Fresh Cambridge Analytica leak ‘shows global manipulation is out of control’
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Lets be clear this is the explicit purpose of the advertising and public relations industry.
1. Create Art (writing, multimedia etc...) intended to influence viewer
2. Distribute Art via Large Scale Channels
3. Hope that people exposed to it take the action you want them to
For Coca-cola they want you to "Buy Coke"
For AirBnB they want you to book a stay
For Politicians they want you to vote for them
Politicians have always used the media channels of the day to advertise themselves. So it's extremely unclear what is news here aside from the fact that Politicians are following Corporate levels of sophistication for advertising.
I think what it really shows is that Advertising in total is a toxic and corrupting business and should be banned outright for all things.
Even if you ban directives from ads (Buy Product Now!) ads can be reduced to simple voicing of opinions on a media channel ("I love product X, you'd love it too, I'm sure!"), which is what most ads are anyways - emotional persuasion, not the old style "Johnny's Canned Beans are the most nutritious!" from the early days of TV.
And if you're talking about banning all paid endorsements, I guarantee there will be 10,000 loopholes that look like Citizens United/SuperPAC behavior, where a person performs the advertising speech in public for free, and then is later given gifts and trips and other things for "unrelated reasons" from an "industry interest group."
In short, we need to incorporate critical thinking/mental and emotional resilience/manipulation resistance into the educational system, which I'm pretty sure will never ever happen since the Powers That Be are all there precisely because, as you said, they all use the media channels of the day to manipulate.
Do I get free speech, or does my potential to continue making a living preclude me from that right?
Also, related to ultrarunner's point, is it not possible to freely promote something that is both in my interest financially and in the best interest of my audience? Isn't that in fact the ideal scenario, mutually beneficial arrangements where everyone benefits via aligned incentives?
It's not practical. Even if people were taught and learned that, you can't expect them to stand on their own against an entire industry, which pays top dollar for the best and brightest in psychology and cognitive science to work full-time on manipulating people. The arms race favors the attacking side very strongly here.
It'd be hard to eradicate advertising with legal means, but I'm confident the most egregious forms could be made not worth the money. Advertising will be a problem for as long as malice exists, but so will theft and murder, and somehow we manage to prevent the latter two from disrupting society too much.
I still feel strongly that advertising should not exist and think it's on par with CO2 as an externality.
Btw, the issue here isn't ads, but the data and usage of data.
We already have rules about this, https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?SID=701066299822530421...
I discovered this after they published a really astounding partisan whopper about a London terror attack right before the UK election - one which was not only completely untrue and debunked all over the place, but was something being spread by their preferred party as part of an explicit attempt to politicise the attack against the ruling Tories. They didn't care to correct this, and given their position that independent regulation was only for the other papers there was nothing that could be done about this.
A sole proprietor pushing his services is the simplest example of being paid for advertising that is also clearly free speech. Where would you draw this line?
I don't have a problem with people barking about their products when I'm at a market. But I do have problems with just about everything about modern corporate advertising. Merely listing every individual aspect I take offense too would take hours.
I draw the line at the point where anything is exchanged, given, or recieved, tangible or otherwise, to allow someone/something/some co, to display, demonstrate, brand, or otherwise make known anything through an intermediary.
To clarify. Having generic, unobtrusive signs pointing to food courts around a sports Arena where one can purchase food, that may or may not be served in branded containers is acceptable. Neon signs, or banners, or full advertisements on big screens, etc advertising some company that is not doing any business directly with the attendants at said Arena is unpalatable to me. Likewise, selling refreshments with branding foranything besides the establishment selling the item, or the company that manufactured the item is ridiculous.
But if I pepper a market crowd with my family members all randomly talking about how amazing the food/widgets/whatever over at Bob's Widget Stand are, so that over hearing bystanders can hear is a form a psychological manipulation that may fall into a gray area.
Ultimately, each time you say "this is fine, this isn't", you're adding an exception and branching logic that will be argued about ad infinitum.
Laws, like lines of code, have a technical debt to them, except the lines of law are likely to impact more people generally, enough so to ruin lives and industries (which can happen with code, of course, but code doesn't have the same global application to every member of society backed up with the use of force).
I'm not saying that reaching an acceptable compromise is unachievable, but conceptually, it's a lot more involved than simply laying out the broad strokes, with tons of ramifications, implicit and otherwise, that have to be considered.
In re to your example. If you were to pay your family members (in any way) that would be wrong in my book. If your family does this out of the goodness of their hearts then so be it. It's their unpaid labor. I fully realize that no solution will stop every avenue of abuse. However, seeding crowds with people up selling your widgets only works for so long. you'll never be able to reach scale with those methods because eventually the irs will audit you or your family members and even though you wouldn't go down for illegal advertising you would go down for not paying taxes. Or you'd find that having enough family family members to seed every crowd is getting you unwanted attention, or is just too darn expensive.
