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How Cambridge Analytica’s Facebook targeting model really worked

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Re: How Cambridge Analytica’s Facebook targeting model really worked

#201

Post by spitfire »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #97
spitfire wrote: post #35

When talk about CA first emerged on HN before the election some posters found the original papers referred to. They were looking at pictures in the story and zoomed in to find the titles. I cannot find those posts for the life of me again. Not suggesting anything nefarious here, I just can't find them. Does anyone have a link to those early conversations or make copies of the papers? I made copies earlier but deleted…

Here are some leads: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14486365 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14393991 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14330547 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14284502 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13939814 And the query: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=mercer&sort=byPopularity&prefi...

No none of those are it. I believe it was before the elction that the article came out. There was a picture of someone reading the paper CA was supposedly based upon in the article. Someone zoomed in and found the paper.

I'll keep looking.

Re: How Cambridge Analytica’s Facebook targeting model really worked

#202

Post by dmix »

fjsolwmv wrote: post #197
dmix wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope... it was a Reddit self-post (incl. people who put together the viral compilation video of her joke 'borrowing', breaking down why she's no longer as popular, and analyzing Netflix's timing and stated rationale). I'm curious why you brought up Breitbart? I just googled it and found a ton of other (non-political/right-wing) sites which drew the same exact conclusion between Schumer and the ending of 5 star review…

Outside of the reddit echo chamber, some people like Schumer, some don't, and most don't care.

Then I guess those 5-star ratings must have been some Trump supporter conspiracy brought to you by Breitbart and Steve Bannon then... not the fact she went off a cliff talent-wise when she moved to LA. Which was more than apparent to even non-fans of hers. And I say that as a big fan of her earlier work and as someone totally indifferent to US politics.

Re: How Cambridge Analytica’s Facebook targeting model really worked

#203

Post by alexcnwy »

fjsolwmv wrote: post #194
alexcnwy wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're throwing out buzzwords instead of addressing the response. It's dimensionality reduction. You cannot recover the original object. It's like using a shadow to reconstruct the face of the person casting the shadow. Note this has nothing to do with the expressive power of a deep neural network. You are by definition trying to throw away noisy aspects of the data and generalize a lower dimensional manifold from a…

Your SSN is "dimensionality reduction" over your data. It's still your private data. Same for your race, sexiual orientation, hobbies, etc

I don't think you understand what dimensionality reduction means.

SSN is a lookup key into the raw data. Dimensionality reduction is by definition lossy since it's used in scenarios where: rows of data = n <<< m = number of features

Re: How Cambridge Analytica’s Facebook targeting model really worked

#204

Post by aluhut »

soared wrote: post #190
aluhut wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if you learned something since your blatant failure last week where you gave all that trust into facebooks hands, and praised advertisements, one day before they've blown up.

Oh, I forgot you were the one who called me mind rapist for working in advertising. I'm tempted to do an AMA here so people can hear the perspective of an insider (not to sway opinions necessarily, but to quell some misconceptions and understand how we got here/how things actually work)

Oh come on, you are a failed video platform guy who got kicked out of YC startup school (I got that from your data out there/here scared? Probably not, because we are giving it all away...don't we?). Last week you have already shown that you seem to have no idea what you are talking about and you ran away when you got cornered. One day before my main point (that one about data) became reality for everybody. The day when your ignorance about people giving their data to advertisers has shown their evil outcome. I wanted to hear from you if you feel anything about it now. Regret anything? A slight feeling of guild or ANYTHING there? Did you learn something? It seems not. Now you want to have an AMA. What for? You didn't know that things like canvas exist a week ago. Now you want to tell us about your experience? Or is this just advertising for yourself?

PS. Seeing that the only thing you could remember was the advertising for my post (mind rape), shows that I'm a better advertiser then you.

Re: How Cambridge Analytica’s Facebook targeting model really worked

#205

Post by gleglegle »

katebrooks wrote: post #167

And we can't blame the companies because we agreed our data to be monitored when we installed the apps and granted permissions. Facebook and Google has taken so much of our data and knows more about our behavior than we ourselves. Even if I demand my data to be removed I don't know if they will 'actually' delete it.

Who says we can't blame them?

Re: How Cambridge Analytica’s Facebook targeting model really worked

#206

Post by he0001 »

emodendroket wrote: post #170
pjc50 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can freely infer things just from reading his own Twitter feed. Such as the silence of the Salisbury poisoning vs. the instant reaction to other UK terrorist incidents.

