The Spinner | Hacker News Reader

The Spinner

thespinner.net

377 pointsMaysonL196 comments

I found this website really weird, with no "About us", so I searched some more.

"Elliot Shefler" (some publications put his name in quotes) is a co-founder, but he does not want to appear in photos and online profiles himself. He is Turkish-Jewish and spent most of his life working in ad-tech and online gambling. He claims his algorithms were developed by an agency with links to the Israeli military (this is repurposed military/PSYOP technology?). His whereabouts are unknown, circling between Germany, London, and LA.

In 2018 the price was 29$, now its 49$. Elliot claims $5.1 million revenue for 2018. Most customers are men, most customers want to initiate sex with a target. Nobody follows up to complain if it wasn't successful, since they are very much part of the conspiracy to manipulate. Elliot plans to share information with bigger advertisers: "A woman who wants a target to propose to her, would be in great proximity to a person that is in the market for an engagement ring".

This service is illegal in Europe, due to data protection and anti-tracking laws. The site has about 10 employees and one British company who works the contracts with bigger companies.

> “The value is in retention, not in the acquisition,” he said.

> He related a story about one insurance company he was commissioned work on, where he would target the insurance agents at the company to “brainwash and manipulate” them and change the perception of the company itself with the goal of retaining those agents.

> “We planned a similar campaign with a big pharmaceutical company that was targeting doctors (not patients—doctors) with articles about the benefits of a certain medicine.”

> ... if he feels the same targeting tools he leverages for The Spinner could be vulnerable to possible misuse, his response was matter-of-fact:

> “I would prefer using the word “effective” instead of ‘vulnerable.’ The answer is: highly effective.”

Very, very shady.

I think I know who built this, obviously, it wasn't Elliot Shefler

This is deplorable and hopefully some day grounds for prosecution by the people who were targeted and manipulated.

Wouldn’t that give cause to sue every single advertiser who attempts to target and manipulate potential customers?

Aka all of them? I agree this is despicable, but I’m curious how you make this illegal and not all of advertising.

Just make it illegal to target ads based on the people viewing them. You can still target to things like contexts, venues, areas, etc. but it would rule this out and it would eliminate the justification to farm so much personal info.

Ha! Twitter can target based on email. As soon as I signup for some services, I immediately get ads. Same with LinkedIn.

Banning targeting via email address, birth date, name and other personal identifiers would go a really really long way.

I work for a tracking company and I know how much power marketing folks have nowadays. It’s scary precise.

I too am in favor of bankrupting Google and returning to the old model of advertising where you put the car ads on car magazines and computer ads on computer magazines.

I see no problem with making all of advertising illegal as well. Good fucking riddance.

For those who find this horrifying, the [typically unstated] assumption is that it works. I'm pretty skeptical of this. Think about it: what do you imagine the effect size is of seeing 10 articles like "4 Secrets to Losing Weight and Feeling GREAT While You Do It!" in your Facebook feed? I'd bet it's essentially 0. If seeing these kinds of articles is all it took to improve our body composition, then we'd all be absolutely shredded.

I'm not trying to argue that advertising doesn't work. Clearly it does. But there's a huge difference between being exposed to tens of thousands of Coca-Cola ads over a lifetime, and being exposed to 10 spam articles over the course of a month.

I'm also not trying to argue that this isn't creepy. Clearly it is. But the real 'target' of this scheme is the person buying the ads. I doubt this has any real effect on the person who sees them.

Yeah, it comes off as more as a way of taking advantage of desperate people willing to try anything.

My apologies I'm using an app that is not intuitive to comment and read.

You have to remember the majority of people are both not tech savvy and don't pay attention to things like advertising trends.

My mother for example is heavily affected by the ads she sees on Facebook and other places. All it takes is one or two articles and I've had to talk to her a few times about being careful about the sites she visits and what she reads online.

So this service? This would be remarkably effective on people like her. This service isn't for people like us who are a bit more aware of how advertising works. It's for the majority of people.

For some scientific research into this subject, see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_(psychology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repetition_priming

(do note that this research suffers a bit from p-hacking).

There is a good chance that you were already targeted before, since online manipulation is used by the big militaries. Think back about 2 years, reading about SJW, politics, neo-nazis, antifa, BLM, manspreading, immigrants, the deep state, etc. Good chance at least some of your perception about these subjects was molded by just a few individuals. For instance, remember that Russian girl throwing bleach on "manspreaders" in the metro? You may have had a strong reaction to that, and it would be the desired effect of Russian troll-factory.

Specifically, on the effect of manipulating the Facebook feed to control behavior, Facebook did some controversial research themselves, where they used sentiment analysis to make a feed more or less positive. People who were fed negative feeds, started using negative words in their own status update: https://www.forbes.com/sites/gregorymcneal/2014/06/28/facebo...

> The marketing study suggested companies should "[c]oncentrate media during prime vulnerability moments, aligning with content involving tips and tricks, instant beauty rescues, dressing for the success, getting organized for the week and empowering stories... Concentrate media during her most beautiful moments, aligning with content involving weekend guides, weekend style, beauty tips for social activities and positive stories." The Facebook study, combined with last year's marketing study suggests that marketers may not need to wait until Mondays or Thursdays to have an emotional impact, instead social media companies may be able to manipulate timelines and news feeds to create emotionally fueled marketing opportunities.

