The Secret Agenda of a Facebook Quiz | Hacker News Reader

The Secret Agenda of a Facebook Quiz

nytimes.com

268 pointslingben106 comments

I'd suspected for years about such quizzes. Initially, I assumed the posts to calculate your (porn/movie/etc) name was a low grade phishing exercise as it asked you to mix personal data that are often used in security questions (eg first pet name plus mothers maiden name). This is a whole new level, but entirely unsurprising. Facebook is a data mining platform. Remembering that is nothing but a good thing.

Especially quizzes like "where was your first job?" or "what's your favorite movie?" all sounded like phishing for security question answers.

It is much harder nowadays, but around 2000 every Hotmail account was protected only by these easy one sentence questions. It was trivial to open accounts if you wanted to. Favorite football club, pets name - - just ask the target. I remember I was young and was wondering why is it so easy to 'hack' Hotmail.

There was also that time when it was trivial to login to every single Hotmail account by only knowing the username.

And it was left like this for at least 12 hours after it was first reported in media...

http://edition.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9908/30/hotmail.03/

https://slashdot.org/story/99/08/30/1324206/hotmail-cracked-...

Just got an evil idea.. You can target on fb and Google by email lists. You create some stupid web app with questions and promise something in return, a prize, or make it worthwhile to play and target them with all the security questions email accounts or whatever might ask. Could be that this is being done for phising already if the victims are being targeted specifically and don't have 2fa.

You are late to the party. I remember receiving this kind of questions in 2006 when hotmail and msn messenger were still popular. I think it was part of a game to measure how worldly you were.

I've been seeing a lot more articles blocked by "surveys" these days. Normally there's a skip option. The mirror group of sites are especially bad for this.

i pride myself on spotting phishing and fake emails but the porn name game omg missed that one!

I remember in 2000's there was a sex quiz that spread like a worm where you answered personal questions. My friend sent me a link and of course I answered all the details for him to read. Then I sent my link wanting for revenge etc. I can't remember what was my motivation to answer, maybe I was young and just thought it's cool. I do know what was the motivation to spread it further...

When #first7jobs started trending on Twitter last year, I assumed it was a phishing attack - I've been covering such for years - and it turns out that two major banks were using jobs.. one was first job, the other was second job.

Two for one is a good deal.

I'm not impressed. Did anyone notice that Cambridge Analytics did not work for Ted Cruz? I mean he did win Texas and the great plains states, but those were his most-winnable locations from the beginning due to his consistent conservatism and other nominees dropping out. He even lost the south, which should have been his other target, presumably due to being off-wavelength with southern voters, something the analytics data should have helped him with. Cambridge Analytics and their Facebook questionnaires don't seem to be very effective.

I imagine we'd be equally unimpressed with other early tech.

imho, our concern should be of an extrapolative nature. we can guess where this will be in 5 or 10 years, nevermind Ted Cruz' future electoral successes. and we know how easy people are to psychologically "nudge". (sorry for assuming our agreement there)

> and we know how easy people are to psychologically "nudge"

How easy? I thought "Nudge theory" was beginning to unravel under the burden of empirical evidence?

Ted Cruz is probably more to blame in this case than Cambridge; he came across to many as supremely unlikeable/comically phony and clearly lost the mud slinging fights with Trump that dominated the Republican primaries. Whatever benefit Cambridge bestowed probably wasn't enough to turn Ted Cruz into a serious Presidential candidate. In more colloquial terms, perhaps even the most effective data targeting can't polish a turd.

1. There are many degrees between "didn't work at all" and "worked so well he became predident".

2. Cruz was an establishment candidate. This electorate wanted an outsider.

well, some geographically significant proportion of the electorate wanted an outsider.

> Cambridge Analytics and their Facebook questionnaires don't seem to be very effective.

So, nothing speaks against nipping that in the bud, right?

It's like a tiny person with no tools sneaking around your house to murder your whole family; sure you could ignore them, at least at the moment, but why would you?

I'm late to this party, but I'd point to the fact that many of the states Cruz lost in the south have open primaries:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_primaries_in_the_United_S...