Oh please. His administration threw out 60 ambassadors in response to this very incident, and this is hardly the first instance of them acting against Russian interests. This paranoid Manchurian Candidate stuff needs to die already. https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n01/jackson-lears/what-we-dont-tal...

Except he didn’t. He told russia to replace their 60 diplomats. That’s pretty much ,in relation, the equivalent of a threat to bitch slap you.

Re: How Cambridge Analytica’s Facebook targeting model really worked

#207

Post by emodendroket »

he0001 wrote: post #206
emodendroket wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh please. His administration threw out 60 ambassadors in response to this very incident, and this is hardly the first instance of them acting against Russian interests. This paranoid Manchurian Candidate stuff needs to die already. https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n01/jackson-lears/what-we-dont-tal...

Except he didn’t. He told russia to replace their 60 diplomats. That’s pretty much ,in relation, the equivalent of a threat to bitch slap you.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/26/world/europe/trump-russia...

> Trump and Western Allies Expel Scores of Russians in Sweeping Rebuke Over U.K. Poisoning

> WASHINGTON — President Trump ordered the expulsion of 60 Russians from the United States on Monday, adding to a growing cascade of similar actions taken by western allies in response to Russia’s alleged poisoning of a former Russian spy in Britain.

> [...]

> On March 15, the Trump administration imposed sanctions on a series of Russian organizations and individuals for interference in the 2016 presidential election and other “malicious cyberattacks,” its most significant action against Moscow until Monday.

> [...]

> Mr. Trump has said that, despite its denials, Russia was likely behind it. “It looks like it,” he told reporters in the Oval Office on March 15, adding that he had spoken with Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain.

You have to wonder how far Trump has to go before something he does is considered hostile to Russia. Does he have to nuke Saint Petersburg?

Re: How Cambridge Analytica’s Facebook targeting model really worked

#208

Post by codezero »

godelski wrote: post #52
codezero wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying all of Netflix suggestions are getting worse? How are you measuring that? Or are you saying your netflix suggestions are getting worse? Mine are pretty good and have held steady for a while, at least in terms of my own preferences, though I also am probably using it a little less as I've got Prime and Hulu now as well, so there's probably less times I'm randomly searching through Netflix and finding no…

I can only tell you what my personal experience is. I laid it out more in another comment under rjurney's reply. I'll also add that I am more frequently searching for 15 minutes then switching to another service. I used to find a movie to watch in 5 minutes. I am a big movie person too, and will watch most things. But I am also more aware that if I watch one show that is just "meh", then I am going to be bombarded wi…

It is surprising how bad the recommendations can be sometimes though – I avoid watching comedy specials on Netflix because if I watch one, then suddenly I must want to watch every single comedian ever. It's reminiscent of buying something on amazon, then seeing tons of retargeting ads for the same thing. Oh well, like I said, in general, diversifying my streaming sources has helped a lot.

Re: How Cambridge Analytica’s Facebook targeting model really worked

#209

Post by he0001 »

emodendroket wrote: post #207
he0001 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except he didn’t. He told russia to replace their 60 diplomats. That’s pretty much ,in relation, the equivalent of a threat to bitch slap you.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/26/world/europe/trump-russia... > Trump and Western Allies Expel Scores of Russians in Sweeping Rebuke Over U.K. Poisoning > WASHINGTON — President Trump ordered the expulsion of 60 Russians from the United States on Monday, adding to a growing cascade of similar actions taken by western allies in response to Russia’s alleged poisoning of a former Russian spy in Britain. > [...] > On M…

https://twitter.com/OrenDorell/status/979764266646622209

Russian news confirmed it and later us state department.

Russian news https://amp.vesti.ru/doc.html?id=3001089&3001089&3001089=&id...

Business insider https://www.google.se/amp/s/amp.businessinsider.com/theres-a...

Re: How Cambridge Analytica’s Facebook targeting model really worked

#210

Post by stochastic_monk »

rhizome wrote: post #198
stochastic_monk wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do think that the most significant components of a personality will likely be targetable with a relatively low nuclear norm. And, for example, where someone's proclivity on the exploration/exploitation spectrum, if you will, (IE, how strongly do they respond to fear-based messaging) falls is probably quite predictable from a spectrum of likes. Cat pictures may be less informative, but not all of these people clicke…

the most significant components of a personality will likely be targetable with a relatively low nuclear norm. Is this falsifiable? It reads like a tautology to me.

I think it is falsifiable. More precisely, the claim is that the most significant features for psychoanalytic purposes will be contained in the model after training even with low nuclear norm. It’s possible for the most salient features for this purpose to not be in the model. It was unclear the way I first said it.
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