Facebook Seeks Shutdown of NYU Research Project into Political Ad Targeting
wsj.com
wsj.com
What bullshit. If I want to know what ads are targeting my parents in print, I can buy the locally distributed newspapers. If I want to know what they see on Facebook, I have to literally shoulder surf. That or wait for the week’s crack cure-all to surface in a family message thread.
Tons of posts on HN are about how individuals should own their data, yet you think you should also have access to that of others?
advertisement is part of public discourse, in particular political advertisement.
>But that library excludes information about the targeting that determines who sees the ads.
>The researchers behind the NYU Ad Observatory said they wanted to provide journalists, researchers, policy makers, and others with the ability to search political ads by state and contest to see what messages are targeted to specific audiences and how those ads are funded.
The point of the research is to figure out what ads Facebook shows to which users, which is of course particularly important for people who try to do research on how ads on Facebook intersect with politics.
I have someone on my contact list in fb who honestly thinks that QAnon exposes pedophiles. I can't wrap my head around how the heck they've reached that conclusion.
Oh, come on. You are bringing that into this discussion. The topic is not people's private search or browsing history. Political advertisements are very clearly a public issue.
A real breakdown of theory of mind would mean that there is a breakdown in common understanding. Like with an animal, you don't have complete theory of mind with an animal, and it certainly does not with you -- there is an inability to account for the reasoning of a dog.
The way current social media and search engines optimize for engagement and tailor information to each user, people have really different views on the universe right now as is; and this has already had real-world consequences. (eg. corona-response, motivations for or against Brexit, etc. )
Of course, one could argue that Facebook has a right to communicate with their users confidentially. But it's a bit of a stretch to treat ads as private communication.
The advertiser, The ad, the targeting given.
None of this contains private information and it‘s equivalent to what‘s known about ads in a newspaper.
It's also not about knowing what a specific user sees. The targeting configurations that advertisers use should be made public, but nobody needs to know which individual users see which individual ads.
So, you should be able to click a "?" link in the corner of any ad and see which demographics or groups the ad is targeting. And likewise, you should be able to look at individual demographics or groups and see which ads are targeting them at any given moment.
This sort of transparency would go a long way towards restoring trust, but I suspect that it would also reveal what a cesspit their ad market is. The advertisers would also probably object, because many would consider their targeting parameters to be a sort of trade secret. And whoever pays the piper calls the tune.
You can do this on Facebook, for maybe four years now. It's not particularly informative, but it exists.
FB/Google/Twitter etc work by measuring some kind of conversion (pixel hit, app install etc). Micro-targeting in terms of voting doesn't have this signal, and as such any of these ads will be difficult to make work on FB.
You can optimise for engagement, but I suspect an ad targeting black voters saying about the 94 crime bill is unlikely to elicit much engagement.
The status quo outside FB is not newspapers, it's other web ads, television, sms, and phone calls. FB may be more or less transparent, but the status quo is not transparent in the way you're describing.
There should be a law against that.
They also mine and sell your activity.
Recently on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24756042
The research participants are voluntarily sharing their ads with NYU. Facebook is objecting.
I have bought voter rolls for direct mail campaigns. On the mailer, I had to disclose who was paying for it. I knew a fraction of my mailers would end up in the opposition’s hands, just as their messaging ended up in mine, and that from who got which mailers we could deduce which voter roll query was used. If I lied they would call me out to the people I lied to. That is an incentive to stay honest and a promoter of a common fact base.
Direct mail, SMS and phone outreach has gotten more targeted. But it’s nowhere close to Facebook. That deserves elevated transparency to a regulatory force. Given these are political ads government regulation is out of the question. So the next best options are total public disclosure, adversarial disclosure (i.e. someone identifying the opposition, which is complicated, and giving them full transparency) or mandatory or voluntary disclosure to academia. The last is the weakest since it introduces sampling biases and requires private collection resources. But it’s better than nothing. Facebook still fights it.