Long term priming, as opposed to short term with gaps of a second or so, was one of the prime victims of the replication crisis and seems to actually not exist.

Priming is one of the psychology topics worst afflicted by p-hacking. Almost every prominent priming study has gone down in flames during the replication crisis. Consistent, repeated propaganda has real effects, priming doesn't.

Like said by the other poster, long-term priming is not proven nor disproven: Science needs better and more experiments. So we don't yet scientifically know enough about long-term priming to make a judgment on its effects. Short-term priming is well-established and has real measurable effects though. The prominent priming studies you refer to are the "exotic" studies -- these looked at less defined aspects of priming, and were found to be lacking.

> Amidst the recent furor over failures to replicate some empirical results on behavior priming, it is important to emphasize that some basic behavior-priming effects are real, robust, and easily replicable even if others are much more problematic.

For instance, your reply contains too many words starting with "p" and "pr" for it to be a mere coincidence :). (syntactical priming is something that authors or editors have to guard against, as it can make for poor quality writing).

> Like said by the other poster, long-term priming is not proven nor disproven:

If there is no evidence for it, there is little reason to be concerned about it at this point given how much research has gone into it.

Absence of evidence is no evidence of absence. You could put the Bayesian prior to be extremely low, but a zero chance would not make you a Bayesian anymore, it would make you a believer in that something is simply not possible (and no amount of scientific evidence would update your priors. It really is scientifically a mistake to claim: There exist no black swans. To proof that, one would have to observe all of existence. Now... should you worry about black swans, when all you see is white swans? Depends on you and the amount of risk managing. But that poster claimed all of priming is non-scientific, when we have clear replicated proof.

Suppose I run a fake investment company that pretends to double your money, but actually just steals it. Suppose you find out all my claims are lies, and demand your money back. How would you react if I said "The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. The prior probability of my investment strategy working is nonzero. Now give me more money."

Just pointing out that priors can't be zero isn't a principled stance, it's Pascal's mugging. You can use it to justify literally anything.

>Absence of evidence is no evidence of absence.

No shit. But at this point it’s pretty safe to not waste money building anti-aircraft guns to shoot down flying reindeer.

The prior for priming effects as strong as those claimed by psychology is, obviously, extremely low. After all, the only reason everybody knows about priming is that it got lots of press coverage, because it was surprising and unexpected. Now that we know the evidence for it is very weak, we can just go back to our original prior for it, which was very low.

In general this is true for almost all popular psychology results. They're all popular because they're surprising, which is what makes them interesting. And now we are learning that such surprises were only produced in the first place because the evidence for them was p-hacked. It turns out that there are no tiny hacks that radically change human behavior, beyond placebo effect.

I'm sure that psychology produces some real results, but whatever they are, they aren't what get reported in the New York Times, or TED talks, or bestselling pop science books.

The inability to quantify targeted advertising's worth at specific levels is probably seen as a benefit by those employed on both sides of the transaction (i.e. marketing side and serving side).

Isn't this what enabled the Brexit?

I mean, you can show people ads about "Are you an immigrant? Claim your government-sponsored house. We will help you to qualify even if you don't meet the criteria" and now you conceived the idea that the government is giving away free houses to immigrants and there's even a way to cheat the system and get a house even if you do not qualify.

As far as I remember they essentially divided people into categories through data gathered through facebook and targeted them with ads like this.

I guess if you can manage to put the cookie to identify your target you can run all kind of manipulative campaigns because you can change the perception of the reality.

You don't have to be honest and straightforward and speak directly to the target. Simply re-shape his/her reality.

Want a rise? Stalk your boss with ads about developer jobs with salaries way higher than yours. Your boss might start getting the idea of pay rise due to the false reality you prseented.

quote: 'I mean, you can show people ads about "Are you an immigrant? Claim your government-sponsored house. We will help you to qualify even if you don't meet the criteria" and now you conceived the idea that the government is giving away free houses to immigrants'

I think I actually saw an ad similar to that - my takeaway was "damn, these slimy scammers are targeting desperate immigrants", so I guess that means they didn't hit their target?

It might have a low chance of success on one particular person ... but target ten or a hundred thousand, and there will be some statistically significant shift. Advertising isn't a sniper rifle. It's a cluster bomb.

My immediate thought when I saw this was "Fancy scam mixed with PR bomb", a little digging surfaced these:

https://blogs.harvard.edu/doc/2019/02/27/spinner/

https://www.prexamples.com/2018/07/frustrated-husbands-can-u...

The harvard link touches on how he was using cheap Google Ads for this purpose. It reminds me of a shady "internet background check" company that I had the unfortunate pleasure of working with a few years ago. They were approaching, if not exceeding, this site in total shady tactics. One thing they did that their former-pill-pushing founders came up with which I did think was rather clever is they were able to buy Ad Words for cheap for various permutations of common given names and they used this to bootstrap their business to great effect.

It's certainly a bit sketchy in terms of site administration etc., but it is a one-man operation so I'd say it's understandable.

