Mark Zuckerberg: "Cambridge Analytica" (2017)
twitter.com
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The Zuck then apologized for this undocumented API access leak and FB subsequently patched it out of their platform. It had nothing to do with running ads. We shouldn't let time paper over the details here.
[1] "It also gathered data from their Facebook friends, which reportedly resulted in Kogan having access to the data of millions of Facebook profiles". https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/10/facebook-cambridge-analytica...
I don't know if it was a psy-op or deception campaign or what.
> But when reflecting on the biggest mistakes of his career, Zuckerberg said his largest one was a “political miscalculation” that he described as a “20-year mistake.” Specifically, he said, he’d taken too much ownership for problems allegedly out of Facebook’s control. “Some of the things they were asserting that we were doing or were responsible for, I don’t actually think we were,” said Zuckerberg. “When it’s a political problem… there are people operating in good faith who are identifying a problem and want something to be fixed, and there are people who are just looking for someone to blame.”
TechCrunch then goes on to blame Zuckerberg by insinuation. As someone who dislikes Facebook and Zuckerberg, I think Big Tech is a rather convenient boogeyman for fallout from the 2016 election & beyond.
Zuckerberg sounds a bit entitled in that interview. Yes, it was a chore having to appear in the senate and all, but he would probably not hesitate to take that same chance again if he could. As they say, all attention is good attention, and that probably goes double if you personally control the biggest social network on the planet.
In Careless People, they mentioned that this was a strategy they wanted to employ:
They wanted facebook to become a tool for winning elections so that they would have more leverage over the politicians in power.
For example, they were trying to fight the Indian government over internet.org initiative (essentially shipping out a stripped down version of the internet to impoverished areas where they could only use facebook and a couple other apps, subsidized by telecoms). They used facebook features to incite backlash against the Indian government.
It looks like we only have access to this now? If yes, this would be development and I’d remove the “2017” from the title.
"We could see where these people are on the map. if we wanted to drill down further, we could resolve the data to an individual level where we have close to 4000-5000 data points on every adult in the United States"
It’s amazing that so many people don’t understand that.
It seems far harder to accept that people simply voted for trump because historical institutions had failed them so completely.
This would force the other party to recon with the failed parts of their platform. Which they still never have.
But we know that propaganda works. That doesn't sit well with your claims.
Do tell.
For example many players in the civil rights movement were not wealthy and did “good” propaganda which others refuse to call it as such.
The prohibition movement was a second example.
We are all capable of being stupid.
I’m having a hard time imagining you didn’t know this.
Did you miss the entire event? Or are you so busy trying to be swarmy that you can’t remember it?
And you shouldn't call names. HN does not like that one bit.
I could be wrong. Do you have a citation for the magic?
If you only remind people who are likely to vote the way you want, that's likely to swing the vote a little bit.
Maybe you do a little convincing with your reminder and that helps a little bit more.
Some jurisdictions have a blanket ban on political advertisement or media coverage as a way to reduce the effects of campaigning in an attempt to get a less influenced result. But we don't have that in the US and I suspect it would fall afoul of US free speech, and may be hard to enforce, anyway.
Now there may be other potential issues that would elevate the matter, if disinformation is used, or if personal information about citizens is obtained illegitimately, then they could constitute crimes in their own right. Whether the crime is aggravated by its intent to subvert the democratic institution would be a legitimate question, but without the accessory crimes, I don't think political campaigns from non citizen actors are themselves illegal, just icky.
Both of those happened. And are still happening.
This is algorithmic behaviour modification using sophisticated psychological priming that most people - including people who consider themselves educated and rational - have no defences against.
It very much was, and is, an issue of critical severity. CA and Nix specifically sold themselves as election fixers, but most people using FB would have been completely unware they were being influenced.
In the same way dynamic personalized pricing in the supermarket is different from supermarkets being able to set prices before.
Which I also think is overblown. The one thing that people can actually agree on is that dynamically setting sticker prices is bad, but nobody actually does this. There's less consensus on whether coupons (targeted or otherwise) are okay, even though they have the exact same effect (ie. $10 w/ $2 targeted coupon vs a Dynamic Price™ of $8).
But that's not the real problem here.
The problem is that it has been demonstrated how ad-tech infrastructure can be re-purposed for political propaganda, disinformation, and misinformation. All of that power is now available to the highest bidder, and the infrastructure providers, as we are now know are utterly amoral, stronger and faster than any government regulations, beholden to their shareholders and nothing else even if the world burns.
> Now there may be other potential issues that would elevate the matter, if disinformation is used...
