Hacker News Reader

Comment by freeflight | Hacker News Reader

I consider myself a rather well-informed person, but this is the first time I've read about Harris Media involvement in the last German election and I'm German. All I can remember is indeed the "Russian interference" and how the AfD is supposedly financed out of Russia.

But that Bloomberg Businessweek article [0] unearths some scary details:

“We took that 300,000 (AfD likes), and Facebook created a model of them and used their lookalike audiences to find the closest 1 percent of German people to match that audience,”

That "1 percent" sounds extremely familiar, particularly in a far-right context [1] It makes me wonder who originally came up with that concept, was it Harris Media or was it the idea of their client, the AfD?

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-29/the-germa...

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ein_Prozent_f%C3%BCr_unser_Lan...

View on HN

Why do you find this story scary? It seems like a sensible way for a political party to get votes: profile your current supporters, find other people who fit that profile, convince those people to vote for you too.

As for Russian interference, the article you linked to says this: "The Russian meddling that German state security had been anticipating apparently never materialized. Instead, the foreign influence came from America."

> It seems like a sensible way for a political party to get votes

Democracy was about educated voters, I thought. If you find this acceptable, we're on different planets. Perhaps ask a German about slippery political slopes? Or live long enough and find yourself in the middle of one.

> the article you linked to says this: "The Russian meddling that German state security had been anticipating apparently never materialized. Instead, the foreign influence came from America."

It also says "While the Russian episode involved ads bought under false identities by people with Kremlin ties" which you must have seen if you'd searched for 'russia'. How this statement links with the one you found, I don't know.

> Democracy was about educated voters, I thought.

So trying to convince voters is undemocratic because voters are supposed to be educated before they become potential voters (and therefore don't require convincing)? Or is it just that you shouldn't try to convince them with simplified messages that don't reflect the actual complexity of the universe? Or that you shouldn't do it via Facebook?

> because voters are supposed to be educated before they become potential voters

yes, in that they make up their own minds rather than be open to influence by those with most money.

> Or is it just that you shouldn't try to convince them with simplified messages that don't reflect the actual complexity of the universe?

Such messages tend to be of the form 'vote X! Y is crap!'. Or outright lies (qv. certain leaders) That's not even a simplified messages, the first is pure tribalistic emotive, the second, well, it misrepresent reality (aka 'wrong' or 'deceitful' or 'lie').

If the were factually based and told both sides I guess I'd be OK with it.

> Or that you shouldn't do it via Facebook?

No, facebook is just a tool. How that tool is used is what makes it right or wrong.

I think here American and German sentiment differ. From the American perspective the informed general public comes as a result of every ambitious group of people trying to pull you in their direction and you using as much of that input as possible to create a model that you can use for your personal gain. In sum of all the selfish actions a more objective result is achieved than with previous political models. So nobody is responsible to educate you but yourself. And it is assumed that everybody tries hardest to improve their own life independent of the General Good.

That's at least how I understand the Americans.

I've heard similar regarding how they do things in the US, though your expression is more extreme. If true that has to be the most inefficient and corrosive way of improving anything.

> If the were factually based and told both sides I guess I'd be OK with it.

Do you have an example of a message that you'd be okay with?

I'm a brit and I suppose I'd describe myself as a remainer. That is itself a label which I don't like, but let it ride.

So an example message I'd be OK with is if bojo (boris johnson) had said that the uk gives 160 million (or 199 million[0]) a week to the EU, instead of his claim that it was £350 million a week (which deliberately and dishonestly ignored the rebate), I'd be OK with that.

I fear that tribalism is a disease that's damaging both the UK and the US at the moment; make your point with facts as far as possible.

[0] dependng on how you count, I've heard both figures

I guess that would quickly end up being a judgement call, since there are barely any things that aren't connected to other things, so mentioning a single fact without mentioning the others could be said to be deliberately ignoring the other.

And since we typically vote on our shared expectations, "no false claims" would probably mean everybody has to shut up. That might be a good thing, I don't know. I don't believe in the power of elections to bring about change (whatever party wins will have very little room for maneuvering), so maybe removing the loud and divisive parts of them might be helpful. Basically: if they don't help, we can at least make them less harmful.

Lies are lies. Some are more evident than others. This was blatant. If you do not care about facts and truth then don't complain about the world you're allowing to be created by liars. Don't complain about shoddy products sold as good quality, don't expect contracts to mean anything, don't complain when politicians are dishonest. Do expect a race to the bottom, that bottom being a very ugly place.

> yes, in that they make up their own minds rather than be open to influence by those with most money.

The entire point of profiling is to spend less money, or spend their money more efficiently, by only advertising to a smaller part of the population.

If you have tons of money, you can just carpet bomb the entire population with your message.

> The entire point of profiling is to spend less money

This totally misses my point.