The less understandable part is that it's charging $50 for 180 impressions such as https://twitter.com/RichLeighPR/status/1037066048485371905 while Facebook sells those directly for a few dollars per 1000, i.e. 100x markup.

>The less understandable part is that it's charging $50 for 180 impressions such as https://twitter.com/RichLeighPR/status/1037066048485371905 while Facebook sells those directly for a few dollars per 1000, i.e. 100x markup.

Facebook does not allow you to build a custom audience of 1 person. I believe it has to be a minimum size of 100 or thereabout. Which means when Spinner says your target will get 180 impressions, they have to throw in 99 random non-targets into the targeted audience in order to get the placement. Thus they really aren't marking it up as much as you think.

They would batch them though, wait for 100 clients who want the same and put them in the batch. So it does provide a marginal service, viewed from that angle.

This is fucked up. At first I thought, of course this exists but no one would really fall for it. Scrolling through the offerings, I felt a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. Psychological warfare on-demand, only $50!

Having someone see more articles on the benefits of quiting smoking is messed up?

Involuntary psychological manipulation is messed up regardless of the intent.

Ads we see can already be increasingly targeted to a very narrow group of people, which is spun as "making the adds more relevant to you". Is it different when it's a slightly larger group size than one?

You're speaking in generalities. This site is dealing with real people, such as a man who wants more sex from his girlfriend (apparently the most requested "ad") and so secretly signs his girlfriend's phone up for a system where she is shown ads designed to manipulate her into giving her boyfriend what she wants.

You don't see how there's an ethical difference, between that and a corporation advertising its products towards a general demographic?

I'm not clear here: are you using this as an argument in favor of spinner and their service or as an argument against targeted ads because they're basically just this spinner on a larger scale?

If the latter, I'm with you.

I am against targeted ads at all scales because we have a lot of fallacies that we cannot really control all the time even if we are aware of them.

But the reactions to this service is slight proof that an organisation evokes lesser negative reactions than an individual

I think the greater reactions are due to the targetting of individuals rather than the entity acting.

Very interesting response! So marketing by large companies does not evoke such strong reactions but marketing by an individual does.

The service is fucked up. If a store sells machine guns and lollipops, the lollipops do not make it child-safe.

Like Wal-Mart?

I assume you’re engaging in hyperbole, but just in case you aren’t - machine guns have been strictly regulated in the US for nearly a century.

To speak directly to your point, yes, actually, because now people who want to rationalize smoking can do so by being suspicious of a conspiracy to feed them slanted information.

Not if you are doing it for yourself, but manipulating a loved one in this way is messed up - even with good intentions.

Of course this is already happening on a massive scale. Perhaps having someone openly admit to it will help make people more aware.

I believe HN Does not allow people to question gaslighting on HN.

I never understood why. Mods claim it "doesn't add to the topic".

I don't recall ever saying either of those things.

Ironically, that could be portrayed as gaslighting on your part - not that I think it is.

It's no secret that content moderators moderate content. Most of the stuff on HN is shaped by a few people who gets to decide what's interesting enough to get a boost or not.

It definitely feels like gaslighting when you notice it happening. For example a few times I know I made a comment on an old article the day before but it didn't get traction. But then it would be on the frontpage again the next day with all the timestamps manipulated to seem fresher, including on my own comments! I know I was sleeping at that time so then I start questioning my sanity and whether I was sleepwalking or not!

That last bit sounds like you ran into the second-chance pool (described at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380), which involves modifying timestamps when re-upping. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19774614 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16117291.

Most of HN isn't shaped by moderators boosting stories. But some of it is. The intention is just to make the site more interesting to the community. We don't always get that right, because sometimes the stories we think people will like just get flagged, and in that case we usually accede to the flaggers and unboost the thing. But most of the time it seems to work out.

Can you clarify, because while you've said gaslighting HN users is, "an egregious violation of the guidelines and a bannable offense on HN" [1], you're also saying the _questioning_ of gaslighting is allowed? Given the nature of gaslighting, those things seem one in the same, do they not?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16608054

Uh, I think the problem in your example is the "How much did Putin pay you to..." part. That's indeed against the rules.

ratww already pointed this out, but the issue from our point of view was implying that the other commenter was not posting in good faith (how much is $baddie paying you). The concept of gaslighting didn't really enter into it.

I really appreciate your supplying a specific link. It's amazing how rare that is! and makes it so much easier to respond accurately.

I think this is called Sniper Targetting [1] or providing ads for a single audience.

Earlier I had read about someone who tried to spook his roommate by targetting him with heavily-personalized ads. Cannot seem to find it now.

[1]: https://medium.com/@MichaelH_3009/sniper-targeting-on-facebo...

Yeah, the roommate story is great! You can read it here:

The Ultimate Retaliation: Pranking My Roommate with Targeted Facebook Ads. https://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking...

Yeah. That one. Thanks.

Would a service like this work on people who don't use the popular social networks?

E.g. I get my news + dopamine from the local newspaper (physical paper edition) and HN, respectively. Ofc HN pretty much qualifies as a social network, but it has no targeting. My girlfriend isn't on any social network at all, unless WhatsApp qualifies as one and IMO it doesn't, unless you have a gazillion active group chats (which sounds like hell on earth).