Actually, the following states were lost by Cruz and have open primaries:

Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina (All races' primaries open for unaffiliated voters only), South Carolina

I've been warning friends and family about this for years. It's incredible how much information people will give about themselves to get totally inane information. This "psy-ops" stuff is shady and scary, and I guarantee you that most voters have no idea it's happening.

> I've been warning friends and family about this for years.

How did it work out? I tried the same too, but it was falling into deaf years. Most common response. "Sean beta (means son in hindi). You are being excessively paranoid. Facebook is a closed community, and I only share info with friends and family, so don't worry."

I've had mostly the same responses. My family has said I'm being overly paranoid. My liberal friends don't think anyone cares what they think. And my conservative friends are afraid of the NSA and the government, but fully support this kind of spying and data collection by private companies as long as their team wins.

That answer depresses the shit out of me.

Nit: "falling on deaf ears"

I will concede to typo/autocorrect, but wanted to make the comment in case someone reads your comment and assumes the phrase correct.

haha. Yes it was a typo/autocorrect. lol. thanks.

And yet for all their magic, they were just as wrong about the outcome of the election:

You might think from a casual reading of the Cambridge Analytica press release that they predicted the outcome of the election. They did not. A company spokesman called reporters before election day to say that Trump had only a 20 per cent chance of winning.

Source: http://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/12/the-british-data-cruncher...

I'm not sure I get this logic. If I told someone they had a 16.6% chance of rolling a die and getting a 6, and then they proceed to roll the die and get a 6, would you laugh and tell me that I was wrong?

I get your point but that's not a fair comparison because there were 2 choices, not 6.

Ok. If I told you you had 80% chance of flipping a coin to a head and you got a tail, would you say I couldn't predict things ?

6 and Not 6 are two choices

I think many people would, yes. Which is frightening.

I just read an anecdote about Sid Meier dealing with this in the Civilization games in Michael Lewis' Undoing Project: people couldn't stand losing battles of 33% 3 times in a row.

If it was your job to measure all the things that affect the roll of a die, and this is the result of your prediction, then I would indeed say that you failed to do your job properly. You could defend the result by claiming that it is impossible to get better measurements, and that the 16.6% chance is a reflection of our unavoidable ignorance of the system, but this doesn't really seem applicable to predicting election results.

What you are essentially saying is that every prediction that doesn't claim certainty is always correct. If I "predict", by looking at a crystal ball, that there is an 80% chance of an asteroid destroying Earth tomorrow, and no asteroid destroys earth, do you think that it makes sense to say that I was correct in my prediction, because I said there was a 20% chance of it not happening? Surely you must agree that there some sense in which my prediction was wrong, or at the very least more wrong than NASA's prediction. The election predictions were wrong in the same sense.

A lot of words to say very little.

>What you are essentially saying is that every prediction that doesn't claim certainty is always correct.

This seems to be the crux of it. No, what I am saying is that when you want to laugh at the polls/pollsters, you should be arguing how their methodology was wrong and what they could have done to find the true proportion +/- some standard error with however much confidence level. Simply laughing at pollsters when the minority wins is not good enough. 20% chance of winning and then actually winning does not seem all too unlikely to any reasonable person.

> you should be arguing how their methodology was wrong and what they could have done to find the true proportion +/- some standard error with however much confidence level

There are countless of arguments about how their methodology was wrong and what could be improved, all over the internet. Almost nobody disputes that the models were bad. I thought this part was obvious.

> 20% chance of winning and then actually winning does not seem all too unlikely to any reasonable person.

It seems about 80% unlikely. But the question isn't whether it seems unlikely or not, but whether it makes sense to call the prediction results "wrong". 20% chance of an asteroid not hitting Earth and then not hitting Earth might not seem extremely unlikely, but the prediction that it had an 80% chance of hitting Earth is still a bad prediction.

Is it really a bad prediction? Or just a wrong one?

Sure, you could say wrong predictions are bad. However, maybe it was the best prediction given the data available before a given event. Its weird assigning a kinda subjective good/bad to an event when it is just an assigned probability based on what is known. All we can really conclude is that the improbable happened; we didn't have enough data or the right methodologies to make a more accurate prediction. Learn what we can, and apply it to the next event.

I would say that predicting the chances of an asteroid hitting Earth based on looking at a crystal ball is a pretty bad prediction.