Social media was definitely the start of that downfall. Yeah people used to spread misinformation longer before social media was a thing. But what Facebook changed was the way how misinformation could be targeted with surgical precision.
If your "just increasing shareholder value" is found to cause damages to the public, you should be held to account for that.
But if we take a more relevant comparison: In the financial sector, banks are responsible for detecting abuse.
They’re not the only ones responsible, but they don’t get to absolve all responsibility because someone else committed a crime using the banks infrastructure.
> As a 1984 R.J. Reynolds report stated:1819
> “Younger adult smokers are the only source of replacement smokers… If younger adults turn away from smoking, the industry must decline.”
And the reason those laws existed was precisely because companies couldn’t be trusted to regulate themselves.
At the point, everything was on the table, and everyone was "welcome" into the everlasting flame war.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2012/12/19/114510/how-obama...
This was in 2012.
These tools were used around the place. They have an influence. They don't decide who wins and what big issues are.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/facebook-acquires-israeli-app-...
2018 - Facebook tells Congress that it uses security app Onavo to analyze what people are doing in other apps
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/12/facebook-explains-to-congres...
Remember the Internet.org and FreeBasics movement which was used to muddy the Net Neutrality waters? Guess which startup was excited about Internet.org
> Onavo’s founders, Guy Rosen (CEO) and Roi Tiger (CTO), are on board with the plan. “We’re excited to join their team,” the two wrote, “and hope to play a critical role in reaching one of Internet.org’s most significant goals – using data more efficiently, so that more people around the world can connect and share. When the transaction closes, we plan to continue running the Onavo mobile utility apps as a standalone brand. As always, we remain committed to the privacy of people who use our application and that commitment will not change.”
I'm not sure how old you are, but I remember things being pretty rabid in the 1980s.
Data promised to improve lifes, it has done so in many aspects, but also has made countless things worse.
From physical and digital products squeezing the last cent instead of improving user's experience, algorithms getting every single second of your attention, from deciding the kind of music and tv shows getting produced, to the kind of dull ever repeating style of everything really on every corner of the planet from hotels to restaurant and menus it's all a data-driven conversion to the mean in boring-and-safe or money-squeezing fashion.
Data has entered sports and transformed them from the times of money ball. Basket, soccer, football, are all much less enjoyable and creative because again, it's all about applying data.
And yes, data has entered politics at a level it could not before computing power and data collection and our understanding of human manipulation didn't reach those levels.
It has understood you only need 50%+1 of the votes and efforts to get 50%+2 are a waste and less efficient.
So politicians, especially in weaker democracies characterized by winner-takes-all mechanics, are incentivized to be divisive, not representing the majority of the citizens.
Again, you only want 50%+1 of the votes, if you trying to get a single more you're dispersing your efforts and decreasing the chances to win.
And you do that today with maths, algorithms and quick information analysis and response.
Trump’s team knew exactly where to focus their efforts for 2016. That was half of it
The other half was all the rallies and stops where he literally workshopped all of his slogans in front of an audience. That’s where “lock her up” and a dozen other creative insults and slogans were tested. Like a comedian on tour, he had to work on his material.
You can say a lot about him, but he is charismatic and none of that is data driven. He has instinct on how to hurt people. He has always been a salesman and con artist. These are creative skills
The data gave him the audience but the human angle got him those votes.
I don’t think truth aligns with either extreme. Both are approaches that have their place. But if it was an “uncreative” with no ideas that simply took the time to look and discovered that the three point shot was absurdly more efficient than basically any other shot in basketball, what does that say about all the “creative” coaching geniuses who failed to discover it in half a century? And if basketball is now “less creative” because of it, that’s an indictment of the fact that the league refuses to address the underlying issue.
I think it’s telling that no one bemoans the fact that we design our medicine using data driven methods. I’m sure it would spice up our lives if the pharma companies dropped the boring data analysis and statistical methods and just slapped some compounds together through free-flowing creative passion!
something that data can't tell you either!
This happens to some extent, particularly in the US's electoral system. But I'd argue the incentive for divisive politics is coming mostly from the fleeting nature of our communication media (plus legitimate grievances that mainstream politicians were out of touch with for a long time).
Twitter was already a politically destabilizing force even before data analysis and manipulation caught up to it. The medium itself punishes constructive interactions and ideas.
Claim: Brainwash was very successful in Brazil. Reality: The government in power for 12 years turned out to be as corrupt as any they had previously criticized, generating a massive institutional crisis.