I'm inclined to think that this makes both of us immune to attacks like the ones performed by this company, but I have an uneasy feeling that I'm missing something. Anyone with a better insight in targeting hacks than me able to chip in?

If you click through to other sites, such as news sites, blogs, web comics, and so on, they may be loading ads from adtech companies, which may be retargeted based on your browser cookies without involving any social media site.

So your overall vulnerability to this targeting has more to do with what your browser does (such as whether it blocks trackers and expires or removes some cookies) and what sites you visit (in terms of where they choose to embed ads from).

Anywhere you can see retargeted ads online you could be targeted.

WhatsApp group chats were used to spread carefully crafted opposition memes and fake news.

So, while you may be safe against 50$ campaigns, it could be a false sense of security. For 5000$-50000$ I am sure I can get a special message in front of your face: Take out local ads, plant a newspaper story, create a huge story about your controversial 5-million-dollar-revenue website on HackerNews (remember, no such thing as bad publicity, this website will see their customers spike today!)

> He banked on people hate-tweeting it. “I don’t mind what they feel, as long as they think something”, Halib said – which is scarily like something I’ve said in talks I’ve given about coming up with PR ideas that bang.

They should add an “expose target to qanon and conspiracy theories”-option. There was an article not too long ago about what obsessing over this can do to personal relationships. It was not pretty.

Lollll

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? You've done it a lot, and we're trying for a bit better than that here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Initially I was disgusted, but, then I realized I'd be interested in a "Make your parents skeptical of Fox News" option.

Like any technology it can be used for good or evil ... but it has to be said ... anger is a helluva drug.

Considering how many stories CNN, ABC and MSNBC have gotten wrong (and retracted the next morning), I'm not sure they're any better. At least Fox's bias is obvious. They also tend to have a more diverse guest list in terms of political leaning.

BTW, I really don't watch much Fox news, I tend to read about things a few days after they have happened. When I stay active on twitter, it's all a cesspool of lies, and I am pretty sure the news media is part of it.

>They also tend to have a more diverse guest list in terms of political leaning.

I'm going to need to see some evidence for that one because it doesn't match what I've seen at all.

That evidence is stored on the other side of the looking glass, you can see them, but you’re gonna have to jump.

I watched Fox News regularly until 2015 or so, so unless the changed dramatically since then the statement about them having more politically diverse guests is just wrong.

I've been leaving copies of The Atlantic at my parents' house and it hasn't made a dent. I think the problem is campaigns like "Stop believing conspiracy theories!" are really hard to pull off, especially when compared to "Here's a new conspiracy theory!"

This feels like a satire. But it's not. My god. We are truly living in the end of days.

Also the title is purposely inflammatory (if not also true).

I thought this was going to be an exposé about how SaaS platforms changing functionality or UI design with little or no notice are undermining employee confidence and causing loss of productivity but it seems it more like Cambridge Analytica does inception?

The title is not good, but I’m not sure this isn’t satirical, based on the ”Get Your Kid A Dog!” campaign.

The terms and conditions, alongside with the technical detail (see targeting link) make it believably legit.

Also the "100% Natural" badge :)

Spinners usually say this to distinguish themselves from automated spinning tools.

I feel like most of the options are really only there to provide cover for the creepy ones. Another comment said that "Initiate Sex!" is their most popular campaign by far.

Oh god. Spot on! At first I was having a hearty chuckle. Then there was some disbelief. And then it hit me like a hammer. Yes, it is possible. Yes, it is being done. Yes, you are a target for these nudges and chances are, you will not notice them amidst the daily stream of garbage. And, finally... the title is spot on in a reverse kind of way: it did make me doubt my own decisions over the past few years...

It's not just the overt attempts in ad traffic... there's tweaking to how your feeds work from Twitter, Facebook and Google/YouTube themselves. There is definitely a LOT of meddling going on, much of it to shape the elections next year.

I'm really not sure. The "get started" buttons go to some sign up page. Is this some kind of next-level art piece? It feels too cheeky to be real.

That has me wondering, too. Has anyone tried signing up?

Someone did, yes: https://twitter.com/RichLeighPR/status/1037066048485371905

Sooo I guess it is serious and not just some art piece. That’s disgusting.

A positive way to think about it is that now everyone can be their own Rupert Murdoch and control public discourse in their own small way. It's basically democratizing the ability to influence political thought.

Of course as other commenters are positing - there are definitively many negative ways to look at it that are more realistic.

Is it though? I recently bought some clothes, if I signed up with their mailing list I got a 10% discount. The salesperson asked tentatively, afraid I was going to start shouting or something about sending me emails, invasion of privacy etc. I said sure, gave them one of my fake emails, got my discount, sweet.

Like all this internet stuff is just fake, it's more entertainment than real life. Emails you don't like? delete them. Don't want people to find you on facebook, use a made up name, get all your friends to use made up names.

My daughter recently tried to search my on the internet - I don't exist, much to her chagrin. But we're linked on facebook, we share photos etc.

The only thing that does exist is purely professional, maybe these are skills that should be taught. No doubt facebook can do something with face recognition, and google can do some tracking, but I don't leave cookies lying around long, so they're pretty weak signals.