By banning all advertisements except advertising in person, at the location of sale and for only items sold at that location there would be very little room for manipulation. Obviously the time share/used car methods would still work, but I haven't ever seen a way to make that profitable with low margin items, where many consumers get fleeced by huge ad budgets.
Basically, I think everything but shouting about your products from your shop should be illegal. I can see concessions made for websites that don't sell anything, and charge transparent/flat fees for listing their info in a web directory that is intentionally bland. However, writing legislation for that would be a whole lot harder to draft than what I've already stated.
I realize my desires are unrealistic. That being said, advertisings days of doing whatever creepy crap they want to without punishment are numbered. Either the industry will reform itself (unlikely, it's too easy to delude oneself when pulling $500k for selling fidget spinners) or, eventually, some people are going to be nailed to the walls of Congress as examples.
For instance, I find that the advertising done by Facebook and Instagram very effective for me. The advertising tends to cater to niche things I have actually gotten real use from (in my case, it's soundkits containing midi files, and/or software musical instruments).
I've purchased many of these and have been quite happy with both the offerings and the purchases.
Sometimes these are by small companies (one to two man shops, or 10 people companies), and sometimes well known large companies.
Under your thinking, and correct me if I'm wrong, but this sort of thing would be illegal.
Word of mouth wouldn't work for me in cases like this, since it's particularly directed towards things I like, but I don't have very many friends in the music producer community (learning it for less than a year), and it seems in my case, I've really only been "scammed" once, which was easily disputed and rectified via PayPal.
Now, I've been scammed before, online and off, with shady advertising, but this current model greatly benefits me.
If I'm correct in assuming that you're against this sort of advertising, is there a substitute that would work, while still bringing the benefits to both sides?
Because it appears to me that anything will have it's abuses and negative forms, but it really comes down to, is the advertising to blame, or the malignant folks who abuse it?
Allowing unlimited dark money into super pacs is where it fell apart.
If you want to "entice" an official, you don't offer them cash. You offer someone in their family a great job. You buy the plot of land next to their house and keep it open and undeveloped. You back away from that deal that you're competing for against the major company in their district. You reach out to friends, colleagues, and vendors in their district and encourage them to support the other guy. You let them know you have a job open for someone exactly like them that opens up whenever they need. You get them a home loan at a fantastic rate not available on the open market. You make a call to your alma mater and recommend their kid or niece get into that amazing university with a great scholarship.
* Those are all real situations in the last ~10-15 years. None of them involved donating to a politician.
Malaysia: http://repo.hindsightfiles.com/01012020/malaysia.zip
Or maybe there's a better solution, but at least let's agree on the transparency problem.
Ironically, it's not clear which party they re referring to
I m confused, were the Democrats being accused of using manipulative social media ad campaigns in 2016?
I don’t blame them for doing it at all, but i definitely feel uneasy about a lot of democrats blaming 2016 elections on cambridge analytica and acting like their party didn’t do it themselves, while also bragging about it publicly.
Note: I neither support nor am affiliated with the republican party whatsoever. I also don’t think that cambridge analytica scandal affected the 2016 election outcome in any significant way.
0. https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/facebook-data-...
These lists have 0 value. At scale, it's always better to use algorithmic targeting than uploading lists to target. This is true on any ad network, but especially on Facebook.
Restated, and this might be so off base and tangential that maybe it's not worth answering, but if you were say....something reasonable like a dentist. And you were fairly far along in your practice and had tenure. Let's say in that case your "list" represents a fairly not insignificant amount of the people around you. Say 5%? 10%? Whatever is reasonable.
Even in that case the algorithm is better?
Also, why does sex sell? Because people desire sex.
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/twiml-ai-podcast-forme...
(On an unrelated note, that’s also what made Star Trek much more interesting to me than Wars. Until pretty recently there weren’t any or only one tv show to really watch in the Wars universe. But lots of Trek.)
The biggest problem is that you risk to distrust any new information, in particular any information that does not align with your worldview is easier to discard if you just scream "fake news" and get it out of your head without a thought.
Regardless, I’d suggest reading Descartes or some philosophy of logic. You can’t trust everybody, but there are high value sources out there. The media are largely ok.
I was just setting that up to make it clear I was asking for evidence out of curiosity rather than passive aggressive skepticism. Generally if a media outlet reports something as a hard fact, I do believe it.
The "don't trust what you read online" meme is a persistent one, but it's also long been reactionary and incomplete.
1. Yes, there's disinformation on the Internet. Shocking, but true. And yes, the ease, scale, scope, and speed of online disinformation dwarfs all previous media. And while I frequently argue that scale matters, we can at least point to the fact that the mechanism isn't a new one: rumour and disinformation networks predate mobile, the Web, Internet, electronic, and print communications technologies.
