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.
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.
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.
They also mine and sell your activity.
Recently on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24756042
There should be a law against that.
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?
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. )
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.
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.
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.
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.