Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Has anything of consequence happened to Meta from 2016? Their stance is just a private company running ads. I worked at Meta on ads from 2013 to 2018. Fundamentally, Cambridge Analytica and their "psychographic profiling" was absolute garbage designed to hide their real business model (getting your opponents caught with hookers and blow). Like, at various times, we tried both using the Big 5 traits and hyper local…
I wasn't necessarily saying that FB single handedly manipulated an entire nation into making huge swings on a national election. But it doesn't need to. When an election is decided by some 6-7 swing states with extremely slim margins, targeting ads to those regions can change the result. A few thousand votes swung would barely register in any mass analysis as effective (nor would it be in any other proper ad campaign…
OK, if this happened in 2016 (which I honestly don't believe) then how come these techniques haven't become standard across all political advertising? This is a small field, and everyone talks to one another (particularly the data people).
Like, FB's systems were essentially incapable of optimising for this kind of thing, you could have spammed reach ads at people I suppose, but those generally (based on experiments i was involved in) don't tend to move in-person metric.
It's worth noting that Clinton didn't campaign in the Mid West in 2016, which again is a much more plausible explanation of why she lost than Trump's team being uniquely effective on FB ads (and if they were, why didn't the Republicans sweep the 2018 midterms and the 2020 Presidential?).
> I'll admit I haven't researched brexit's margins enough to see if that same theory sticks, so I won't comment much further on that example.
It was a million or two votes, so unlikely (no electoral college in UK referendums).
As I noted above, the fact that almost all print media were printing deceptive takes on the EU for twenty years is more likely to be driving the result.
> Now even ignoring all that: I feel the intent is the real damming part, not necessarily the success or lack thereof. As a recent example: Musk's campaign in Germany for the afd party failed overall, but it's still very bad taste for an outside party to try an influence a national election that is not representing them.
This is definitely wrong, but worth noting that the "West" broadly has been running influence operations like this all over the world for many, many years. While I sometimes have agreed with the goals here, I'd argue that this sort of thing is problematic regardless of said goals. (Amusingly, there's some evidence that the most consequential impact of Musk in Germany was the surge in support for Die/Der Linke (apologies I have always sucked at german grammar).
>The ultimate issue in all of this is people ignoring their best interests and falling for lies and misinformation (from all sources), but this chain was focused on media ads, so that's what I discussed.
Yeah, i too would prefer to live in a world where people voted differently, but ultimately the only judge of someone's best interests in a free society is what they themselves believe. And if they get suckered by a charlatan, then hopefully they'll learn from that. I'm not sure any other approach is compatible with democracy over the longer term.