The retaliation: Pranking my roommate with targeted Facebook ads (2014) | Hacker News Reader

The retaliation: Pranking my roommate with targeted Facebook ads (2014)

ghostinfluence.com

335 pointsCountHackulus65 comments

And here was it used for in seriousness https://inews.co.uk/news/labour-staff-deceived-corbyn-facebo...

Staff of the UKLabour party deceived the leader at the time by making very targetted facebook ads, so it would look to him like they were doing what the campaign as they were meant to be, while they were actually trying to undermine him.

Sounds like a guaranteed career-ending move that’s bound to become public sooner or later…

Considering the stakes were "who's going to be the next Prime Minister" and they worked at a political party, they must have thought this was more important than their career.

Or that their career was better served by undermining those within the party that were less aligned with them, to open up more posts in future for themselves and ensure positions of authority were staffed with those most likely to retain their services.

I think it may be time for you to watch (or re-watch) Yes, Minister. I seriously think that every civil servant in the UK has seen that series. One of the points/jests of the series was that the worst enemies of each Ministry are their own staff.

Hah but then the right wing of the party took over because of the lefts poor electoral performance...

Read the Forde Report and then come back here with this "left" and "right" nonsense. The problem was everywhere, and no-one should be feeling vindicated right now at all. Five more years of Johnson, Truss, Sunak, and whatever godforsaken attempt at leadership might follow him, and all because the Blairites and the Corbynites were so wrapped up in being Blairites and Corbynites that they completely forgot to do anything useful and actually present a functioning alternative.

Seems a bit odd to accuse Corbyn supporters of not doing anything useful when they were being undermined from all angles. Smeared as anti-semites, hit pieces on state media, constant bashing in tabloids; sneakily undermined by a faction of their own party, as here, and even undermined by state security services (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2022/06/22/jeremy-corby...).

This wasn't because Corbyn's side didn't have policy positions or wasn't getting things done - it's because wealthy vested interests were fucking terrified of what he would do.

Blair is a full-on war criminal btw, so presenting the two as somehow equivalent is staggeringly dishonest.

Have you read the Forde Report? Because that's kind of the issue at stake here. Yes Corbyn was smeared by the press and people on the right wing, that shouldn't be surprising anyone. But a healthy Labour party would be able to draw together, come up with a coherent media strategy, and make an argument to the British people. Instead, we ended up with a party obsessed with purity that got embroiled in month after month of petty infighting. Absolutely nobody from that era should be holding their heads high right now.

The one commissioned by Keir Starmer? Lol. No, I haven't.

At a glance though, it seems to be making the same "mistake" that you are:

> Forde’s seeming even-handedness is, in fact, a continuation of factionalism by other means. The report’s implausible premise is that Corbyn and a handful of staff in the leader’s office wielded as much factional power as the combined might of Labour HQ, the parliamentary party and the entire media establishment. Each side was apparently equally obstructive and uncooperative; each fed the other’s political paranoia.

> That misrepresents the true balance of power in Labour – and the reason why Corbyn spent his years as leader permanently on the defensive, battling internal revolts and media firestorms.

...

> The same lacuna can be found in the Forde report’s analysis of Labour’s “antisemitism problem”. Starmer has stepped up the crackdown on left-wing members on the basis of a supposedly continuing concern about the prevalence of antisemitism in Labour’s ranks – a claim at the heart of the Labour right’s efforts to discredit the left under Corbyn.

- https://www.jonathan-cook.net/2022-07-21/forde-inquiry-labou...

Here's a helpful tip - anyone calling Corbyn an anti-semite is either a massive piece of shit, or incredibly ignorant.

I'm not sure the guy who've been stanning for each and every dictator out there was meaningfully to the left of anyone in the party.

Not exactly undermine, since we're talking about staffers that may know better than political heads (this generalizes to all parties):

“Corbyn’s aides sometimes demanded big spending on Facebook advertising for pet projects which Southsiders [officials at Labour HQ] regarded as a waste of money,”

From the next line in the article:

> They wanted us to spend a fortune on some schemes like the one they had to encourage voter registration, but we only had to spend about £5,000 to make sure Jeremy’s people, some journalists and bloggers saw it was there on Facebook.

