Exactly, and sites like Reddit make money on the same sort of thing. It wasn't controversial when Facebook and Google became arms of the Obama and then Clinton campaigns, but now more people are turning on Facebook after learning that their info was sold to the Trump campaign and companies and so on through companies like CA.
I don’t think we have fully enough information yet, but if a political campaign is using analytics to clearly advertise their campaign, fine, that’s being straightforward.
If a political campaign is posting in ways that do not clearly label it as a political campaign, and is lying to people viewing the data it is paying to show, would you agree that’s kind of a different situation?
There’s not enough information yet I think to claim what was shown, but if political campaigns are not labeling their ads clearly, that is in violation of a variety of state - and some federal - laws.
> Facebook was surprised we were able to suck out the whole social graph, but they didn’t stop us once they realized that was what we were doing.
> They came to office in the days following election recruiting & were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side.
I do adhere to the view that wrong is wrong even when others do it, but I'd like a better look into the big data fantasy of the past decade, and that includes a deeper look into the times when this social/data/analytics/targeting bonanza seemed sweet because the teams who were more adept at it were not associated with people or institutions one abhors.
Whataboutism taints conversations when it's an excuse; other kinds of excuses also shut down conversations that should be had.
More plainly, the CA approach to starting the graph was nauseatingly scammy, but how many friends of Obama supporters (and perhaps Clinton - the API changed before the campaign, but maybe some data persisted with the DNC) were aware that their data was being processed by political parties?
Interesting how whataboutism became a common use term recently -- when people started pointing out hypocrisy, suddenly we care about whataboutism?
Hypocrisy is what I care about and there's enough of it to repave the entire Interstate system. When someone criticized Obama or Democrats, the first words in response was some variation of "Bush..." Blame Bush was a competitive sport. Whatabout that?
In its original incarnation it was not so bad. If one criticizes the Russian government for their low-level corruption and it responds with "but you are lynching negroes", that is basically irrelevant and does not invalidate the criticism and one can categorize the response as whataboutism to disregard it.
But it is disingenuous to use it to disregard others who point out hypocrisy. If you want others not to use a useful strategy, you can't use it yourself and then whine when they respond in kind, telling them they should stop without making any assurances that you yourself will. It's like telling someone they should only fight with fists while you're wearing brass knuckles.
Say targeted advertising is like a nuke. If you complain when your enemy drops a nuke on you, but not when you drop a nuke on them, your problem is obviously not with nukes, just with your enemies dropping them on you.
This whole media campaign against Facebook is aimed to prevent something like Trump 2016 from ever happening again by denying the people who [i]shouldn't win[/i] modern tools. It has nothing to do with privacy.
Sure do. This kind of double speak is rampant. One that bubbles to the top of my head is that when some people were targeted for anti-HRC messages(I think specifically it was Haitian Americans on the gulf coast), then that was labeled as "voter suppression", but targeting likely voters for Trump and spreading negative information about him, say the access Hollywood tapes, is "informing the voters"
The bias there is largely do to the differences in behaviors and histories of the parties involved. It's one thing for a charity group to run a donation center, and a wholly different thing for a life-long con artist to do it.
If I wanted to say that, I would have. The situation today is very different from when Obama campaigned. For one, the FBI & CIA didn't announce that Russians interfered during Obama's campaign. So it's really no mystery that people are paying attention to what the Trump campaign is doing.
And that's ignoring the fact that Cambridge Analytica was apparently breaking laws.
Either way, it is ok for the media to 'influence people'. If you're going to be vague, then we may as well say that is their whole reason for being. And if I wanted them to advocate one message over another, what difference is it to you? That's politics.
There’s a difference between implying that a racial/ethnic group will get hassled or deported, etc due to their race and saying that Trump said douchey things in an interview.
Voter suppression is a term of art that means something. Democrats generally don’t engage in it because more people voting usually translates to more people voting democrat.
Bit of a difference between "he said <this>" vs "news" stories about Clinton conspiring to keep drug prices high. The source for the latter was an email where someone rejected the idea of negotiating american prices so as to avoid derailing ongoing negotiations into drug pricing in Africa.
It's also not news when it's some story about a town in <state> adopting Sharia law. At least the drug pricing thing is halfway true in some convoluted form.
Here's a Twitter thread by someone who worked on Obama's campaign talking about her firm's use of Facebook data. It was tweeted by Julian Assange so I'm assuming it's one of the more damning examples of the Obama campaign using social media data:
This person asserts that people from Facebook gave them their blessing because FB was "on our side". However, she says that from what she knew, FB was on the other team's side too. Kind of need more specifics about who from FB said what, and what "suck out the whole social graph" means. But it's still a different situation than what CA is being accused of, which is using the guise of a quiz app to mine the social data of the quiz participants' friends.
