Comment by throwaway5752 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway5752 | Hacker News Reader

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Yes, easily. Microtargeting and related campaigns can be distinguished entirely by the content of they present. Microtargeting is just a technique that can be used for good or bad. In the case of Obama's campaign, nobody has accused them of misleading or false information. Brexit and the the US 2016 election was almost defined by misleading or false information (as you can see by lingering Pizzagate, QAnon, and Bengazi conspiracy theories).

Amused at the downvotes. It is true. You can not like Clinton and not vote for her, or Obama. I don't judge and people can disagree. But the amount of false content in those campaigns (which came to be known as "fake news" after the fact) was unprecedent, was aided/spreaded by foreign sources, and was largely on partisan lines. Evidence includes https://news.stanford.edu/2017/01/18/stanford-study-examines... among countless others). It would be just as wrong if, say, the Sander campaign did the same thing.

I do agree that Obama's campaign used this much "more ethically" but I didn't then and still don't approve of micotargeting or campaign advertising in general. I really want to see the US get to publicly funded elections because full public funding would cost not even a sliver of what elections current run and provide a more even playing field for candidates.

> I really want to see the US get to publicly funded elections because full public funding would cost not even a sliver of what elections current run and provide a more even playing field for candidates.

I would be in favor of that if we also blocked media coverage of the election other than strictly objective dates and times style coverage. No opinion sections in newspapers, no “John Oliver” type shows talking about politics, no Fox and Friends, etc.

Otherwise, you give tremendous power to the owners of media companies and then all the previous funds that were raised will go towards buying or starting media companies so they can give your candidate favorable coverage.

While true—the USA does indeed need election media reforms—these seem like a minute problems next to other issues that the US election system has, including voter suppression/exclusion, non-participation, gerrymandering, as well as all the problems that follows first past the post, single preferential voting with nth degree representation.

If we only fixed the media coverage of the election while still not allowing Puerto Ricans to vote in the Primaries, and still allow super governmental agencies (like the DNC) to conspire with candidates, I don’t think a lot would change.

Maybe you’re one of today’s 10000 https://xkcd.com/1053/

But it’s been widely accepted since West Wing first aired that corruption in America’s electoral system (and politics generally) can be traced back to campaign finance reform as patient-0.

Representatives are constantly campaigning and raising money for the next election and the rest follows from freeing them to actually do their job.

So your saying that any attempt to reform the election system in America is futile?

Edit: I’m not sure which reforms you are referring to, but I bet that corruption existed in American politics before that, even before election financing was a thing. Corruption is a serious problem in democracies that have serious and strict regulations on campaign financing. A prime example here is Israel.

I will have to educate myself on the specifics of corruption in Israeli politics, but we're dealing with a particularly virulent freewheeling kind of graft in American politics where pretty much any curb would be significant.

Right now it is literally all graft and no progress at all to the point that we can barely pass the same bloated terrible budget we pass every year.

No opinion sections in newspapers would be directly against freedom of the press, and I feel like going after cable is just as bad. All of it would be ripe for abuse by the party in power to suppress tthe other too.

While I don’t doubt it would be ruled unconstitutional in the US, election day media bans are enforced in many functioning democracies (including Iceland, Israel and the UK). However, it can be debated how effective these bans are in the wake of social media. Also repercussion for braking this ban is also quite often minimal (two parties were found guilty of violating it in the last Icelandic parliamentary election, and no punishment was given).

Cambridge Analytical would have been fine if they hadn't been spreading "fake news"?

I'm sorry, but I think this kind of practice should be banned no matter if it's true, false, political, commercial, non-profit, or whatever.

Aside from data collection questions, yes. I think it's distasteful, but I think it's inevitable. The same techniques are used by grocery stores to send people coupons. This isn't cutting edge.

Sure, microtargeting is bad and should be illegal, but that is not what the parent is asking about. Microtargeting is a fact, and it is immensely powerful. If you don’t use it for your campaign in 2020 you will loose. So you should understand why well meaning candidates use it.

That said there is still a world of difference using it to spread your agenda, vs. using it to spread false information in order to spread your agenda.

While microtargeting is a fact and not forbidden by national law, we need to understand why people use it and universally condemn it when people use it to spread lies.

So in other words, there is nothing wrong with paying for data from CA or others?

Depends on how the data was acquired, wouldn't you say? Wasn't there some problems in the news about how CA acquired their FB metadata that was confirmed by one of their contractors in Canada? I think the better question is "is paying Facebook to generate models and run advertising campaigns on those identified by those models right?"

The problem was they broke Facebook's TOS.

... and Facebook thinks that's a problem because it's using Facebook to compete with Facebook, not for other moral reasons. They were breaking the part of the TOS where app developers were banned from trying to reconstitute the social network dataset outside of Facebook via secondary signal.

Is there any evidence Obama campaign made people install apps in the pretext of a poll and harvested FB data?

Don't confuse using "FB advertising platform" with "stealing FB data outside of their terms and selling it"

If CA was not involved and Trump campaign merely used FB advertising, we wouldn't be arguing about this particular point. Still bad on FB, but that is a different matter.