I appreciate the “this is evil” analysis, but I have a different take on it:

Packaging this capability for everyday people is exactly what we need to get widespread understanding of what is being done to them, and begin to build social defenses.

Political parties, corporations, and all kinds of bad actors are doing this stuff all the time. People need to find ways to externally validate their realities. I don’t see any way that can happen besides widespread adoption of consumer psyops tools.

It feels like Pandora’s Box has been opened, and we need to get comfy with the monsters as a first step, if we are to subdue them.

Yes — this is the thing that will make it click for the ordinary people: that when we talk about online advertising, it’s not the digital equivalent of printed magazine ads we’re talking about, we’re talking about this.

This, bought en masse, by most companies on Earth.

I’m tempted to use this as a demonstration to a friend who still doesn’t believe me about targeted ads and the maliciousness of social media companies. I’d pay them to target her with an obviously irrelevant idea (have kids for example, considering she’s against kids and does not want any) and hand her an encrypted flash drive with a message saying I did that beforehand. A few weeks later I’d ask her about it and give her the key to decrypt the drive and read my message.

You can also write your message locally and just email her the hash, then you can prove you had the original message.

`echo -n "MESSAGE" | shasum -a 256`

I think encryption is much more readily understood by nontechnical people than hashing, though.

While I agree with you 100% for the general public I think if someone is manually decrypting a file (assumedly with gpg) they understand enough to get hashing. Now if you want to get into the realm of really "understood" by the public you should just send a Word doc or zip file with a password on it.

Yes, the latter is the kind of thing, no need for gpg complexity. The original comment talked about an encrypted flash drives, and that's usually done in a fairly accessible way.

A few years ago Facebook had less stringent limitations on its ad targeting, and I believe Chris Soghoian was able to target ads to individual people (from the Google public policy team, if I remember correctly) by specifying enough intersecting demographic criteria related to each individual target. This probably doesn't work anymore because big tech companies have gotten stricter about how small the pool of targets for a demographically-targeted ad campaign can be.

At one point, you might have been able to create a non-retargeting-based ad campaign that would only have targeted your friend!

Edit: another amazing example using a different method is discussed elsewhere in this thread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21094682.

You might find that she was unswayed and you learned the ineffectiveness of targeted advertising for that specific person. After reading the message, "Sure I saw the ads, cared about them as much as any other - ignored them".

I was curious as to how it all works, from the FAQ:

>The Spinner* sends you an innocent looking link. This link is sent to the target via text message. When the target presses the link, a cookie connected to the link attaches itself to the target’s phone. From that point on, the target will be strategically bombarded with articles and media tailored to him or her.

So it's using a tracking cookie and the victim needs to click a link before anything happens. More from the FAQ:

>Thanks to an online advertising technique called "retargeting", the service makes sure that only the target sees the content chosen for her or him.

I assume Google Ad's remarketing (or SaaS, "stalking as a service") is what was meant: https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/2453998?hl=en&r...

So as far as I can tell, the whole thing is just using marketing features built into Google Ads.

What? How are they controlling what articles the target sees via a cookie? What am I missing here?

It's based on remarketing technology. Just like Amazon can drop a cookie on your browser so they can later show you ads to convince you to come back and complete the blender purchase you have sitting in your cart, this site is offering to drop a cookie on the target and then show them ads for whatever message you would like to show.

My guess they're setting ad preferences cookies for certain ad networks that are then used by various sites as pay-per-click revenue for the hosting sites. So when you'd see an ad served from Google's* ad network or Outbrain* or someone, it's as if the target had told those ad networks what kind of advertising interests them more than others.

* These are named as examples of ad networks and I don't mean to imply they are used in this scheme and definitely not that they would be complicit or cooperative with it.

No, I imagine this is more like you tell them your target's screename and then they just use regular ad analytics to target that person specifically.

After paying, you can select 3 popular articles, or create your own URL to link to. The service creates a shortened link (goo.gl) which, when clicked, drops the tracking cookie, and redirects to the article/own URL.

Then they give you an important notice: the person you targeted with that link (which you are responsible for sending!) should also be referred to the terms of service of the Spinner. Sneaky loophole, where nobody will do that ("Hey honey, click this link and then visit this manipulation website to agree with the TOS!"), but they seemingly covered their asses, targeting people who never agreed to a TOS.

Yes. the website says they spam a link to sms, and if user clicks drop a cookie. I'm skeptical it will work on iOS especially since most of these spam-y 'native' networks use 3rd party still it seems.

I've done similar 'hyper target decision makers' and I think they'd have more success using emails to match, @twitter handles, idfa etc, and or dropping FB's remarking code.

You might need to fake/expand minimum sized group to get spend but the value in reaching your top 10 decision makers outweighs also reaching another 490 or whatever needed to hit minimum match sizes.

You can do hyper-local advertising to target someone in a particular zip code...

Wish they had a campaign to convince my boss that working from home is a win-win situation.

Sounds like a great opportunity for a GoFundMe campaign.

OP, what do you think "gaslighting" means here?