This is also from nearly a decade ago..... and shows up at least once a year or so

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31104803

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26909156

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17112559

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15658182

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14428792

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14097548

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12842667

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9543534

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8332031

2015 is nearly a decade ago...great now I'm getting an existential crisis

Greetings fellow future-dweller!

Here are some facts to get you oriented:

* We're shooting down UFOs on a weekly basis

* The entire world was recently shut down because of a virus

* The machines are becoming creepily human-like

* You probably can't afford eggs anymore

I thought this was a joke, until I got about half way down that list.

I just created a calendar event to remind me to post it in 2024.

Alright, I think we're due for time travellers and lizardmen, the abyssal sleeper is about to awaken, and Galactus may pop by. Let us know how it checks out.

It was nearly 5 years ago too.

Memento mori.

Steer towards how you want to be living, while you can.

I’ve seen it most times it’s been up and I will read it every. single. year.

Hahaha, thanks for that.

~OP of the article

The question is: would this still work today?

I suspect something akin to it might work, but there would be "collateral damage" in that you can't target as precise anymore, not after all the kerfuffle around Facebook ads and Apple and such.

But if you don't mind others seeing your targeted ad, you probably could still hit your target.

Reading the comments, it is worth noting that to target someone directly, you just need them to visit a site with a re-targeting pixel. They load an ad 1x1 pixel image that lets google set a cookie to re-target that user when they are shown google ads: https://ads.google.com/intl/en_uk/home/resources/retargeting...

Replace Google with your ad provider.

Hold on, I thought it was not possible to target ads to specific individuals... can one do that now??

I'm fairly certain Facebook at least will not deploy a pixel campaign until the pixel has collected a few hundred visitors. However, you can trigger a pixel any number of times with a headless chrome session using a proxy list.

Script up a few hundred triggers and you'll be able to target single individuals to you heart's content.

You target an ad campaign to IDs representing 100 users, 1 of which is your target and 99 don't really exist or are bots.

"Always has been"

Hilarious, although I am a bit disappointed. I was expecting an extremely specific demographic filter to target his roommate (e.g. “white males in their mid twenties who live in Philadelphia and like Slipknot and Beanie Babies”). I didn’t realize you could target based on email addresses!

It makes sense that you can directly advertise to your mailing list.

That explains the highly targeted Amazon ads I was often getting on Facebook.

Really creepy is seeing, "Your friend X bought this." on Amazon, regarding a friend on Facebook... can only imagine if it was something embarrassing.

Ok, so here I go... No, this was NOT "very well played", because the pranker, when he was confronted by the pranked, resorted to a flat-out lie: "but it’s not me", basically shutting down the only avenue leading to truth, short of accusing a roommate and friend of being a liar. AFAIAC, that lie transformed the prank into deception. He should be happy the roommate took it so easy.

Also why do we see two different versions of the final ad?

It was a pretty awesome (and creepy) prank, but I do agree that once he was accused, he should have come clean.

Early in the story, he mentions the roommate had already played an elaborate deceptive prank on the author, so I don't see an issue with doing what he did. The roommate had already established the precedent that deception was fair game.

The main takeaway for me was that dark red writing on dark grey is absolutely unreadable! I tried but couldn't make out the red words at all.

Mine was that you need an Excel to create a CSV file.

For one email.

Why?

Use the tools you're familiar with?

I was also confused by this. It’s literally writing the email in a text editor.

But this probably means that the poster has no knowledge of what the CSV format is. (which is sad to see that we created a system in which someone intelligent and tech-savy enough to pull out such a prank has no curiosity/background culture about very basic things in computers. Not to blame him, blaming the culture and the education)

Even though it's simple, it's a minor detail. I am unaware of many minor details in lots of things I use. It's not that I can't be bothered or I'm not curious, it just that it has never come up and there's lots more important stuff.

How do I target my daughter on TikTok?

Simply make an entertaining video, top it off with "and if you're my daughter, stop scrolling and empty the dishwasher" and wait.

If day == Tuesday, print "Please put out the bins"

If day == Saturday, print "Be home by 9pm"

Tiktok targeting is not very good, best bet would be finding out what hashtag to target.

Probably easier just to decompile tiktok and insert some code which checks for a video at a certain known location controlled by you and plays it if it is present. And then surreptitiously install that app on her phone.

I wonder how much of this is still possible.

I have been trying to define an audience (ie, people who work at surfing schools), without much success.

