhat different now to then.

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