We all wear tinfoil hats now • Hacker News Board

Re: We all wear tinfoil hats now

#71

Post by JPKab » Tue, Mar 03, 2020, 3:33 PM UTC

ameister14 wrote: post #59

dangerface wrote: post #52

The op doesn't seem to know the first thing about advertising and is in denial of how it works. Op asks head of facebook advertising if advertising influences people, their response "No companies spend millions on advertising with us because it doesn't work!". > The gullibility of the latter two may have stemmed from wishful thinking: If Brexit and Trump could be traced to the malign influence of a single company The…

>As an ad insider I know first hand that the tactics used by Cambridge Analytica and other agencies work, thats why people pay me to do it. As another ad insider I know first hand that people are willing to pay me to do a ton of things that don't actually work. (They often continue trying to do so after I tell them it doesn't work and it's a bad idea) People and companies pay millions for things that don't work all t…

Thank you. Most advertising does nothing. I'm sick of people lazily assuming that people that don't vote the way they do must have been manipulated. It is a self-defeating idea in the first place.

By the way the Cambridge analytica data was incredibly similar to something that I used working for a democratic campaign in 2014 midterm elections.

Trump and brexit both won with voters due to the fact that we have for years had policies which benefited the financial and managerial classes over the working classes. These policies created a higher aggregate GDP but did so while concentrating it in the hands of the urban and managerial classes. This is a little bit more complicated than just saying they stole the election by manipulating rednecks. Which is why so many people believe it.

I continue to be astonished by how few people in the community of software engineers understand the countries they live in. If you live in London go to northern England and look around. If you live in San Francisco go inland and take a look at what it looks like when a factory shuts down.

Trump doesn't have the answers to these problems, but he was the first politician on the right to admit they exist. Sanders on the left was routinely squashed by the post Clinton DNC, which traded in supporting unions for the professional and managerial classes.

Re: We all wear tinfoil hats now

#72

Post by danmg » Tue, Mar 03, 2020, 3:43 PM UTC

tic_tac wrote: post #43

The idea that targeted political advertising is unreasonably effective to the point of constituting mind control is ridiculous. It assumes people have no independent agency. While advertising can be effective it's definitely not mind control. It's the same story with money on elections. People were and are extremely paranoid about monied interests dominating elections, but we have seen Trump beat Hillary with half he…

They're pretending that this is the case as a form of guerilla marketing for ad tech.

"See how influential these ads can be! Someone in the GRU can pick the president by spending 100k on facebook ads."

It's self-serving like everything else these companies do. So they're willing to go in front of congress and do kabuki theater about how serious their position to influence people is and make guidelines---which they will undoubtedly ignore.

Re: We all wear tinfoil hats now

#73

Post by YinglingLight » Tue, Mar 03, 2020, 3:48 PM UTC

>On November 8th of 2016, half the country learned that everything they believed to be both true and obvious turned out to be wrong. The people who thought Trump had no chance of winning were under the impression they were smart people who understood their country, and politics, and how things work in general. When Trump won, they learned they were wrong. They were so very wrong that they reflexively (because this is how all brains work) rewrote the scripts they were seeing in their minds until it all made sense again. The wrong-about-everything crowd decided that the only way their world made sense, with their egos intact, is that either the Russians helped Trump win or there are far more racists in the country than they imagined, and he is their king. Those were the seeds of the two mass hysterias we witness today.

Re: We all wear tinfoil hats now

#74

Post by crusso » Tue, Mar 03, 2020, 3:48 PM UTC

jfengel wrote: post #70

mech1234 wrote: post #25

I strongly urge all people who wish to be informed citizens to consume news sources from diverse sources. Selection bias of what events get covered is a huge source of political spin, and using diverse sources is the only way to eliminate selection bias. Consider any statement with morally-significant wording to be the spin, and whatever is left over to be the facts on the ground worth considering. The vast majority…

By way of alternative, I'd suggest not consuming news at all. Or at least, delaying your consumption of news to sources that have had a chance to digest and consider the news, such as a weekly news magazine. It's very, very rare that you require up-to-the-minute news. Continually-updated news sources, like Internet sources or 24 hour news channels, are more for entertainment than information. They focus on keeping yo…

Just think of all of the panic news stories where the facts and the corresponding emotional impact evaporated within 48 hours.

