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Comment by closeparen | Hacker News Reader

Facebook is in trouble because it sold political influence at a price that previously non-mainstream actors could afford. Data is incidental to that scandal. Equifax suffered no meaningful consequences for its breach.

I understand that the HN consensus desperately wants your statement to be true, but that doesn’t make it so.

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> Facebook is in trouble because it sold political influence at a price that previously non-mainstream actors could afford.

Since there appears to be some confusion (it took me a few passes as well), I interpreted your statement as the following:

> Facebook is in trouble because it sold political influence at a discount from what previously only large nation-state actors could afford.

The implication, if I'm reading correctly, is that any mom-and-pop millionaire could practically launch the same sort of campaign on the platform. Or perhaps more succinctly and dramatically,

Facebook commoditized the weaponization of data.

Am I understanding correctly?

The traditional DNC/RNC campaign-finance and media-buy systems are not very efficient. They're also based on relationships. Candidates must appeal to broad coalitions of donors so that they can afford the TV airtime necessary to succeed. Ads must not be too damaging to the reputations of the career staffers and media companies putting them on the air. This tends to constrain the ideological space a successful candidate can occupy.

We saw a successful candidate from outside that space because the efficiency of Facebook's ad platform, plus a unique and possibly Russian-intelligence-supplied savvy in wielding it, obviated the need for (as much) donor consensus to achieve a winning level of influence. I don't know about "any mom and pop millionaire," but you need less of them in your court than you used to.

That scandal that has everyone up in arms is Facebook's complicity in Trump's election, which is a consequence of its enablement of extremists in general, which is a consequence of its ad platform's cost-efficiency, which is a consequence of its troves of user data. But it's not data that started a drumbeat of public intellectuals calling for heavy-handed intervention in the New York Times editorial section (a fingerprint we've seen before). It's influence. The establishment is (correctly) not trying to engage populism in a meme war. It's fighting back the way it knows how.

Politics are like medieval royalty. A complex inter-generational web of influence, alliances, and quid pro quo. Support of these influencers was required to earn votes, and policy had to repay these influencers - rather than voters.

Through the application of advanced techniques and data, Facebook enabled the circumvention of that at a shockingly lower cost than in the past.

That’s right. The numbers I’ve seen have been 10 million for the Mercer’s initial investment. This is a pathetic amount of money to bankroll an operation with such large scale effects. Assuming the Mercer’s eventual expenditure reached 10 times that, $100 million is like building a library in a middling size city. It’s an incredible return on a pittance of an investment.

This is a pathetic amount of money to bankroll an operation with such large scale effects

What effects though? The idea that CA’s strategies were effective has been disproven [1].

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/cambridge-analytica-facebook-...

I think the full amount of money and dark money involved in this will turn out to be staggering. Parscale bragged of spending $90m alone on FB ads. And that is just one highly visible piece of the puzzle.

Im amazed how sheryl sandberg hasnt been called out. Wasn't she supposed to be adult in the room

No! She is the one who is teaching Mark to play seasoned politics and not come to the townhall.

Facebook is in trouble because it sold political influence at a price that previously non-mainstream actors could afford

I’m curious exactly what you mean by this. If you’re saying that their paid ads system works well, that isn’t specific to political influence. Further, the recent scandal was over data abuse by third parties, and the reported effects of that have been proven to be dramatically overblown [1], so I assume that isn’t what you’re referring to. Finally, the notion that enough votes to change the election results were suppressed/changed by some Russian fake news articles mostly written in broken English is laughable.

So what exactly are you referring to here?

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/cambridge-analytica-facebook-...

>Further, the recent scandal was over data abuse by third parties

The most recent wave of Facebook's ongoing scandal revealed that data abuse by third parties was one implementation detail of Facebook's complicity in Trump's election. Facebook's troubles (calls for breakup, regulation, etc) started over its crime of making political influence too readily available to extremist ideologies.