Interesting the difference between the topline description "exposed to hundreds of items disguised as editorial content" and the one later in the page "10 articles". Could it be that a company which sells deception is playing a bit fast and loose with its claims?

Also, I think it would be very interesting to set up a honeypot for this and see what kinds of changes it drives. Anyone interested in splitting the cost for an experiment?

The hundreds of items could be links to the 10 articles.

The FAQ clarifies it as "a set of 10 different articles presented to the target 180 times over the course of three months."

Frankly I'm surprised this isn't augmented with some sort of hyperlocal lat/long or zip-code based targeting to, for example, influence all the workers at a specific office building. It wouldn't take much for a company to bombard it's competitor's staff members with wacky conspiracy theories and/or other things to make them less effective.

I think I have seen this link[0] posted a few times in related posts (I might have shared it as well).

[0] http://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-...

You can do the same exact thing with facebook advertising. People have done it (job ads, apartments, etc.). This is just targeted at banner/Web vs. social media.

Doesn't make it any more or less icky, just saying that it's not the only method/it's happening already.

Reminds me of something about a true crime case on TV.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/48-hours-drawn-to-murder/2/

>But the plan went still further: at one point, police duped a newspaper reporter into writing a phony story saying an arrest was imminent. They even left a copy of Tim's mother's obituary on the windshield of a friend's truck.

>"That's torture," says Tim's former attorney, Erik Fischer. "They're trying to get this poor kid to relive his mother's death. They're trying to make him snap! It's a psychological experiment to try to make him snap!"

I regularly use seven browsers: Three different ones at work, two different ones on my home desktop and three different ones on my phone.

My webmail intentionally runs in it's own browser profile which is only used for opening links in email. If the tracking cookie attached there it wouldn't apply to nearly any of my usual web browser usage.

If you use Chrome for your browser, you can create a new profile and "web app" to run your web mail in. In Firefox, pin your web mail to a container. (Hopefully links followed from there stay in the container?)

On your phone, open links from email in chat in Firefox Focus unless you have reason to do otherwise. In settings disable third party cookies. (Firefox Focus still allows normal cookies by default)

This is assuming you don't use gmail, and sign into any other sites on your main browser profile using google credentials, of course.

The real trick is to search for brands advertised in a magazine meant for a different demographic as you.

Beyond that, IP addresses are the primary identifier on the internet, and all other tracking is meant to differentiate between different users on a single IP address.

Temporary containers are a nice plug-in for Firefox.

My first thought was that it was subscription service for people who don't know how to re-light their furnace pilot light when it goes out. My second thought was - Is that a huge addressable market, but what do I know?

Then I clicked the link.

Didn't Facebook for a while have the ability to target a single individual for ads? I seem to remember seeing some things on HN about people doing this a while back. Makes sense that someone would turn it into a service.

Yes, and I think they still technically do. At some point they changed it from a single target email to requiring 20, but you could get around this by uploading 19 others of a different gender, then use gender as a filter later on when creating the target list.

In the next couple years a couple things are going to happen:

1) This (or something like it) will go open source. 2) An AI will be made to generate campaigns automatically. This can either use articles selected with some sort of sentiment analysis, or by generating the content itself with the next gen GPT-2.

Neal Stephenson talked about this more then 10 years ago in the book Anathem, calling them "Artificial Inanity Engines."

> * According to The Spinner's terms of use, if the initiator of the Spinner service (i.e. the party that ordered and/or paid for the service) sends the 'targeting link' to any user via any digital media, it’s the initiator’s responsibility to refer the recipient to The Spinner's terms of use and privacy policy.*

Uh huh.

And it literally starts by you sending them an "innocuous looking" link. How does someone actually justify to themselves that doing something like this is even slightly okay? I'd feel deeply disturbed doing this to someone even if it was for a "good cause" like getting them to quit smoking.

I don't know why but the Spinner video reminded me of the Friendface ad[1]. Maybe because both are hilarious in some ways and horrifying.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rNgCnY1lPg

FT has an interesting article on it from last year: https://www.ft.com/content/944d068c-8a99-11e8-affd-da9960227...

"The Spinner* sends you an innocent looking link. This link is sent to the target via text message. When the target presses the link, a cookie connected to the link attaches itself to the target’s phone."

Is this legal? I never click on links sent via SMS.

The person setting this up gets sent the link from The Spinner, and then has to figure out how to get it loaded on the target's device. Texting it to someone who trusts you (enough to click on a link anyway) is one way to get it done.

Their FAQ says it's legal! ...In the same section that says users are required to show targets the terms of use and privacy policy.

I wonder if it's possible to build a defense service to this.

Counter PsyOps as a service (if built, social networks should probably build it in for free).

Make something that can detect if your stories seem to be manipulated and show stories that counteract that.

Maybe something like an Ad-blocker would work.

> Message: Prevent Phishing Attacks!

> Target: Employeess

Hmmm

The site took so long to load that I thought it was for showing the loading spinner tab icon, which also fit the name of the site. I had to go wait it out after reading the comments which seemed unrelated to the first experience.

Is there anything stopping someone from abusing paid ad services for any of these platforms themselves to the same effect? This is assuming that they allow you to finely target the ads which I believe they do.