American politics are no longer a debate. We can’t agree on common facts and can’t agree on a common set of institutions. Broad political interaction has devolved into a competition of facts over one of governing philosophies. That is not a way to govern and is a direct result of social media promoting separate, targeted “facts” that spread faster and more insidiously than they can be countered. If we want to continue making decisions as a democracy, this has to be checked.
This has precedent. Every new form of media (print, radio, broadcast television, phone, cable television, e-mail, et cetera) has been followed by new rules for political discourse. To inform that rule making we need research. If the media controls the data the research will be useless, the rules garbage and our discourse corrupted.
FB gives off serious Emil Kaschub vibes with its willingness to run non-consensual psychological experiments on people.
I totally agree. I think that we as a nation (US) (and possibly all over world) have a blind spot where social media, surveillance capitalism, and targeted ads are. The power of the algorithm is so strong that people truly believe they’re being recorded (the whole FB is listening because I got such and such ad).
Policy is always many years behind technology. My biggest concern is that this technology poses an existential threat to our current zeitgeist (?). I always trouble putting the threat into my own words.
But I can’t agree more. We need immediate transparency. And we need to study the cause and effect so we can better understand. That will lead to the best form of whatever regulation we may need to move to the next stage.
Well that's quite nice that Facebook understands their intentions are positive, surely Facebook will just supply then the data directly instead!
Let's not forget that Facebook is a company that tormented an employee so severely he killed himself at the office [1].
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/qvgn9q/do-not-discuss-the-in...
Now, the walls are opaque, and privacy situation is worse. Outsiders can no longer observe and audit Facebook's output information to users, let alone the information users offer as input.
1. FB does something wrong that affects 700k of its 1b users at the time 2. FB loses any moral authority to object to things that violate their terms of service.
That is a bit of a leap, but I am open to hearing what I’m not understanding about your thought process.
1. FB didn't "do something wrong". They have repeatedly engaged in research without informed consent as op mentions. These are not isolated incidents, but rather Facebook's modus operandi.
2. NYU uses volunteers to collect information on what Facebook ads are shown to them. A university project using volunteers to research on how people are targeted for political ads.
3. Facebook is trying to use its ToS so that its political targeting remains opaque.
I do not see any leaps here. I do not understand how a company such as Facebook has any moral authority to object about _anything_, much less about this research, but I'm open to hearing what I'm not understanding about your thought process.
Are you referring to AB testing here?
Are you aware that every internet service does this, on an incredibly regular basis, without informed consent?
You can argue that this is unethical, but you should then be calling for online experimentation without informed consent to be banned.
Speaking as a psychologist who's extremely familiar with both experimentation to affect emotional states and AB testing, I really, really don't see one.
I personally think there should be ethics reviews for AB tests, but that's a fringe position in the industry right now.
Consider "A 61-Million-Person Experiment in Social Influence and Political Mobilisation", the 700,000 people whose emotional states Fb experimented with, the documents which revealed how Fb tried to pinpoint when young Australians and New-Zealanders were vulnerable to advertising.
The difference between AB testing and Facebook's experiments should be obvious to anyone familiar with those experiments, as the aim has been to research and alter human behaviour in general, whereas AB testing has to do specifically with understanding user engagement and satisfaction with regards to the product.
Trying to dress up this experimentation as AB testing or no different than AB testing is incredibly dangerous. As a psychologist extremely familiar with both this kind of experiments and AB testing, you really, really should see a difference.
This article, right: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature11421 ?
So, this is a messaging experiment, which is pretty standard within psychology. The only interesting thing about this (and the only reason it's in Nature) is the size, not the experimental design.
> The difference between AB testing and Facebook's experiments should be obvious to anyone familiar with those experiments, as the aim has been to research and alter human behaviour in general
This is what AB tests do. You change the colour of the button, and conversion rate (i.e. the proportion of people that give you money) goes up or down. How is this different from people taking an action (self-reported, btw so potentially garbage) around an election? Seriously, i would love to know the actual difference here.
