Facebook Security Chief Said to Leave After Clashes Over Disinformation

But because of how things played out, we slowly became more introspective and started questioning. Scandals involving sexual impropriety with actors, culminating in the #metoo movement, is part of this introspection. And there will be increased scrutiny in social media and its role in enabling the current situation.

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.

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.

  people who signed up for the app knew they would be explicitly 
  allowing this Obama-connected app access to info/friend data.

I think you're probably right. There's a different emotional impact between being manipulated to consume versus being manipulated in what you think. Of course at the end of the day it's exploiting a similar vulnerability in our wetware.

The problem is when huge amounts of money get mixed up in it. In the US money doesn't buy you political power directly, but it does buy you a voice (in the form of advertisements using mass media). It's still up to the listeners to listen to your voice one way or the other, but the disproportionate loudness of people's voices ensures that arguments backed by money are supported much louder than those without money (this is the thesis of Manufactured Consent). Ok, this is less than ideal, but things probably aren't skewed that much regarding things like social issues.

Political advertisement, in my opinion, doesn't veer into the realm of propaganda until one of two things happen: either the source is dishonest about their intentions (e.g. a person fully aware of climate change publicly denying it for financial reasons) and true beliefs, or their arguments are veiled in a way such that they do not appear to be advertisement at all. For example, suppose out of 100 homicides in the US, 10 were committed by Green people against Purple people, but a news organization decides to cover 5 homicides this week, and focuses solely on the ones between green and purple people. That doesn't look like an ad, even though it is one. The problem is that there's big money in this type of propaganda; these days political power is all about controlling narratives. It allows for a type of "inception" of beliefs and values - for example, making Green people think they're on the bring of a race war with Purple people - by letting people come to conclusions themselves after being presented by a highly slanted distribution of input.

This type of belief-inception is precisely what Cambridge Analytica specialized in. By knowing demographic information, they could target individuals based on issues they knew they would be sensitive to, and slowly indoctrinate them with desired views. I'll use my race example again, because Robert Mercer is essentially an unapologetic racist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Mercer_(businessman)#Ra.... You start by painting a narrative picture, highlighting race-related conflicts and painting a picture of deteriorating race relations. Like a self-fulfilling prophecy, this stokes racial tensions, creating more incidents for you to curate. By misrepresenting the relative frequency of these types of occurrences, people gradually come to the conclusion that you want them to: in this case, that black people are becoming more racist towards white people. You can use this to bring over working-class white people to the Republicans. Another good example of this type of indoctrination was Gamergate (which essentially birthed Breitbart / the alt-right) being used to galvanize frustration with the social justice sphere into creating a community of young male "race-realists"

Nothing new here, seriously. Propaganda from both sides before elections has existed for as long as there were political debates and political campaigns. The fact that we have now systems to make Propaganda more targeted may make it more effective than before, but that's all. In the end, believing or not in Propaganda is the individual's responsibility.

I think we want to believe that but hasn't been true for many years. Presidents sell a brand unfortunately, just like large companies do their commercials. With the same psychological and rhetorical tricks.

One of my favorite examples I always bring up is this: http://adage.com/article/moy-2008/obama-wins-ad-age-s-market... notice how with much fanfare everyone was happily handing his campaign the marketing award. Normally that is not awarded to political candidates, it goes to Coke, Pepsi, Apple etc.

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"I honestly look at [Obama's] campaign and I look at it as something that we can all learn from as marketers," said Angus Macaulay, VP-Rodale marketing solutions "To see what he's done, to be able to create a social network and do it in a way where it's created the tools to let people get engaged very easily. It's very easy for people to participate."

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Social network they say? They couldn't mean using Facebook,could they? But, I think they are. An unsurprisingly Obama's campaign used the same methods as CA did:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/business/economy/face...

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Any time people used Facebook’s log-in button to sign on to the campaign’s website, the Obama data scientists were able to access their profile as well as their friends’ information. That allowed them to chart the closeness of people’s relationships and make estimates about which people would be most likely to influence other people in their network to vote.

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> Propaganda is not received in the same way.

That's exactly why it is disguised not to be perceived as blatant propaganda. It works best when it is sneaking its way in via a seemingly unbiased publication, or news story, a comedy skit etc

Everyone who worked at Facebook or on 3rd party integrations knew this for years.