2. From early days, the Internet was very often where both disinformation and rebuttals were most available. Two specific incidents I can recall by memory: the Pons-Fleischmann "cold fusion" paper, in 1989, and Intel's Pentium F00F bug (Spectre/Meltdown aren't their first on-die rodeo) (1997).
Each was distributed widely online, though largely via non-Web protocols. I received a copy of the Pons-Fleishmann paper two days after its release (stunningly quick for the time) via FTP. The F00F bug was circulated on mailing lists, particularly those concerning any kind of numeric programming, several days ahead of general news release.
3. "Online" is simply a channel, and use of the term conceals more than it reveals. Harold Lasswell's five-questions approach to content analysis is useful: "Who says what, to whom, why, to what extent and with what effect?"
That is, in online comms, known and reputable sources, speaking on known and reputable channels, tend to be more trustworthy than unknown and unreputable sources speaking on unknown and unreputable channels. The risks of impersonation and mimickry are real and actual, yes, but also the general notion that if someone is claimed to have said something but denies it, you might want to check assumptions. Similarly, the message itself ("says what"), audience ("to whom"), and actual or apparent intended outcome ("with what effect") are also relevant.
(See generally: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_analysis)
The simple fact that a thing is said online doesn't of itself make it more or less credible. The elements of content analysis are a far more useful guide.
Verification of information acquired online is often also going to involve online sources. Though offline may also come into use.[1]
4. Reality is that the Internet (increasingly apps) and Web are now where most communications happen. Both legitimate and valid, and illegitimate and invalid, messages are propagated. As my friend Woozle put it a few years ago:
[B]ecause of a high percentage of the population being present, there is now substantial power to be had by influencing the discussions that take place.
That's now true of the Internet, though it's true of any medium. Cable TV, talk radio, Citizens Band, television, radio, magazines, books, pamphlets, church sermons, theses nailed to parrish doors, and the like, have been used through the ages. Art and music likewise: Michelangelo operated a propagandistic arts factory for the Medici, and liturgical music and classical art were an arm of Church propaganda (in both the original and contemporary meanings of the word).
The three most published books in history are all propaganda, again, in original and contemporary meaning: the Bible, the Koran, and Chairman Mao's "Little Red Book" (The Sayings of Chairman Mao), each with billions of copies printed.
Facebook more messages to more people than that, every few days. It is the largest propaganda engine ever created.
Oh: and some of the earliest online abuse was organised around political and cultural conflict and genocide.
See Dorothy Demming, "Activism, Hacktivism, and Cyberterrorism: The Internet as a Tool for Influencing Foreign Policy", ~1998:
http://www.iwar.org.uk/cyberterror/resources/denning.htm
Documented as well by Howard Rhiengold in 1993:
http://dlc.dlib.indiana.edu/dlc/bitstream/handle/10535/18/Th...
An account is also included in John Quarterman's proto-history of the Net, The Matrix (1990):
The most striking use of the Matrix [Quarterman's term for online communications networks, Ed.] occurred to late to be described elswhere in this book. When the Chinese govenrment cleared Tianamen Square on the morning of 4 June 1989, reports of eyewitnesses were sent out by Chinese students by telephone and facismile within hours of the actual events, typed in by Chinese students abroad, and immediately broadcast throughout the world on dozens of networks and maling lists....
Though cautions of excessive credulity over online communications are valid, I strongly suspect that at least some of the impetus for that particular caution comes from powers and institutions which are challenged by a communications channel they can not directly control. This can, at least at times, have benefits, though the rise of the Net itself as a locus of surveillance, control, and manipulation is to my mind among the biggest stories of the past decade.
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1. For an example of a meme debunking, there's a case of a now 127-year-old hoax which still has legs. Some 18 years after its initial appearance, the hoax was being re-publicised by a US congressman, and I believe entered into the Congressional Record -- just to show that even well-known and highly-institutionalised sources can get things Very Very wrong. All this for a bit of political fluff tossed out to encourage attendence at a party meeting. The "Banker's Manifesto of 1892" hoax:
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/39w8u4/jp_morg...
A political opponent (with the help of a political party..and possibly a president) worked with a foreign government to dig up dirt on an opponent and affect the 2016 election. It didn't work, but the deed has been done.
It's scary that a political party can get away with this with impunity.
If it would have worked, would we even be seeing anything about it?
Alternatives as i see them are either "democracy with prequalification", limiting voters pool to 1-10% of population (back to good old days, basically), or outright dictatorship (which is unstable). If i were to pick, i'd probably prefer the manipulations route.
The words we are more likely to associate with the setup would be "oligarchy" or "plutocracy".
It's either prequalification, or manipulations to make those voters irrelevant, reduce them to just noise. And of course, in today's world of lies, manipulations are the way to go.