I agree with your general point. Whether a better prediction could've been made based on available data is really the key question here, and this is exactly what allows us to say that crystal ball predictions are bad.

In the context of predicting election results, I think it is fair to assume that, in principle, there should be enough available data (or an ability to collect such data) to make more accurate predictions. This also seems to be the assumption of all major polling agencies, and was also the assumption in investigating the results of Brexit polls. This is precisely where it differs from dice rolling. It therefore makes sense to assume that the predictions were inaccurate due to methodological reasons, as opposed to pollsters having no practical way of accessing the relevant data.

I'm not sure which ones you read. Nate Silver's analysis seemed pretty sound. His team pointed out that, just as with the housing crisis, if the models were wrong in one state, they were probably wrong in all states in the same way, giving Trump a decent chance at winning.

Note that Taleb criticized the speed that Nate changed estimates, not the estimates themselves.

There are countless of arguments about how their methodology was wrong and what could be improved, all over the internet.

Could you link to a couple of your favourites? Non of the ones I've seen felt very convincing.

Sure:

[1] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-polls-missed-trump-...

[2] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/09/why-2016-ele...

While it will take more time to figure out the precise reasons for the failure of the polls, the consensus is that such a failure indeed happen, and there are a number of competing hypotheses for why it happened. Other than on HN, nobody claims that the errors were due to some inherent unpredictability which cannot be addressed through better methodology.

I think everybody agrees that something went wrong and many people think that something should be done (although I personally think that medias inability to interpret and report on polling errors and uncertainty did greatly exasperate the situation). I just haven't seen any good articles making a strong argument about what went wrong and how to fix it

I don’t know, I’m under the impression that people here think that winning with a 20% predicted chance of winning isn’t indicative of anything wrong with the polls, because it’s like predicting the outcome of a die, and therefore nothing should be done at all. This false analogy is precisely what I’m trying to disprove.

I agree that there are currently no strong arguments about what were wrong and how to fix it, but I think it's because it takes time to investigate those things. According to Pew, the American Association for Public Opinion Research has a committee investigating it, and they should release their report in May. It took a 6-months investigation to come up with a report about what went wrong with the Brexit polls, so it will probably take a similar amount of time with this.

You're conflating the polls with the predictive models. The polls never said Trump had a 20% chance of winning because the is not how polls work.

There where a dozen or so models which took the polls as input (some added other inputs as well) and produced a probability of a candidate winning. Some of those models where garbage (Huffington post I had Trump at ~1.5-2%) and some where pretty good (fivethirtyeight had Trump at ~30% and trending upwards). The question about how you should interpret these numbers is a more open one. What does it mean to give numeric probabilities to events which are completely unique and will only occur once (cue discussion of Bayesian vs Frequentist inference here).

Admittedly the question about if the model was right or wrong is difficult to disentangle from the question about bad polling. No model can work correctly if you feed it garbage data. The only criticism you could make is that they should have been even more critical of data they where getting from certain polls than they where.

Now as to was there something wrong with the polls? Obviously. But the interesting question is what went wrong. They where pretty good at forecasting the national popular vote, while at the same time getting certain mid-western swing states dramatically wrong. So there is obviously something in their methodology which seems to works fine when looking at the country but fails when looking at certain states.

But like you I look forward to seeing more detailed investigations coming out in the next few month.

That's not a prediction of the outcome. That's a statistic. A prediction of the outcome would be "you won't roll a 6."

The article doesn't claim that Cambridge Analytica predicted the outcome. The only factual claim about the outcome made by the company, according to the article, is that statistic.

The article, however, took that statistic and implicated it as a prediction when all it really was was a statistic.

If you asked me to predict whether you will roll a six or not, then I will predict that you won't. Is that a bad prediction?

It's certainly an incorrect prediction if I roll a six. You didn't simply state the odds and leave it at that, you actually made a prediction. Is it a "bad" prediction? Depends on how you're defining "good" vs. "bad" predictions. If the quality of the prediction is not based on the outcome (i.e. whether the prediction is correct), but is instead based on the odds themselves, then that's a conversation that leads to "bad but correct" predictions.