You may not like Facebook, hell, I may not like Facebook but it's just inaccurate to say that they are uniquely bad because they run experiments on people, when my entire career both in academia and industry has been running experiments on people and that's somehow OK.
I listed three examples that should make it obvious. You refuse for some reason to accept the obvious, that these kind of tests try to alter real world behaviour and not behaviour with regards to the product.
There's a big difference between changing a button's color in a page to see how user engagement changes and trying to find when teenagers are in a more vulnerable emotional state to serve them ads. If you can't see the obvious I'm afraid there is anything more to say.
also: is it more bad or less bad if 3rd parties do it - political advertising, disinformation, Cambridge Analytica etc?
We really need a law/court case that establishes who owns data and who has permission to share it. The volunteers should be allowed to share whatever they want.
Facebook is essentially saying we're not allowed to talk to each-other ("in bulk") about what ads Facebook is showing us. Not the first time corporations try to prevent consumers/users/workers from organizing.
Scraping appears to violate the ToS. Tortious interference was brought up in the comments but I'm not convinced it applies.
Regardless of whether the scraping itself is legal, redistributing the content to a third party is likely to violate copyright in many cases.
The entire situation seems overly complicated.
He gave the data to Cambridge Analytica without permission, though.
This NYU project is the very antithesis of Cambridge Analytica. This project is part of The Online Political Transparency Project. All of the data is public:
https://onlinepoliticaltransparencyproject.org/
From the NYU Ad Observatory page:
>"The Facebook Ad Observatory is part of the Online Political Transparency Project, which operates from the NYU Tandon School of Engineering. This nonpartisan, independent project is focused on improving the transparency of online political advertising, by deploying traditional methods used in cybersecurity to evaluate the vulnerabilities of online sites. The Project builds tools to collect and archive political advertising data, and makes these available publicly. We encourage journalists and researchers to use these to fuel analysis of online political advertising."
It's been obfuscated and I don't see a public repo of the source anywhere.
What do I mean? Facebook is just a manifestation of something that has gripped us through technology. People want to read about their family/friends little daily stories, they want to engage in arguments about politics, they want to hear gossip and news, they want a platform to promote themselves. And they've found a way to do it.
Someone will insert themselves into that stream to manipulate others, entice them to buy things, seek publicity for their causes. Yet we still (collectively) keep opening the app and logging on because we feel -- consciously or not -- that it brings more value to our lives than takes. So every minute, Facebook (or whoever it would be to take their place) gets the reward signal saying, "these people want what we're selling". And on net people aren't abandoning it out of concern for the side effects.
Maybe all you can do is create your local island of sanity and protect yourselves against whatever it produces. Maybe that's us for a decade until someone figures out how to manage this new dynamic, or Congress does its job. How much can you fight when every person's minute-by-minute choice produces a force that's uncontrollable?
Just as smokers want lung cancer? Consumers are conditioned to "like" and "dislike".
The battle against commercial surveillance is a battle for democracy. It is being fought but it will take effort because these companies have become powerful profiteers with smiling investors.
It took a long time to start winning against the cigarette industry. Even now, there are places in the world where cigarette sales are profitable and the product has prestige.
I thought people asked for these restrictions after Cambridge Analytica. Are they evil now? :^)
The researchers here, as per the article, used 6500 volunteers to collect ads that Facebook explicitly showed to them, apparently without the use of any API or unwilling participants.
Seriously fuck Facebook and fuck Zuckerberg. This company is the absolute height of hypocrisy, hubris and deception.
I hope this only makes more people interested in this research project and spurs more interest in similar projects in the future.
Welcome to surveillance capitalism. "We are watching you" doesn't sell as well as "We are connecting people".
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/23/facebook-block-tran...