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I'm an ex-Facebook exec: don't believe what they tell you about ads

theguardian.com

101–110 of 140 posts

Re: I'm an ex-Facebook exec: don't believe what they tell you about ads

#101
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're an advertising platform, you can choose what sort of products are advertised on it. All of them do. You can, quite reasonably, decline to advertise things that are unethical. For instance, predatory loans. You are choosing not to profit off the misery of others. This is not nearly as complicated as you make it out to be.

Will the target demographics universally and unequivocally benefit when online access to such loans is cut off? Other choices might include an even more predatory local check-cashing place and a guy named Vinnie who seems to own a lot of baseball bats for someone that never plays baseball.

This doesn't 'cut off access'. Last year Google stopped advertising predatory lenders entirely. Targeting ads for predatory lenders at potentially vulnerable people is even worse. Again, this is a pretty straightforward thing, not a complex logic puzzle that requires careful derivation from fundamental axioms.

Re: I'm an ex-Facebook exec: don't believe what they tell you about ads

#102
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is sad that voter participation is a partisan issue in the United States.

The idea was telling only those voters in certain counties (who predictably would vote a certain way) to vote; i.e., a less-blatant version of telling exactly the subset of people who are registered to vote for a given party, to go out and vote. That is a partisan action.

That was what I meant, although I have to agree with the parent that Facebook really should show everyone a get out and vote message.

Re: I'm an ex-Facebook exec: don't believe what they tell you about ads

#103
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea was telling only those voters in certain counties (who predictably would vote a certain way) to vote; i.e., a less-blatant version of telling exactly the subset of people who are registered to vote for a given party, to go out and vote. That is a partisan action.

That was what I meant, although I have to agree with the parent that Facebook really should show everyone a get out and vote message.

If they did it would still be seen as a Democratic-leaning message.

Re: I'm an ex-Facebook exec: don't believe what they tell you about ads

#104
post #95
post #73

A little off-topic, but from the article: > I’ll illustrate with an anecdote from my Facebook days. Someone on the data science team had cooked up a new tool that recommended Facebook Pages users should like. And what did this tool start spitting out? Every ethnic stereotype you can imagine. We killed the tool when it recommended then president Obama if a user had “liked” rapper Jay Z... The author left Facebook in 2…

There have been dozens of page recommender units, which have come and gone.

Thanks for clearing that up!

Re: I'm an ex-Facebook exec: don't believe what they tell you about ads

#105
post #19
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main problems they're talking about are PR problems, not ethical problems (if you assume that advertising itself is ethical, which I don't necessarily think is true). Specific types of targeting are then bad because of the optics, not because of their efficacy. Put another way, there's no ethical problem with recommending that people who follow Jay-Z should follow Obama, but there's a PR problem there.

> Put another way, there's no ethical problem with recommending that people who follow Jay-Z should follow Obama, but there's a PR problem there. I agree with that specific statement, but I would say there is an ethical problem with the similar situation of recommending payday loans to poor people. The difference is recommending Obama to Jay-Z followers isn't harmful to those followers, but recommending payday loans…

I mean, is it any less ethical than recommending that poor people purchase things in general? The point of advertising is to convince people to make purchasing decisions that they wouldn't have otherwise made, which is almost always damaging financially.

To be clear, I'm not arguing that you're wrong- I think that the argument you made applies to advertising in general, and that it's correct.

Re: I'm an ex-Facebook exec: don't believe what they tell you about ads

#106
post #105
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Put another way, there's no ethical problem with recommending that people who follow Jay-Z should follow Obama, but there's a PR problem there. I agree with that specific statement, but I would say there is an ethical problem with the similar situation of recommending payday loans to poor people. The difference is recommending Obama to Jay-Z followers isn't harmful to those followers, but recommending payday loans…

I mean, is it any less ethical than recommending that poor people purchase things in general? The point of advertising is to convince people to make purchasing decisions that they wouldn't have otherwise made, which is almost always damaging financially. To be clear, I'm not arguing that you're wrong- I think that the argument you made applies to advertising in general, and that it's correct.

> The point of advertising is to convince people to make purchasing decisions that they wouldn't have otherwise made, which is almost always damaging financially.

That's not really true. People purchase things because they decide that the benefit is worth the cost. Advertising makes people pick one brand over another when they already plan to buy something, and it helps sway someone's decision when they're not sure if it's worth buying. It also brings their attention to products that they wouldn't otherwise have known about. But this sort of advertising is almost never "damaging financially", unless you think the act of buying something counts as financial damage.

Re: I'm an ex-Facebook exec: don't believe what they tell you about ads

#107
post #94
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

Actually existed for years and made a pile of money, and was only closed down when their entire programmatic stack was shut down (LiveRail, the test DSP, and effectively Atlas). You clearly don't know dick about ad tech.

> You clearly don't know dick about

Would you please stop posting uncivil comments to HN? We ban users who do that repeatedly, and you've done it repeatedly just in this thread.

Re: I'm an ex-Facebook exec: don't believe what they tell you about ads

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was what I meant, although I have to agree with the parent that Facebook really should show everyone a get out and vote message.

If they did it would still be seen as a Democratic-leaning message.

Perhaps, but it'd then just be on the same level as any other broadcast medium that puts out such a message. I presume the more partisan of the cable news channels are still allowed to say "hey everyone, vote!"?

Re: I'm an ex-Facebook exec: don't believe what they tell you about ads

#109
post #11

Wow, I can't decide if this guy is more morally or intellectually bankrupt. Seriously, "sometimes data behaves unethically"? Data doesn't do anything. Not even analysis or deep learning does anything. People (or programs written by people) execute decisions on the basis of data. It's still the people being unethical. Big data isn't some magic wand that absolves you of moral responsibility, but it's extremely interest…

Of course data can behave unethically. For example, data might show that people of a particular race in a particular neighborhood have high concentration of bad credit scores. Though using this information to approve/deny loan applications might be illegal. And when algorithms are run on large datasets, are closed source, and their downstream effects are difficult to measure, then yes data/algorithms can behave uneth…

... Why wouldn't they just use the credit score?

Re: I'm an ex-Facebook exec: don't believe what they tell you about ads

#110

Ahh the old "so what" argument. So what if I can target recovering alchoholics with alchohol ads? So what if I target gambling addicts with my gambling platform? So what?

I think that is part of the mistake he makes. "We do , but we also do how is that different?". It isn't, but the logical conclusion of this isn't that they are both "good", they might also be both morally wrong.
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