The difference is that the roll of a die is random, but the outcome of an election gets more deterministic as it approaches. Election prediction is figuring out what people have already decided they are going to do.

Well, the model at least does not maximize likelihood

Analysis is useless if it isn't right each and very time, got it.

How does Trump winning prove he had more than a 20% chance of winning?

I feel this is the rub with this particular comment thread. If all they gave were stats, then they didn't make a prediction.

Seriously. Why do we allow this kind of data collection. This is ridiculous.

Edit: the commenter who responded has pointed out that this is phrased fairly accusatory. Should the fact that there is probably a data cloud out there about me being used to manipulate me through subliminal type messaging not be upsetting? I don't think I have ever signed up for a service with the expectation that whatever information is collected will be collated in some over-arching cloud used for more things than just the service provided to me by the site. Maybe somewhere in a 30 page terms of service document, it said that, and I clicked "agree" upon skimming it. But should that really be enough?

Edit 2: Here's an idea: charge me $3/month to use your service without ads, and with full expectation that my data will not be sold or used inappropriately (you can give it to the govt. if they need it for security reasons, I don't care). I currently pay for e-mail without ads from both outlook and mail.com and would gladly do the same for a pure facebook / gmail / google search / etc service.

Can I re-phrase your question?

"Why do we allow people to voluntarily hand over their own information at their own will?"

Sounds much different when its phrase properly and not accusatory.

Except the ways in which this data will be used is never disclosed, and in fact is deliberately obscured.

Let me quote what voluntarily handing over personal information means at the university level:

"Obtaining written informed consent from a potential participant is more than just a signature on a form. The consent document is to be used as a guide for the verbal explanation of the study. The consent document should be the basis for a meaningful exchange between the researcher and the participant. The participant's signature provides documentation of agreement to participate in a study, but is only one part of the consent process. The consent document must not serve as a substitute for discussion."

http://humansubjects.stanford.edu/new/resources/consent/inde...

Seems phrased fairly differently from the typical "terms of use" document we get when signing up for an online service. So I ask. Should these be vastly different things?

If it said up-front "this data will be collated and eventually used to emotionally manipulate you", I'd agree with you that people give the information up of their own will.

Can you explain how an OCEAN score helps do that?

Because I have yet to be convinced that knowing how open, agreeable, etc. someone translates into manipulation and the article did not even attempt to explain that, it just said this has some vague relation to Trump & Brexit and left us to assume it was a magic X factor.

It was pretty clear to me:

"Mr. Trump’s digital team used [individually targeted] posts to serve different ads to different potential voters, aiming to push the exact right buttons. [...] A pro-gun voter whose Ocean score ranks him high on neuroticism could see storm clouds and a threat: The Democrat wants to take his guns away. A separate pro-gun voter deemed agreeable and introverted might see an ad emphasizing tradition and community values, a father and son hunting together."

So the danger here is that they might find something they agree with Trump on?

I don't know if there is danger, but I find the idea very scary that there is an organization that collects very intimate data on me without my knowledge and uses that to manipulate me. They are not really trying to find points that people agree on with Trump. They are trying to create a strong emotional image that works with the person in question and connect it to Trump.

That's advertising in a nutshell, though. You can (and should) limit the information you put out. You can (and should) learn to recognize emotional manipulation of all kinds from all sources.

I know, but ...

a) This degree of personalization is completely unheard of.

b) No one except the most paranoid expects that when they fill in a quiz that information will be recorded and stored.

c) Normally with personalized advertising (or advertising in general) the worst that can happen is that the person advertised to will buy something they don't need. In this case it can have implications for many other people.

A) Not really, Google knows way more about us. B) That sounds like a problem with education. C) This is by no means the only targeted political advertising. They have systems to track what you respond to and have done so for quite some time now. Calls, letters, even people visiting at the door don't happen by accident.

> voluntarily ... at their own will

That's incredibly rare. Most peopled don't understand the type and amount of data being collected or the power of modern analysis methods. This kind of data collection needs to have the informed consent of those involved. That is a significantly higher standard than getting someone to click "I Agree" or pretending they read and understood the ToS.

Even among the minority that do understand at least the general shape of what will be done with their data, most people - correctly or incorrect -believe they don't have any choice (no alternatives).