No. I think they are doing exactly that: They pay ad services like Outbrain pennies to run retargeting ads. The Spinner has no own platform, they just bid on the market (and can really lowball the bid, until some will go through). Real costs are about 0.50$ - 5$ so the markup is huge.

Not really. There was a story about someone pranking their roommate with targeted Facebook ads but FB then raised the minimum amount of people targeted. However as far as I know nothing prevents you from specifying a majority of fake emails/phone numbers in addition to your target’s phone number as long as you’re happy to pay for the extra wasted fake targets.

This is gross, shut this shit down now. There's no honest use for this. The only people who'll use it are psychopaths, we don't need to empower them, especially when it's as cheap as $50.

So we should only empower rich psychopaths to target very select sets of people (like with FB ads)? :)

So let's keep this service only accessible to the wealthy and influential? It might be a good thing that you can point to a consumer facing website like this and say "look, anyone can gaslight you for cheap, anyone!"

I don’t disagree, but how is it different from corporations, who’s using exactly same methods to deliver the message “purchase our crap”?

The only reason they are paying more than $50, they’re buying more than 180 impressions.

Big tech companies are already doing this to influence public opinions.

Keep in mind that large companies are already using the surveillance and advertising complex to influence behavior, and have been for years. This just puts it in the hands of anyone with $50 to spend.

Hmm, I’m curious using this on oneself to encourage pro-social behavior or reinforce new habits.

Would it have a known placebo effect where even if you knew it was spun you’d still be influenced?

We are currently running tests on Putin. Will be a few years before the results are available though.

Well, I just opened the link and Facebook started showing ads related to "Marrying my partner", "Initiate sex", funny thing because I'm single

This is manipulation and quite despicable imho.

Besides I'd rather make my own "nudging" (or spearphishing) campaign and save a few bucks if need ever showed.

Advertisement is manipulation.

I never said it wasn't - this is manipulative against someone you have a relationship (of some sort) with.

I think Darren Brown claims to use short term persuasive power to influence people to drastically change their mind about intimate things.

He claims that but it isn't true. He's a magician doing tricks.

Poor man's Cambridge Analytica!

Product suggestion: bump the price to $99 and 20 x the traffic over a longer delivery window. You need more impressions than offered to meaningfully affect target beliefs. You can mix in cheaper ad space as well.

None of these have a direct call to action.... thus you need additional impressions to build recall or trigger inception.

Would be interested to hear someone who actually had success with this.

Firefox will block all the tracking cookie! So can not apply to me! ;)

Apparently the guy who set it up is from Turkey but lives in Germany

Illegal in Europe. You need to agreement for this kind of tracking.

Fascinating. This is propaganda war at a micro scale.

Sounds like an episode of Black Mirror.

This is like a shitty SecretNudge.com

This is very much akin to the "weapons-grade" tools used by the likes of Cambridge Analytica and AIQ to manipulate the minds of Trump and Brexit voters, using ill-gotten Facebook data to work out exactly what pushes people's buttons.

Tools like this will now be used during every election/voting cycle, forever.

Extremely worrying, but inevitable.

This has got to be a joke

Exactly what I though. It's very Poe's Law.

lol Poor man's Cambridge analytica!

I think I know who built this

The HN title is incorrectly using "gaslight," and the website makes no mention of gaslighting.

> Gaslighting is a form of psychological manipulation in which a person seeks to sow seeds of doubt in a targeted individual or in members of a targeted group, making them question their own memory, perception, and sanity.

Without trying to be pedantic, I think bombarding people with false (or "spun") information that is in contrast to their views, principles, or beliefs through a long period of time would make them question their perception(s). I get that probably wouldn't change people's memory or sanity however.

Gaslighting usually involves lying about past interactions, not surrounding a person with persuasive material.

Correct - at the root of gaslighting is a bold-faced lie. From the source, it refers to a story where the husband turns down, and then back up, the gas-lights in their house continually, and denies that he is changing anything to his wife when she inquires why the light level keeps changing. Thus the term, "gas-lighting".

There was no mention of false information being involved.

I took "disguised as editorial content" to be false information - which is mentioned in the two sentence at the top of the site.

You never had a memory of some childhood event that feels super real, and yet you're positive that you couldn't really remember it - you've just had that memory implanted as a result of hearing the story told over and over by your parents or older siblings? There's also a solid body of evidence that this can happen sometimes to adults during police investigations when innocent people start to actually believe that they've actually committed the crime. When such double memories are encountered that can be very disturbing experience to a person, it feels like going crazy, as you don't know what is real. Our minds are fragile systems and under pressure some personalities start to decompose relatively quickly so I'm pretty convinced it's possible to drive someone insane that way.

Why not?

Our memory is a unreliable narrator and sanity might change overtime too. Why do you think those wouldn't be affected if you find yourself being victim to purposefully wrong and harmful information?

Form of manipulation? Check. Sowing seeds of doubt? Check. Targeted individual? Check. Make them question their own perception? Check.

I’m pretty okay with their use of the word by your own definition.

What? This is just targeted suggestion/propaganda. There is nothing here to degrade the target's self-worth or make them question their own perception.