In contrast, the Obama campaign Facebook app/outreach was explicitly connected to the Obama campaign efforts, i.e. people who signed up for the app knew they would be explicitly allowing this Obama-connected app access to info/friend data.
edit: Here's a tweet by someone on the Obama campaign, protesting angrily to a tweet by Cambridge Analytics:
> I ran the Obama 2008 data-driven microtargeting team. How dare you! We didn’t steal private Facebook profile data from voters under false pretenses. OFA voluntarily solicited opinions of hundreds of thousands of voters. We didn’t commit theft to do our groundbreaking work.
Of course, we shouldn't take Obama's team at their word that absolutely everything they did was on the up-and-up. But it's important to acknowledge that there are distinct differences between what we know of their work so far compared to what has been revealed with CA.
In other words, it's fair to say that the Obama team was lauded for their "innovation" at mass usage of FB data, which they talked about publicly. It is unfair to say that what they talked about publicly is anything like what CA is currently being accused of.
edit: I more or less agree with u/makomk that @mbsimon (the staffer who tweeted angrily at CA) is not giving the most complete description of how Obama's campaign harvested FB data: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16624794
> I ran the Obama 2008 data-driven microtargeting team. How dare you! We didn’t steal private Facebook profile data from voters under false pretenses. OFA voluntarily solicited opinions of hundreds of thousands of voters. We didn’t commit theft to do our groundbreaking work.
But isn't the bigger problem sucking up the entire social graph from a small seed of users, not how those users signed up in the first place? If I'm getting spammed via a friends-of-friends connection, I'm not particularly worried about the pretense that initial vector signed up with.
Precisely! From what I cant tell, that tweet (which went rather viral) is misleading at best; based on the public information, the 2012 Obama campaign wasn't using that access to target people who volunteered access to their Facebook data, they were using that access to get info about their non-consenting friends and figure out how to get them to vote for Obama. (I commented about this in one of the other threads: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16620454) The 2008 campaign may have been more benign, but the CA Tweet he was debunking was about both, and those Carol Davidsen tweets appear to be about 2012 specifically.
More specifically, based on the NYT story that you linked to, Obama's campaign did things like match the mined user and user-friends' data with voter registration and donor lists, and also attempt to calculate who a user's "real-life friends" were, versus their casual FB acquaintances, which involved an analysis of photo-tagging, among other things:
> Once permission was granted, the campaign had access to millions of names and faces they could match against their lists of persuadable voters, potential donors, unregistered voters and so on. “It would take us 5 to 10 seconds to get a friends list and match it against the voter list,” St. Clair said. They found matches about 50 percent of the time, he said. But the campaign’s ultimate goal was to deputize the closest Obama-supporting friends of voters who were wavering in their affections for the president. “We would grab the top 50 you were most active with and then crawl their wall”
In the next paragraph, FB said it was "satisfied" that this met their data and privacy standards. Which is a bit curious because IIRC, it was not kosher to cache data scraped from FB for any reason beyond having a reasonable cache (to prevent unneeded API requests), nevermind for independent data collation and analysis. I would bet that the users who did knowingly sign up for the Obama app did not think the app would be scraping the walls and photo albums of their friends and attempting to do friendship-strength analyses.
CA still has an extra level of subterfuge, but I agree, what the Obama campaign is reported to have done is definitely not as innocent as the Obama campaign staffer claims in the aforementioned tweet.
When you have a Facebook account, you are explicitly granting permission to FB to use your personal information and social graph to sell ads. There is nothing deceptive about this.
You don’t see “Sign up for this quiz to find out your true personality” as different than “sign up to support change and spread the word about Barack Obama”?
Facebook is a cesspool, but shady onboarding tactics makes a far more dangerous cesspool.
No doubt, spamming is a practice that people hate. Whether it's as unethical as what's being alleged against CA is another matter, though. AFAIK, there was nothing when signing up for the quiz app that said your data would be used for political purposes. At most, the quiz might have been said to be affiliated with a Cambridge professor and his studies [0].
What on earth makes you think they "targeted friends"? What does that even mean? Did they spam friends with unwanted emails and phone calls? Did they try to propagandize friends with ads targeted to certain demographics? Did they literally light up the friends with green lasers?
What on earth makes you think they "targeted friends"?
I wrote "the targeted friends". In other words, the "volunteer's" friends did not themselves volunteer to participate, yet their contact info was handed over, and they were then targeted.
I would say that the alleged use of this information by foreign-funded groups has soured people on it more quickly. I think this kind of behavior would have eventually come to be seen in a negative light over the years, but the possibly-more-nefarious connections has accelerated the process.
you really should not be downvoted, anecdotal but I have remarked on similar. I have a relative who is part of a few groups and they "managed" certain subreddits for a PAC.
its all well established, get enough people together and you can nuke any story you want and take over subs with time. Facebook's crime was getting caught helping the wrong people