> Sounds much different when its phrase properly and not accusatory.

Yes. It sounds like a cheap excuse that doesn't reflect reality. It may reduce conative dissonance and/or guilt to pretend that people are participating in a voluntary transaction, but it's still an attempt to manipulate and scam people... or worse.

I think it's very hard to conceptualize just how valuable and/or powerfull that data can be. Especially when it's given away in small pieces; Knowing my birthday by itself is useless, and so when some webform asks for it I all too easily think it's fine to give away without a second thought.

The same can be said for someone wanting to keep their location private; It's harmless to let the public know you live next to a park, and it was relevant to the story you wanted to tell that day. A month later you complain about the noise, and someone links that you may be near a highway. A week later you complain about a storm, even going so far as to live tweet it from the comfort of your own home, at one point tweeting "wow the rain got real loud for a moment there. Glad to have a nice house :D".

And now Mr. Dedicated Bad Guy has a list of three locations your house could be, all from seemingly innocuous information.

Has anyone been able to validate or correlate the claims in this article? It's an opinion piece without a lot of verifiable references or data. Seems like it is, to some degree, describing itself.

Meh, big deal. Like the Obama campaigns were't good at "weaponizing" all web tools they could find.

Note how the examples proposed are all GOTV efforts targeted to the R base rather than anything appealing larger slices of the electorate. Despite all this black magic, R turnout wasn't that impressive and Trump lost the popular vote. Where it might have helped a little bit is in exploiting weaknesses that Dems shouldn't have had in the first place, i.e. Clinton's baggage, to reduce D turnout in key states, but again, that's more the Democrats' fault for fielding such a candidate knowing very well that she had such baggage.

> In this election, dark posts were used to try to suppress the African-American vote. According to Bloomberg, the Trump campaign sent ads...

Really? Sending ads is suppressing the vote of certain people? Like the soviet union suppressed dissenters by sending them to the gulag?

I don't think so. But I think the New York Times has a secret agenda of its own, I just don't know what it is. Portraying the election as somehow "unfair" could result in civil unrest, who could possibly want that?

> In this election, dark posts were used to try to suppress the African-American vote. According to Bloomberg, the Trump campaign sent ads reminding certain selected black voters of Hillary Clinton’s infamous “super predator” line. It targeted Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood with messages about the Clinton Foundation’s troubles in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake.

How is this suppressing the vote? It's giving potential voters accurate information about your opponent. Frankly, how is it any different from Mr. Biden shouting, 'they're gonna put y'all back in chains!' — other than the former being true and probably in good taste?

N.b.: I did not vote for President Trump.

An answer to how this is different is provided in literally the next sentence of the article.

>Federal Election Commission rules are unclear when it comes to Facebook posts, but even if they do apply and the facts are skewed and the dog whistles loud, the already weakening power of social opprobrium is gone when no one else sees the ad you see — and no one else sees “I’m Donald Trump, and I approved this message.”

"Mr. Zuckerberg is young, still skeptical that his radiant transparency machine could be anything but a force for good" This is naive bordering on delusional. I think Zuckerberg knows the real deal. Considering quotes like these: Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard Zuck: Just ask. Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS [Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one? Zuck: People just submitted it. Zuck: I don't know why. Zuck: They "trust me" Zuck: Dumb fucks"

Is this another rogue Cambridge Analytica ad that will get debunked later when the impact was done?

No, it was written by an Open Society Fellow, e.g funded by George Soros, a major Hillary Clinton backer.

So basically, it's counter propaganda.

e.g funded by George Soros

Careful -- you've mentioned his name twice in this thread. Do it a third time and he'll appear in your bathroom mirror.

Also, nothing in the article was particularly surprising, nor is any of it outside the realm of what we already know is technically possible at Facebook. Give it four years and see if Zuckerberg makes his rumored run for President, after beta-testing the tools in 2016...

> In the immediate wake of Mr. Trump’s surprise election

How was it a surprise? With huge crowd sizes at his rallies (that NYT didn't show, but RSBN for example did), strong populist message that worked, and the awful candidate the other side put up (while sadly destroying Bernie), I was not surprised.

Because most poll models gave him a small chance of success. How bad is your memory?

You're assuming majority of people put faith in those polls?