Quick-release news cycles are toxic to a healthily informed society the way that rumor-mongering is toxic to healthy social communities.

Re: We all wear tinfoil hats now

#75

Post by frabcus » Tue, Mar 03, 2020, 3:50 PM UTC

tic_tac wrote: post #43

The idea that targeted political advertising is unreasonably effective to the point of constituting mind control is ridiculous. It assumes people have no independent agency. While advertising can be effective it's definitely not mind control. It's the same story with money on elections. People were and are extremely paranoid about monied interests dominating elections, but we have seen Trump beat Hillary with half he…

Yes, though to explain swinging a referendum (or a single state in a US election), you don't need mind control.

Facebook ran an experiment in 2010 showing they can get out the vote via the news feed:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-a-facebook...

All an advertiser needs to do is have a way of targetting who they want to get out and vote, and get that to happen.

It seems at least possible this happened with the 2016 EU referendum in the UK, and was one of a bunch of factors which swung the result - Dominic Cummings, who ran one of the campaigns, certainly claims that it significantly helped (search for digital in https://beta.spectator.co.uk/article/dominic-cummings-how-th...).

I'm reasonably sure they were using ML to work out a set of factors for who voted which way on the referendum from other data (answers to the Euro football contest), then targetted ads at those factors. It was pretty clever.

Re: We all wear tinfoil hats now

#76

Post by yboris » Tue, Mar 03, 2020, 3:55 PM UTC

jfengel wrote: post #70

mech1234 wrote: post #25

I strongly urge all people who wish to be informed citizens to consume news sources from diverse sources. Selection bias of what events get covered is a huge source of political spin, and using diverse sources is the only way to eliminate selection bias. Consider any statement with morally-significant wording to be the spin, and whatever is left over to be the facts on the ground worth considering. The vast majority…

By way of alternative, I'd suggest not consuming news at all. Or at least, delaying your consumption of news to sources that have had a chance to digest and consider the news, such as a weekly news magazine. It's very, very rare that you require up-to-the-minute news. Continually-updated news sources, like Internet sources or 24 hour news channels, are more for entertainment than information. They focus on keeping yo…

I strongly encourage people to reduce / remove news consumption as well.

News is not a good way to learn about the world - news is precisely what is unusual. Consuming news gives you a distorted sense of what real life is like.

Re: We all wear tinfoil hats now

#77

Post by logfromblammo » Tue, Mar 03, 2020, 3:59 PM UTC

dangerface wrote: post #63

ameister14 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>As an ad insider I know first hand that the tactics used by Cambridge Analytica and other agencies work, thats why people pay me to do it. As another ad insider I know first hand that people are willing to pay me to do a ton of things that don't actually work. (They often continue trying to do so after I tell them it doesn't work and it's a bad idea) People and companies pay millions for things that don't work all t…

> I know first hand that people are willing to pay me to do a ton of things that don't actually work. (They often continue trying to do so after I tell them it doesn't work and it's a bad idea) Hehehe very true. I tell people what works then they ask me to do random shit. I can't deny you are right at the end of the day I do what they will pay for whether it works or not.

Hello, chain of ancestor posters, each saying the same shocking thing. I have been making things that work, and getting paid for them, for more than 20 years now, and I would like some advice on how to transition my career into making things that do not work, for which the customer has specifically been informed that they will not work, and still get paid for them--preferably paid more than I am currently getting for working things.

Is this just customer management? How do I find stupider, richer customers and convince them to trade the non-working thing they are currently overpaying on, for a non-working thing that I haven't even made yet, and then charge more for it? It seems very alien to my brain that anyone can function in this manner, but it is very important to me that I get some of this money that is apparently controlled by idiots, so that I can do sensible things with it, such as pay for food and housing. I am aware that this is somewhat hypocritical to take a fool's money and spend it wisely, but I promise that if I ever get enough, I will do something incredibly stupid with the excess. Please help.

