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.
Also, rationalizing cheating, because they're certain everyone's doing do it, so it's only proper when the better cheater wins.
> 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.
1. How Obama’s Team Used Big Data to Rally Voters (MIT Technology Review, 2012)
2. How Trump Consultants Exploited the Facebook Data of Millions (NYT, 2018)
No bias here.
It is a rationally induced bias.
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.
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.
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.
https://twitter.com/cld276/status/975564499297226752
https://twitter.com/cld276/status/975568130117459975
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:
https://twitter.com/mbsimon/status/975231597183229953
> 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
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.
[0] https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/sites/gsb/files/conf-presentati...
> 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.
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.
Rephrased: Both campaigns spammed non-signees, and it looks like the CA people spammed signees as well.
people who signed up for the app knew they would be explicitly
allowing this Obama-connected app access to info/friend data.
What on earth makes you think they "targeted friends"?
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