Interestingly enough, the same pollsters are now saying that Trump has a 37% or something approval rating. And Obama went out with a 60%+ approval rating.

Until they find a way to poll a significant slice of the population truly representative of the electorate, I'm surprised people can take them seriously. Since we're on HN, there is a startup idea here somewhere.

(Edited to remove an electoral hypothesis, so that we can discuss polls and not politics.)

Hillary ran a sub-par campaign as one of the least popular candidates in recent history, and that hurt down-ticket races. The democrats made a strategic mistake by allowing Clintonistas to take over the DNC and party establishment to the point that she was essentially "the anointed", and faced no real competition. Had e.g. Biden or even Franken run, the results might be quite different. Heck, if Obama had run against Trump (for a third term, were such a thing possible) it would likely be a different story. This is not the whole situation, of course; e.g. districts are more gerrymandered than ever, reducing competitiveness and allowing party establishments to push their favored candidates (out of touch establishment = unpopular candidate); e.g. the last congress was the most dysfunctional in decades, meaning that the bills that made it were compromises, and not a full test of democrat ideas; media echo chambers have polarized voters; etc.

As easy as it is to critique Obama's policies on privacy & foreign policy, he was assured and rational, which people like in a leader. It's entirely reasonable that there's such a wide gap in approval polls. There's really no reason to significantly doubt them.

Regardless of whether you agree on the above, we're about to see the GOP have its way and push a slew of policies that they favor. Many will actually be favorable for entrepreneurs and startups, but my guess is that overall they will turn out to be quite unpopular. I predict the house to flip back in 2018 and for Trump to be crushed in 2020 (if he makes it that far without being impeached.) We'll see.

"Common sense" maybe shouldn't be trusted if it's leading you to silly conclusions. The Dems lost the Presidency, as well, even though nearly 3 million more people voted for the Democratic Party candidate than the winning one.

Plenty of things that are "common sense" don't pan out once you throw in gerrymandering and voter turnout.

Approval ratings are different from chance of winning election. Both candidates were generally disliked. That's consistent with his low approval ratings now.

If I remember correctly 538 put him at around 25-30% chance of winning the election.

Certainly an underdog, but with a reasonable chance of success.

538 was widely attacked / mocked because they gave him such high numbers. Many people were surprised by the outcome.

Also, it was clear on election night that neither Hillary nor Trump had prepared a speech for a Trump win. (Watch Trump's victory speech from election night. Hillary had to awkwardly postpone hers till morning because she didn't book the venue long enough to handle a close race.)

I suspected 538's projections were spot on because of math and stuff, but many (most?) people did not.

Is it just me starting to really have enough of "secret agendas" of Facebook and other internet giants? What the hell are the legislators doing? Even if you say that the advertising-based business model is OK where do you draw the line? Do they really need to know what kind of a psychologic personality I am and what kind of porn I watch ?! (exaggerating... but who knows nowadays)

Friendly reminder: don't use Facebook and block any advertisement and trackers online using ublock.

It helps to keep some mental ecology.

I did that too. Look where it got us.

Anyway, I eventually set up a placholder Facebook account. Once I typed my name into the setup form, they provided a frighteningly detailed list of friends and acquaintances. Since then, due to "do you know" emails, I get the impression they slurp other people's call and sms logs (or maybe just contacts, if FB types are more OCD about address books than me) into their social network graph.

Anyway, it is not much of an exaggeration to say that facebook gets more metadata to sell every time you make a phone call, regardless of whether you have an account.

(Of course, I don't have their software installed on any of my devices. However, I did give them my phone number for 2FA purposes. How naive I was. Assuming the phone app grabs people's address books and/or call logs, they probably had it before I gave it to them)

> If Mr. Zuckerberg takes seriously his oft-stated commitments to diversity and openness, he must grapple honestly with the fact that Facebook is no longer just a social network. It’s an advertising medium that’s now dangerously easy to weaponize.

The story is chilling. It more or less proves that Trump campaign and the Billionaire Republican donor who owns the Data Analytics site used Facebook to profile people and send targeted "fear" stories to them and swing the vote away from Clinton.

Fear is a great motivator.

