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Comment by KaiserPro | Hacker News Reader

> isnt that close to how Cambridge Analytica happened?

Yes, its exactly this.

"Facebook changes based on past scandal for the better, and this is bad. here is my 9th grade essay with no research just feeling"

Facebook _should_ be held to account.

I personally don't think that the advertising is actually that much of a problem. It all has paper trails because they have to pay. Advertising is not the worst part of facebook is its users.

for that to change facebook needs to understand that "freedom of expression" disappears when you sign the terms and agreements, which specifically limit your freedom of expression. If they actually enforced their community standards properly, the place would be much better.

Instead they carve out exceptions for celebs, based on precedence that not even employees can find.

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> "I personally don't think that the advertising is actually that much of a problem"

Facebook was used to illegally infuence elections in Uk and break spending rules and because of their closed nature, nobody realised untill a whistleblower stepped forwards. Its a massive problem, and maybe we would not have Brexit without it.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/uk-politics-44856992

A TV ad, by comparison, is aired publically and you can see it and ask who paid for it.

The question is the degree to which advertising actually influences behavior. It must have some effect, I’d agree, but was Cambridge Analytica’s ad targeting so powerful that a 1.3 million vote margin was entirely their doing? I’m pretty skeptical.

It was highly targeted advertising on targets which were highly susceptible to be turned. Whatever they were turned by, doesn't matter whether it was factual or not (cause that is the low standard for advertising).

We have Edward Bernays standard of advertising coupled with the power of Facebook available for everyone, including people who lie through their teeth to get what they wanted.

Furthermore, there is evidence Russian trolls influenced the Brexit campaign, and if that isn't enough: it was a moment in polls where leavers indeed won, but before and after the referendum it was more votes for stay and for leave.

I'm actually glad The Netherlands quit with referendum. Elections are very tough nowadays because of how easy people are influenced.

> Elections are very tough nowadays because of how easy people (WHO VOTE AGAINST MY POLITICAL ORIENTATION) are influenced.

Let's be honest, none of this were a scandal if Cambridge Analytica would have worked for Hilary or the remain campaign. I dont deny all this stuff influence people, it clearly does, but that is the price you have to pay for having a society with freedom of speech and universal vote. If you want to get rid of, either you have to take more draconian censorship laws or you eliminate universal voting for adults, both cornerstones of a modern democracy.

Brexit is just an example. Manipulation of citizens is of all time. The danger lies in how precise the targeting nowadays is, together with internet being world-wide and advanced.

Its the price we all paid for some of us having a dishonest ML data hoarder.

I'm involved in the integrity of elections in The Netherlands. I have a political preference, but I am able to leave that out when I manually count votes.

I also am aware of ways which undermine our democracy: electronic voting, strategic voting, and abused ML. I believe a high integrity on elections benefits society on the long term.

However given the international forecast of our societies (ie. what used to be called globalization 20 years ago), and difference in population and cheap labour, a country like Russia or China can heavily influence our society. In this case with the help of an American behemoth, but there is no reason other sources cannot be abused.

I don't have the solution to this problem. It warrants further investigation though. Hopefully before it is too late.

> Brexit is just an example.

Brexit could only take place because the political class spent 25 years using the EU as an excuse for everything that went wrong.

The current PM spent his formative years making up stories about the EU to send back to the telegraph.

FAcebook's advertising only works (assuming that it does actually work) if people are receptive to the message. Those messages have to be thought up by someone.

Thats not facebook's fault. thats the fault of political discourse.

The Pro EU side _lost_ because they failed to follow the standard rules of election winning: Make the other side seem like they are going to make you poorer, or less patriotic (or both)

They spent their time shouting at the sceptics calling them racists. Waffling on about economics, never emotion, never empathy, Never ambition.

Much as its comforting to think that the likes of russia, google facebook and china are at fault, its really not the fault of advertising.

> It was highly targeted advertising on targets which were highly susceptible to be turned

This doesn't gel with me... how many people saw the ads, how many times, and of those, how many were actually influenced by it?

Going by my sample size of two (my sister and my wife) they both claim that they never even look at ads that appear on screen.

I honestly am calling bullshit on the whole ad industry here... show me evidence that a significant number of people are influenced by ads that makes it worth spending money on (if unbiased data actually exists).

Are there any advertisers out there that are seeing a quantifiable return on their ad spend?