> Microtargeting and related campaigns can be distinguished entirely by the content of they present.

So, campaigns I agree with getting their message out is great, but campaigns I disagree with can’t use these technologies.

No, everyone is going to use these techniques. But using arms commercial entities to spread libel (so close to the election it cannot be acted upon, or from sources outside of jurisdiction) or using information obtained illegally crosses a line. I don't care what country or what party. Beyond specific candidates and policies, this is more important because it undermines the integrity of the process. I think the number of people in jail as a result of the 2016 elections is a pretty good indication of how far from normal this all was.

So does criticism of Trump and unfounded theories about him being controlled by Russians also libel?

"Timeline of Trump business activities related to Russia" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_projects_of_Donald_Tr...

"Timeline of investigations into Trump and Russia (2019–2020)" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_investigations_int...

I have no interest in accusing anyone of anything but will point to timelines of documented activity that are hosted on a website widely considered to be a reliable source of information. I think those accusations are distinct from "Pizzagate" in ways that are obvious.

Can you distill down what content in those links are evidence of Trump being controlled by Russia?

The amount of false and misleading information spread about Trump has been staggering though. Trying to pretend this only goes one way is a joke.

Is there even any proof that these micro-targeting campaigns swayed the election in anyway? Has anyone stopped to consider that maybe enough people just preferred Trump over Hillary and the election outcome was not the result of a some facebook ads?

I only have circumstantial evidence of seeing vulnerable family members slide into rabid fanaticism, rambling (nonsensically so) off obviously fake news stories as if they even understood the context. Falling pray to this type of propaganda is not a particularly conservative vs liberal thing from my perspective, it's just that the Conservatives have weaponized misinformation in an organized manner.

I don't see any evidence that the right has "weaponized misinformation in an organized manner" anymore so than the left has.

Honestly, I have a hard time finding any organized left-wing disinformation. Perhaps that's the evidence of left-wing disinformation?

Could you point me to some resources so that I might have a better understanding?

The whole "Trump is controlled by Russia" thing, for starters.

This doesn't seem like misinformation to me. Certainly there are people who believe Trump is somehow directly controlled by Russia, but it doesn't seem to be an organized effort. Whereas there is plenty of evidence that Trump was aided by Russia and has many financial ties to Russian oligarchs. This credibly opens up a wealth of possible ways that he could be compromised. It's one of the reason politicians attempt to avoid the appearance of impropriety.

I'm not sure how the pushing of the Trump/Russia narrative could be seen as anything but "organized".

I think this came up after Sacha Baron Cohen gave his famous speech at the ADL[1]. What makes social media political campaign so much more dangerous then traditional campaigns is that the investigative journalists don’t have the same access to the campaign claims as the targets, and hence cannot scrutinize, contextualize and compare them.

You are not alone in not seeing any evidence. Professional journalists with years of experience have the same problem.

But until we either learn how to overcome this limitation with new investigative techniques, or—better yet—regulate political campaigns with national laws, I suggest we remember the fact that: “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”[2]

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymaWq5yZIYM

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance#Absenc...

People have written about it from that standpoint, sure. Summary: The Democratic Party in the days of Bill Clinton started building bridges to the rich classes, and betraying the working classes, and it snowballed from there. Now millions of people are repaying that fickleness and can be seduced to either side at will without so much as a platform, because they've learned platforms as presented aren't to be trusted anyway; and there's nothing to counteract any of that cynicism, no tangible concrete argument to be made, nothing in reality you can point to, that either party actually did for them. So all you have are ideas floating around with no basis in reality; pick one.

==The amount of false and misleading information spread about Trump has been staggering though.==

Much of it spread by himself, no?

I'm trying to interpret your comment in a charitable manner, but no matter what angle I come at it from it seems disingenuous ("whataboutism" comes to mind, for starters). No one in this thread has pretended that disinformation is mono-directional in the political arena; what has been stated is that there is a disproportionate amount of disinformation emanating from the conservative end of the media spectrum and that said misinformation has been coupled to the process of micro-targeting.

With the premise that advertisements are information streams that are designed to modify a person's behavior, I have few questions for you:

1. Do you believe that advertising is effective?

2. Do you believe that targeted advertising is more effective than non-targeting advertising?

3. Do you believe that misrepresenting information in an advertisement is acceptable?

>there is a disproportionate amount of disinformation emanating from the conservative end of the media spectrum

There is no evidence of this though. Have you considered that whatever you have read to suggest that a "disproportionate" amount of disinformation is from the right is itself a disinformation campaign by the left?

Maybe another way to look at it would be: Nobody would give a shit if "micro-targeting" had been used against Trump. The hand wringing over all of this is solely the result of a humiliated establishment trying to save face by pretending some Facebook ads cost them the election rather than their own hubris.

I'll ask again, what evidence is there that these micro-targeted ads swayed a single vote, much less the entire election? At what granularity is it "okay" to target an advertisement?

This is completely correct.

Even if it was 100% ineffective (and I think it's pretty obvious that it had a non-zero effect), that wouldn't even matter. They still tried to win by spreading lies.

Murder and attempted murder are both crimes.

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