Again, you aren’t explaining your basis for the idea that Facebook actually has political influence to make available to anyone. The idea that CA’s strategies worked to any degree has been disproven.

Also, not to get political, but would you be this upset over it if the other side had won and it turned out that they had employed a similar strategy (even if it had been proven ineffective, as CA’s strategy has)?

Did I indicate I was on board? Absolutely not. I think it's a disgrace that polite society is gearing up to wreck free speech on the internet just because we didn't like the result this time. But of the people calling to punitively regulate the tech industry now, only the tiny minority who've drunk the HN kool-aid are approaching it from a data-privacy perspective. The actual movement here is about Facebook's assistance to Trump and other extremist politicians, effective or not.

You're right, but that's exactly why you're seeing this.

Fact: the "wrong" candidate was elected (according to >50% of voters and >80% of American billionnaires). (wrong between quotes because obviously in a democracy there is no wrong election outcome, and that's a very good thing indeed, even if it is not what I would have liked)

Fact: he did so while being dramatically outspent by the other candidate (and with pretty much all tv stations supporting one candidate with the one exception being Fox, which cannot reasonably be accused of uniform support for Trump)

Fact: The entire bay area is up in arms about this, and has shown itself prepared to destroy people's careers over this.

(and yes, it was the economic situation created by Bush, and (much more so) by Obama, I get it. However, most voters do not get this)

Now you're right. Even if the Russians supported Trump, it cannot have been a great factor. Fake news is another issue that I find hard to believe swayed the election. And, truth be told, there is both democrats and republicans rigging votes, it's not going to make a huge difference.

You're right, BUT, seeing this, as a democrat in California or Florida, requires realizing

1) that they've lost. They were in power and fucked up the economy bad enough that they lost the election. The thing about elections is simple: there is always a change of the guard if the economy does badly. Always.

2) (on the part of large tv stations, newspapers, etc) that they've lost their influence. That Jeff Bezos' money spent on the Washington Post was just wasted money. That the owners of NBC, CBS, ABC ... cannot influence people more than facebook can.

3) Have you seen any interviews with Hillary's election team ? I mean I voted for her (DESPITE the war comments, wtf Hillary ?), but damn, these people are NOT taking a "live and let live" attitude here. At one point I thought she was going to attack the interviewer (for asking "why she failed" after she explained that they didn't fail, they were robbed).

So if you haven't noticed yet, people, especially in the Bay Area, are attacking anything and everything that is even remotely perceived as being on the side of Trump. And of course, Facebook has/had Peter Thiel, and nobody is happy with him.

You are right, the fault is with the democrats and how they handled governing, and how they handled the election, not with Facebook, Russians, Peter Thiel or whoever else will get blamed next month. The fault is with them. They can either admit fault or attack these evil outsiders, and, well, clearly they don't agree the fault is with them.

Any conversation that even veers slightly in the direction of politics immediately gets prefaced with a warning that Trump got elected. And we all know, this is a warning that if you support him, for the love of God, keep your mouth shut (I'm convinced that this merely hides his support, and he therefore has a LOT more support than is generally thought. I mean between 1/3 and 1/4 voted for him in the heart of the Bay Area. Where are these people ?).

Personally I find blaming myself a very healthy attitude to failure. Step 1. It's my fault. Why ? Because what I do myself is the only thing I can change, and that's the only tool I have to create a different outcome next time. So that's where I need to focus my effort. And yes, I can attack who "made me fail", real or perceived, or with conspiracies, but it's not going to get me a different outcome, it'll simply cement in the failure.

> Facebook is in trouble because it sold political influence at a price that previously non-mainstream actors could afford. Data is incidental to that scandal.

Would you care to elaborate? I'm curious and not entirely sure what you mean by this, sorry.

> Equifax suffered no meaningful consequences for its breach.

I don't think OP is claiming they did, but rather that it was part of the evolution towards thinking of data as a liability rather than an asset.

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