It is bullshit I agree. We all know what the intent is with an advertisement. You don’t have to be a “tech-elite” to understand ads.

There should be more transparency around how ads are displayed on the internet.. but giving researchers full access to a user’s data and their friend’s data is a pretty poor one. Can’t a better system be designed for this?

Content, however, is very dangerous and it’s not clear what a good solution is. It’s not clear what the purpose of content is on the internet.

> It’s not clear what the purpose of content is on the internet

Something I have pointed out to others in the past, and on here too, is that the Internet existed just fine before all these ad-related sites appeared. Of course, nothing on the scale of FB, Google etc, but I'd argue that we're worse off now than before.

When you rely on advertising you then have to make sure that every piece of content works towards making the advertising worthwhile. You then maximise SEO, and clicks and focus on metrics and bullshit like engagement (whatever that means).

You have to calculate whether a blog post or article is worth doing because your sponsors now care about that: you stop making content for the love/joy/sake of the content and everything becomes bait for your ads.

20 years ago, the only ads were about punching a monkey and finding out that I was the 1 millionth visitor to a website and could click the ad to claim my prize :)

I agree with your skepticism of referendums, because they do seem to be influenced more by cultural battles than policy outcomes. But I don't follow the connection you're drawing. If survey polls both before and after the election showed a different result, that just indicates the survey polls were flawed - any opinion changes Cambridge Analytica was able to create should be present both in survey polls and the election result.

Survey polls can and do manipulate people. True, unlikely in a referendum, but not impossible. Say the polls say its 55/45 for your team, and its raining heavily (weather is known to influences outcome). Would you be motivated to go? Maybe you would, but some would not.

Another one (not referendum specific; my comment regarding strategic voting wasn't specific to referendum either). Say your preferential candidate is Charlie. You have no idea what other people vote. You'd vote for Charlie. However, say you know its going to be between Alice and Bob. You really don't want Bob to win. So you vote for Alice.

If you consider mass media and hype surrounding survey polls, these cause strategic voting between whoever ends up popular. Consider, for example, the way a candidate gets chosen for Republican or Democratic party. Prime example of strategic voting.

Some see these examples as opportunities to get their preference [for a candidate or political goal] in higher regard. I don't; I see these factors as factors which potentially harm the democratic outcome on the long term. Now, like Earth, democracy is strong and adaptive. It can take a bump. But it isn't endlessly going to accept stomps and beatings. Hence, I believe we need to try to maintain the integrity and authenticity.

My understanding was that its power came from discouraging voting, not encouraging voting for a particular candidate.

Attempted murder is still manslaughter.

Breaking election laws in an attempt to influence an elections outcome is still breaking election laws whatever the outcome. It doesn’t have to be entirely their doing.

Sure. I'm not defending Cambridge Analytica here - just saying that, on a practical level, it seems unlikely that they had a decisive impact on any elections.

Said whistleblower (assuming you're talking about Christopher Wylie) got banned from fb. That's my issue with all this. Did the Russians or Cambridge Analytica do bad stuff? Probably yes. Is Facebook also incredibly hypocritical and self serving? Yes

>Facebook was used to illegally influence elections

yes, the electoral commission found that. sadly its only able to issue a tiny fine. Not only that its being eroded by populists from both sides of the political spectrum. Its not really a facebook problem but an EC one.

This transgression was found by going over the accounts, not by leaks.

> A TV ad, by comparison, is aired publically and you can see it and ask who paid for it.

political TV ads are illegal in the UK. Long may it continue.

We are also supposing that facebook adverts are actually effective. They have the power to somehow corrupt a morally "good" person into someone that votes for the "other side". This is plainly nonsense.

The real issue is that facebook is a warped mirror of society. without rules and order, chaos and bad actors reign. This means "censorship" or if it were treated as the press, editorial standards.

That is not true, according to an investigation ran by a third-party https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/uk-politics-54457407 Do you trust the third-party investigation, or a couple of whistleblowers one of which designed the entire system and another of whom sold the system. No doubt CA is a wake-up call for data security and privacy.. but a sales person telling you how freakin’ powerful the system is and how they can control the world with their ML models. Well we’ve all heard that.

By the way it’s not just TV ads to consider. Mail is a huge part especially for political campaigns and NO one has visibility to that. You can’t just cherry-pick one distribution model of advertisements.

Isn't how human nature works? Exceptions, greed, gossip, deception? You can't leave that to a company to enforce with T&C.

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