You underestimate how powerful suggestion / propaganda is. If you keep getting told you're a worthless person, eventually you'll absorb it into your own psyche.

That is a matter of content not technique; "New research suggests people that use internet handles starting with Homo have tiny penises and poor reasoning skills" - See? Targetted propaganda that denigrates...

Then any media service which lets a user deliver a message enables gaslighting. HN is a gaslighting service because it allowed you to deliver denigrating content to me.

No, gaslighting is systematically disorienting a person by staging confusing events, and blaming that confusion on the target themself. A one-way pipeline of targeted ads is not gaslighting, unless you call your wife crazy when she complains about all these weird ads she's seeing. But that's not what this service is automating.

You are targeting the author of the parent comment and making them question their perception of the meaning of 'gaslighting'.

Yes, though gaslighting is a subset of the possible uses for this tool.

In the opposite direction, you could choose to reinforce current ideas. Which, due to confirmation bias, would probably be easier than gaslighting.

From a utilitarian moral perspective, quite a few of the messages they present are actually good ones: quit smoking, drive carefully. Even the one about women initiating sex helps fight against sexist gender roles that women have to wait for the man to initiate everything.

But those are also things people may be comfortable just asking up front.

Of course other messages like "quit your job" for a coworker just seem spiteful and mean spirited.

Agreed. The wiki article goes further to describe common components of gaslighting:

>>Three most common methods of gaslighting are:

Hiding: The abuser may hide things from the victim and cover up what they have done. Instead of feeling ashamed, the abuser may convince the victim to doubt their own beliefs about the situation and turn the blame on themselves.

Changing: The abuser feels the need to change something about the victim. Whether it be the way the victim dresses or acts, they want the victim to mold into their fantasy. If the victim does not comply, the abuser may convince the victim that he or she is in fact not good enough.

Control: The abuser may want to fully control and have power over the victim. In doing so, the abuser will try to seclude them from other friends and family so only they can influence the victim's thoughts and actions. The abuser gets pleasure from knowing the victim is being fully controlled by them.

If targeting ads and content to an individual is 'gaslighting', then yeah - I'd say most internet/social media co's have a problem on their hands.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting#Usage

>If targeting ads and content to an individual is 'gaslighting', then yeah - I'd say most internet/social media co's have a problem on their hands.

I mean, that opinion is pretty in-vogue right now, isn't it?

Gaslighting is a negative term. You don't want to gaslight your family member, you just want to help them, which this service enables you to do.

Just because the copy doesn't mention it doesn't mean it's not there.

Oh, I’m sure many a traditional gaslighter had every intention of helping their victim.

The issue I take is with the complete lack of informed consent at play here. I’m not willing to see that as a positive. The toxic behavior in secretly manipulating for “good” far outweighs any altruism in my book.

There could be a service that does help people, but it would have to be different from this service.

When someone is struggling with something, often the most difficult step is changing habits. Them knowing they have a problem can help, and it is an important step, but it's not enough by itself.

Ok, we've changed the title to that of the page. Submitted title was "Gaslighting as a Service".

I don't believe this was a good call. The title was accurate before, and the meaning of the submission has been substantively changed. Now it uses the title of the site - something we're explicitly asked not to do as part of the HN Guidelines.

As a reader, there's a real difference between deciding to upvote the original title (an observer's description of an inherently deceptive project) versus casting a vote on what it's been changed to (a brand name used to promote that project). I would absolutely upvote an article critical of The Spinner - while at the same time, I'd downvote a promotional submission.

OP did not intend to advertise The Spinner, they intended to expose it as a deceptive project without linking to third-party press coverage. The submission title absolutely matters.

If this changes your mind, please go with the original again.

This is a pretty rare case. I'd say the commenters made it abundantly clear that the project is not to be taken at face value, so in a way the title is not so important. Upvoting the submission doesn't mean you support what the site is saying or doing. It's more that you think it deserves attention, relative to the other articles that are in play that day.

The HN guidelines do ask submitters to use the site's title "unless it is misleading or linkbait" (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). That's why we changed it.

I referred to "if the title includes the name of the site, please take it out, because the site name will be displayed after the link" but I get that this may apply in particular to "Washington Post: " etc.

Point about importance vs. endorsement is well taken; I would rather not give any publicity to this project without couching it in explicit criticism, but that's a personal choice.

This is absolutely a gaslighting, OP. The linked website even mentioned "gaslighting" several times. You might've missed this or maybe your original perception of the concept of gaslighting was wrong.

I laughed uncontrollably. I knew it was one of those classic 2000s style hoax sites like Coincidence Design ($40k private investigator to find out everything to make someone fall in love with you), or Penguin Warehouse (penguins as pets) or Pets or Food ... all funny, none real.

But wait .. this is ... real? Like they take real money from people? .... huh ... what was that quote about how everything that was once parody is reality?

This is some serious Poe's Law stuff here.

I thought it was satire. Satire died in 2016, but I still haven’t learned.

Looks like the CIA finally got some competition.

This is crazy but cool

Right, so it's malware? Good old malware which once upon a time was frowned upon. Keep on top of that really special person who has a restraining order on you.

I don't think it's malware, it sounds like it's just using retargeting ads.

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