I'm not sure how the Dem's will compete with this going forward. Maybe it will become taboo and they won't have to. Maybe they already are.. I hope they don't go too deep into the mud on this.

It's almost impressive though how well the Republicans, and Trump specifically, are employing these, IMHO shady, tactics.

Is it scandalous how little scandal is made of all this(the FUD, populist rhetoric, phycological manipulation, etc)? I can imagine how this would be spun if "evil Hillary" was found to be targeting people with "dark posts".

Democrats will use it in completely analogous ways.

I agree. However using the same methods in this election, 'establishment' Hillary would have probably come across as big brother-esque whereas Trump as more of a 'new awareness' message to some targeted users (fitting his rhetoric). Surely not in all cases but perhaps notable enough.

> analogous ways.

I really don't understand what this mean? Can anyone explain?? Thank you :)

He's deflecting by saying Democrats will do the same thing. It's a false equivalency.

similar/comparable (https://www.google.com#q=define%20analogous)

Zuckerberg really loves Trump and I can see how he is more than willing to help give Trump the platform he needs to continue to spread his propaganda

Google's Eric Schmidt proposed a plan similar to this (though in more ambiguous terms) back in 2014, sharing a draft with Cheryl Mills that was forwarded to the Clinton braintrust (John Podesta, Robby Mook and David Plouffe) and subsequently released by Wikileaks[0]. The use of quizzes as a front detailed in OP's article is especially insidious, but the idea of individually targeting voters with "stories" in such a manner was clearly in play. Whether they followed through with it or not, it seems naive to think they won't do something similar in the future now that Cambridge Analytica has been shown to have been so effective.

[0] https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/37262

It's not as if Donald Trump, or anyone else invented this tactic in 2016, or even the 21st century. Mass media has manufactured consent with those tools for as long as there has been a mass media. William Randolph Hearst was a master of it over 100 years ago. This is a subject that very few in the media are willing to report on, because it would delegitimize the media itself.

Even if there was a media outlet willing to destroy their reputation and business, good luck convincing human beings that they've been conditioned to behave as they do through media messaging. Brainwashing is Hollywood scifi mumbojumbo, not a scientific explanation for why basic training produces a uniform level of discipline in the military, or why millions of people pay for the privilege of inhaling carcinogens.

To top it off, I am well aware of how tinfoil the preceding two paragraphs must sound.

Going forward?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/feb/17/obama-digital-...

Obviously, this is not identical, but many of the same principles are in play. You can argue around the edges of who understood exactly who was getting what data but I pretty much guarantee you the bulk of the people didn't know exactly what they had just done then, either.

I also do not mean this as a partisan attack, because everyone's gonna do it, and do it better every election cycle, until something major stops them. In 2012 it was widely believed the Republicans simply had no good digital ground game, so I can't really link you to articles about theirs, or I would. And I'm having a hard time imagining what will stop this, short of total internet collapse.

I think the fact that the Dems ran Clinton despite more support in key demos for Bernie shows that as of right now they aren't very interested in following data if it conflicts with their other agendas.

If this trend continues and extends down to congressional elections, etc. for both parties as it is now (Republicans ready to follow data to build campaigns, Democrats playing out of an opaque narrative), this could spell bad news for the future of the American Democratic party.

It's funny because people were playing this exact card during the 2012 election due to Obama's tech-savvy reëlection effort. A lot can change in four years.

It's pretty naive to think the democrats aren't doing the same thing. Maybe not with the same company, but I'm sure they're doing it to some extent.

> The story is chilling.

Chilling. In fact, you could say it was a "fear" story.

All it's missing is the billionaire pulling the strings - except if you look at the tag line at the end you see it was written by someone who is an Open Society Fellow.

You know, those fellowships from the Open Society Foundation that are funded by Billionaire Democrat donor George Soros.

Did this article make you feel any negativity towards Trump and the Republicans?

If so, then for Soros, this was money on dark articles well spent.

How is that chilling? Were those ads false?

Swaying votes away from one's opponents is the definition of running for office.

Back in 2008 the Obama campaign ran a very successful information shop and was widely lauded for it; why is it now chilling when a different candidate does the same thing?

N.b.: I did not vote for President Trump.

The Open Agenda of a New York Times article.

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