"Spending less" was not really what happened there:

"Although Canter gave up on getting the display ads approved, he did keep paying for the Google search term “Angela Merkel,” which it linked to the Oath Breaker site. The Merkel campaign could’ve paid Google more money to displace the ad, but, to Canter’s disbelief, it never did. “We’ve been running search on Merkel’s name, calling her ‘Oath Breaker,’ and pointing to a very ugly website about her,” Canter said, laughing. “If it was us, we’d say, ‘You need to invest to get that ad bumped down.’ ”

For US Americans this might not be anything out of the ordinary, after all, "money=speech" and political campaigns mostly focusing on tearing down the opposition have been the norm for decades.

But for the German political landscape, where political parties are publicly funded to ensure a somewhat level playing field (at least in theory) this is a complete perversion.

Particularly the change in tone in the political discourse, it's become extremely toxic, apparently in no small parts due to the introduction of US American campaign tactics.

> But for the German political landscape, where political parties are publicly funded to ensure a somewhat level playing field (at least in theory) this is a complete perversion.

Public funding is only a part (about ~30%), donations and member fees contribute far more.

As for that being totally new, I don't think so. The AfD is the only new addition in recent years which changed a lot and still takes adjustments (though I don't know if it's actually that different from the Greens way back when - only they aren't conservative, so they wouldn't have used the patriotism angle and websites weren't a thing).

If you read the sentence before the one you very selectively quoted, or even just completed the very sentence you quoted, it becomes clear the sentence is talking about the US presidential election, not the German one: "That’s a paltry sum for Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, who finds himself in the greatest crisis of his career over the company’s role in Russia’s meddling with the U.S. election. While the Russian episode involved ads bought under false identities by people with Kremlin ties, the AfD campaign was completely different—the party literally walked through Facebook’s front door and introduced itself, a strategy Harris Media intends to repeat."

I messed up, thanks for catching it. My mistake. Upvoted.

> Why do you find this story scary? It seems like a sensible way for a political party to get votes: profile your current supporters, find other people who fit that profile, convince those people to vote for you too.

I'm going to take the bold stance that: yes, fascists renting time on sophisticated ad networks to spread pro-fascist propaganda is in fact scary.

This is not a case of a simply political party pushing a policy agenda. This is a dangerous, militant and xenophobic group attempting to target individuals with materials designed to stoke fear and subtly misinform the public.

So yeah, it is scary. It's also scary that they had help from American interests. It speaks to how far right American politics are sliding.

It's scary but we evolve and learn from it. While they can be targeted with fear and misinformation. The opposite also holds.

They can be targeted to diffuse fear and inject purpose, hope etc. Which is the thesis of the book Nudge (by Nobel winner Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein who tried doing this during the Obama Administration)

as much as I support the aspiration, I do not see this working practically, well, funded, and not being abused for propaganda. I think the practical solution is to forbid foreign interests from financing attack ads and political campaigns, be they from US or Russia. And to enforce this vigilantly, with tough penalties.

> Why do you find this story scary?

For several reasons.

Over these past years the rise of the AfD, the alt-right in general, has been heavily credited to Russian interference.

But to this day there's no actual solid evidence for anything like that, and these accusations of "You are just a Russian bot!" have been a major factor for driving protest voters to the AfD.

When in reality it seems to have been a US American PR firm facilitating most of it, one that has managed to make political attack ads an actual thing in Germany. While I was wondering why and how the political discourse suddenly became so unbelievably hostile in Germany.

But all the German mainstream gets to read and hear about is the Russians attacking "democratic institutions in Germany" [0] and supposedly propping up the alt-right, which keeps on driving voters to the AfD for feeling marginalized with their "Russian opinions".

[0] https://www.dw.com/en/hackers-target-democratic-institutions...

The next paragraph goes on to state they targeted 10.1 million people:

In all, Harris Media created seven target groups, according to Canter, including mothers (2.6 million targets), business owners (1.1 million), and working-class people such as union members (6.4 million).

The detail about the 1% is pretty much a non-sequitur; I don’t really follow why that is even mentioned.

One percent is just a small, round, common number that crops up in human thought frequently. What's the point of targeting 5% of the closest users if you might not even have luck converting the 1% closest users? Would you see this connection if it turns out they actually targeted the closest .96% of users? Do you think the one percenters that Bernie Sanders rallies against have anything in common with your [1]?

> Do you think the one percenters that Bernie Sanders rallies against have anything in common with your [1]?

I don't know and I seriously doubt it.

I didn't see Bernie Sanders stickers in the middle of Germany advertising for "We only need 1% to change the country", as the German identitarians do.

But as you say: It's very likely just a coincidence.

A 1% lookalike is the standard starting point for targeting pretty much any type of target audience on FB.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com