Re: We all wear tinfoil hats now

#78

Post by raxxorrax » Tue, Mar 03, 2020, 4:03 PM UTC

atoav wrote: post #16

llcoolv wrote: post #2

This is an extremely one-sided and biased article. Basically, it presumes that manipulating public opinion begins with Cambridge Analytica, being completely oblivious to the excesive lies, public shaming, character assasinations, alarmism that the agents of the "solid establishment consensus" (The Guardian, NYT, BBC, Deutsche Welle, etc) routinely perform.

For me there is a difference tho: when the Guardian does it, it is public . That means if your political view differs from that of the Guardian you can still read it, comment it, write an article in another outlet about it. So basically: you are creating public political discourse about it. In targeted advertisement no such public space exists and political discourse on the ads is hard. A political party could target…

Today media outlets are private companies that are arguably in between filling their role as the fourth estate and entertainment. They do not offer much public space, they just are the traditional proxies for citizens to reach public officials.

To a time when people bought more news papers, you could have argued that the customers were voting citizens, although even then the real ones were advertisers. At least there was mutual dependency.

Today fewer and fewer people pay for journalism.

I don't think many people see them as creating public discourse and more about creating controversies to get attention. To be fair, they need it to stay economically viable. The trust in media outlets is pretty low and I believe that is not completely unfounded.

The Guardian is certainly not the worst offender by a long shot but general distrust in media isn't that hard to understand.

I think only more pluralism can help rectify this issue. And public officials need to think about channels to reach the public. Preferably not Twitter or Facebook. Attention is a precious resource and you have youtube make-up tutorials that have more views in a week than the Guardian in a quarter of a year.

A lot of frustration I have is that these advertising methods are only called out if the other political camp is the offender. Obama for example spent a lot of money on targeted advertising on social media. Granted, he told us and said that money in politics is a great problem on multiple occasions. So there is still a difference.

Re: We all wear tinfoil hats now

#79

Post by toss1 » Tue, Mar 03, 2020, 4:10 PM UTC

dangerface wrote: post #52

The op doesn't seem to know the first thing about advertising and is in denial of how it works. Op asks head of facebook advertising if advertising influences people, their response "No companies spend millions on advertising with us because it doesn't work!". > The gullibility of the latter two may have stemmed from wishful thinking: If Brexit and Trump could be traced to the malign influence of a single company The…

Exactly.

Moreover, the second sentence gets it entirely backwards

>The previously little-known company, reporters claimed, had used behavioral influencing techniques to turn out social media users to vote in both elections.

The major Cambridge Analytica push was not to increase turnout of supporters, it was to suppress and divert turnout of the opponent's supporters. E.g., finding black voters and highlighting Hillary's 25-year-ago comment on "superpredators", or pushing Jill Stein & Bernie Sanders as better options, promoting fallacies about the math of 1st-Past-The-Post voting -- all focused on the fence-sitters in key states, just make it feel to them like the real option is the one that helps Trump in 1PPP voting. Note that the success is shown in the margin by which HRC lost in the three states is about 20% of the people voting for Jill Stein, with zero chance to win in 1PPP voting.

Between this massive misdirection in the opening paragraph, and the long but mildly interesting distraction on the 1700s "air loom" hoax, it safe to recognize this article as an attempt to emotionally undermine the CA story and ignore it.

Re: We all wear tinfoil hats now

#80

Post by pjc50 » Tue, Mar 03, 2020, 4:13 PM UTC

jancsika wrote: post #58

raxxorrax wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There certainly is a qualitative difference, I agree. But the societal relevance cannot be derived from the degree or order of irrational thought. Someone believing he is regularly abducted by aliens is perhaps more irrational than someone saying a company distorted and manipulated voters on a large scale. The latter allows you to dismiss a whole plethora of different opinions without effort and it was used for polit…

There's one candidate who has spent billions of his own money laying the groundwork for his campaign. He's spent hundreds of millions on both traditional ads and "gray area" social media stuff like paying influencers to post memes. Wouldn't a rational back-and-forth about the efficacy of his spending happen after the election results come in?

Couldn't we have a postmortem about the previous elections first? People are still happily claiming that the advertising and use of Facebook had no effect.