I recall FB became quite keen on not letting you target particularly small audience groups which would have made it even harder.

However, a friend of mine recently got an ad targeting his name with some custom clothing and was confused how it happened because Facebook doesn't let you target by name. My speculation (and I'm intrigued if anyone thinks this is possible) is because his email address is $fname@$fname$lname.com, an advertiser autogenerated a giant list of common first names and my friend's last name plus common email providers or domain name patterns, fed it into FB's Audience Manager, and then targeted all the ones that matched FB logins. A sort of dictionary attack, if you will.

I think your guess would be the most likely.

Step 1. Get a huge email list

Step 2. Grep that email list for peter

Step 3. Do a custom audience in FB and run a Peter t-shirt campaign

I don't know any other way to do anything "dynamic" in Facebook Ads. And FB doesn't really like that advertisers creep out their audience, even though they can. I assume it's the reason behind their policy that you can't call out personal attributes. E.g. you can't say "Hey hetereosexual white person! Click here", but you have to write it as "Here's a fun website for hetereosexual white people".

I just double checked the policies and using a first name in the ad is actually not allowed, BUT I think you can get around that by having a general ad like "Cool name t-shirts" and then the image happens to have "Peter" printed on the t-shirt.

Source: https://transparency.fb.com/policies/ad-standards/objectiona...

It was the (popular) last name in this case. I don't know if that makes any difference.

Glad that someone with almost certainly more knowledge thinks it might be viable though. I'm a total FB advertising novice so I'm aware of the options, but not so aware of how it works in practice ;-)

I don't know how the Facebook end of the targeting worked, but having your friend's name and email address on any number of probably-even-freely-available lists seems highly probable, no need to autogenerate them

More likely FB is trialling a way to put $name in an ad?

It had a photo showing the clothing with the name on, but maybe, though it didn't smell that way to me.

I think that might be hard even if there was a specific target that was "People who work at surfing schools" because people don't really keep their FB job description up to date.

I would just target "Surfboard (sporting goods)", "Surfing (water sport)" and similar and then let the FB algorithm do it's magic. I.e. create a very broad targeting for your ad and then let the ad run for a while and get results, and those results will let FB automatically fine tune the targeting for you. It costs some money but it will probably be better in the end. Unofficial rumours says you need around 50 conversion events on ad for the ad to be fully "trained", which can mean a couple of hundred dollars.

Remember the targets you add have a OR function between them, unless you use the "Narrow audience" button in the targeting.

If you really want to narrow down you could do "Surfing (water sport)" and narrow the audience and find some interest that is AND <insert teaching-related interest targeting>. People that work as surf school teachers could possibly have been identified by FB with some kind of teaching-interest.

I similarly have not had success defining most targets I want. It says “click here for advanced targeting” but that 404s.

When I was first asked to some facebook ads for a company that I was actually doing industrial sewing work in a production environment ... I saw how targeted everything could be with the ads and it just seemed so gross. That was 2009-ish.

And I haven't had a facebook account for me to edit since then. I'm glad some people saw levity, but to me it just seemed dour.

Thia is the first time I've read this but so damn good! I'm going to NEED to read this again for a giggle in the future!!

There's some contradiction in this story: being "extremely smart" and using facebook. Without adblock. )

You can be extremely smart at 99 things, and undone by one.

That's why you don't have FB ads. It's so easy to kill them. Btw, I never understood why people get a hard on when pranking someone.

I enjoy pranking and being pranked. For me, the enjoyment comes from secret knowledge of the true world vs the perceived world and then the quick feeling of reconciliation of my memory rewriting itself to use the new information of what actually happened vs what I thought happened.

I’ve never received a hard on, but it is mentally enjoyable.

I’d say within reason though as a prank stops being funny when there’s some actual change made to reality instead of just perception. It’s not a good prank if someone sells their car because of it, or does something they regret after the prank is revealed.

What creepy albeit hilarious fun. Partly the reason I block ads is because of ad targeting. It gets way too creepy.

Unrelated, back in the 90s and early 00s, I used to troll people in my grade by signing up their email addresses for porn. Since most people had emails their parents monitored, this would inevitably lead to awkward questions.

I also would script kiddy people with aik bots that would boot them offline. The magic of computes with limited resources.

Genius roommate, yet doesn't run ad-blocker?

That's very scary

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