How about all of the services using Facebook OAuth that subtly leak social graph information? For exactly this reason, Facebook OAuth is always my absolute last resort, and I'll almost always skip a service entirely if it's the only option.

Still, I always gave Facebook the benefit of the doubt and I figured that these things were handled by Facebook directly as a "plugin" to the app/website (I'm not a web developer, I don't know the details of how this would work), and the various services didn't actually see the data. It's pretty mind blowing to me that this is not actually the case. I always felt I was being absurdly paranoid about Facebook compared to most people I knenw, now it turns out I was not being even remotely paranoid enough.

Does anyone know if Google is similarly aggressive with user data sharing? I've never noticed information leakages similar to the above coming from Google (so I don't hesitate much to use Google OAuth) but me not noticing something during casual browsing is not a very high bar to clear.

The fact that computers are placing digital picture ads (that are cheap to produce), allows such extreme cases as we've seen to happen.

It's easy to understand, however, the business model of companies like Facebook if you don't pay for the service. That's what Facebook users should realize by themselves.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/data-war-whistl...

This article is probably the biggest one right now.

Not the public per se but the media suddenly cares.

My guess it's the runup to the US midterm elections, it's never too early to start the mudslinging...

My only point (if there is one) is that, despite the massive proliferation of blogs and amateur media, it often takes a professional, salaried reporter to bring an important story into the public eye.

"On 8 February 2018 Mr Matheson implied that Cambridge Analytica "gathers data from users on Facebook." Cambridge Analytica does not gather such data." — Letter from Alexander Nix, CEO, Cambridge Analytica, to the Chair of the Committee, 23 February 2018 (PDF, linked from below page)

https://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z...

— And now, it's basically been 'proven' by FB that they do. Of course the ICO is gonna get involved now.

Edit: plus there's also this Channel4 investigation which went public today:

"An undercover investigation by Channel 4 News reveals how Cambridge Analytica secretly campaigns in elections across the world. Bosses were filmed talking about using bribes, ex-spies, fake IDs and sex workers."

https://www.channel4.com/news/cambridge-analytica-revealed-t...

— I think that most certainly puts CA into all kinds of shit they weren't in just 24hrs ago.

"So I was talking to a senior government official of this government (2012) about that outcome and he said well you know we've come to realize that we need a robust social graph of the United States. That's how we're going to connect new information to old information."

I suspect that the only reason we are hearing about the Trump campaign being the buyer is that the democrats already had the information. It is also why Facebook can not put the cards on the table since then they would not have any political allies left. Just like with the Snowden leak, privacy is not a issue for which the parties differentiates on. One can only hope that will change in the next election.

The story was linked to Trump?

Also, security nerds are attuned to how personal data might be misused. The public needs a concrete example.

There are major power players at work trying to a) exert control over the internet as a speech platform; and b) ensure that their political opponents can't win without establishment support. I discussed this some at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16616227 .

As for my grandma, my mom, and my sisters, like most of the public, they don't care about any of this, because this data was mostly already public-enough (friends list restricted) and they just want a platform where they know they'll be able to engage with friends and family.

People use the Myers-Briggs typing at work because it helps you work with (read persuade) people.

So you can make an argument this is at least 100 years old.

As for why we've reached critical mass - it seems likely the ability to influence democratic elections, and the efforts by enemies of the Western world to use it to undermine democracy, are getting people to notice.

"The Data That Turned the World Upside Down How Cambridge Analytica used your Facebook data to help the Donald Trump campaign in the 2016 election.

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/mg9vvn/how-our-li...

"But Cambridge’s psychographic models proved unreliable in the Cruz presidential campaign, according to Rick Tyler, a former Cruz aide, and another consultant involved in the campaign. In one early test, more than half the Oklahoma voters whom Cambridge had identified as Cruz supporters actually favored other candidates. The campaign stopped using Cambridge’s data entirely after the South Carolina primary.

“When they were hired, from the outset it didn’t strike me that they had a wide breadth of experience in the American political landscape,” Mr. Tyler said."

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/06/us/politics/cambridge-ana...

I’d like some explaination of $1.2 billion is spent on Clinton some of which came from Saudi, Canada, UK, Australia, Norway and that’s all well and good! But $500,000 spent against her is “influencing elections”.

Is Facebook advertising that effective!?

I’d really appreciate if people stopped using the term “influencing elections” that’s the whole point of campaigning. In related news, you don’t have to like him, but Trump won fairly.