Computers can't replicate on their own, so they need entire corporations/societies to build them. A computer's reproductive locus of control is at the corporation/society level. Human individuals get sucked into that superorganism by evolutionary pressure and will eventually integrate (ENIAC -> desktop -> laptop -> smartphone -> wearables -> neural interface). Today it merely influences what you see on the phone, eventually it will be behavior-changing signals from the datacenter delivered straight into the brain. A similar thing happened in our evolutionary past when individual cells combined to form multicellular organisms.
In the long run, this cannot be fought because it's the physical tendency of matter to gather and form more complex things. There is however a second path with equally strong evolutionary precedent, which is for the human individual to integrate vertically by taking the computer in as an endosymbiont, thereby preserving the human's individual sovereignty / bodily integrity. We can pull down the computer's reproductive locus of control to the individual level, instead of being pulled up by it to become part of a larger organism at the corporation/society level. In practice, this requires miniaturizing fab tech so that each person can manufacture a custom computer from raw materials using a fridge-sized chip fab + 3D printer home appliance. We will obviously not get there immediately, but the will exists, and attempts to diffuse fab tech are already underway (such as https://fab2.com/, which started as a DIY attempt to manufacture chips at home https://sam.zeloof.xyz/category/semiconductor/).
It's worth noting that any evolutionary path may fail, especially the horizontally integrating kind because it must solve the very hard problem of constituent individuals becoming less likely to reproduce as a result of the environment changing in the emerging superorganism's favor. Some people think they can sidestep this problem by automating humans out of the computer production loop entirely, which removes integration pressure and creates a new digital species. Best of luck to Elon and various other mostly Chinese companies making the attempt. But that's an extremely risky bet, and it's basically giving up on yourself/humanity. We ought to attempt all available paths at once instead of putting too much faith in any single one. And that includes preserving pockets of pre-digital civilization where life happens without much technology at all, rather than dragging everybody along.
You have been brainwashed. Or was it Russia as well?
Everything started much longer ago. You can't go along in life just assuming everything will converge to some whig paradise.
If campaign spending is strictly regulated, I imagine it would be difficult for such work.
Because it was shady, deception is deception.
Might be a challenge to some, but one can find out things if they pay enough attention to data.
This was mentioned in Careless People. It seems like they wanted to use facebook as an electoral tool pretty early on because it gives them leverage over politicians. They might not have been deliberately involved in CA, but this is probably exactly what they wanted
That and a lot else Facebook does is a primary sin, end of story. This isn't conservative vs liberal. It's one very cynical man's view of humanity. I have very little respect for Mark Zuckerberg, and much contempt for him
When future supreme court judges are writing their manifesto to business interests on how to stop Ivy League graduates from caring about the environmental impacts of capitalism in the 70s, le funny memes were not mentioned.
On Hillary specifically, she was the subject of the the movie that the Citizens United court case was about!
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/citi...
Trump and Cambridge Anlytica are just unpleasant, cancerous symptoms of this.
From: Mark Zuckerberg
Sent: Monday, January 30, 2017 8:10:16 AM
Subject: Cambridge Analytica
https://motherboard.vice.com/read/big-data-cambridge-analyti...
I can't tell how much of this is just a dramatic telling the best practices of marketing today seen through the lens of survivorship bias, or how much of what they're done is truly novel and interesting work, at least in the field of politics.
Can someone explain to me what they actually did from an analytics and ads perspective, and how advanced it actually was?
From: Andrew Bosworth
Sent: Monday, January 30, 2017 9:58:03 AM
Subject: Re: Cambridge Analytica
- They ran tens of thousands of creatives and iterated quickly to find what was working, further sub segmenting audiences (using custom audiences) based on response.
- They used different formats early but found video was most effective so were using that primarily by the end (90+%)
- They were primarily fundraising on Facebook, which means rallying the base instead of trying to win over marginal voters. That was an effective strategy that lead to very low CPMs and makes iterating to find market fiit for your message much easier. The rumor is that they turned tens of millions spent on FB into hundreds of millions for the campaign, which they spent elsewhere.
I've heard separately that their entire electoral strategy was to rally the base rather than send a broadly appealing message. Few marketers are interested in doing that so it stands to reason they would have unusual results.
Net net, my guess is that CA did have to do some interesting work to quickly take results from campaigns and spin them into the next, and the campaign had to do some interesting work to generate so much creative, but I'm skeptical that Cambridge Analytica has any data or expertise that couldn't be replicated readily by someone else. I'm suspect we will find that the majority of the advantage was using our platform to the fullest.
boz
[This document is from In re Facebook, Inc. Securities Litigation (2026).]
It’s not about whether these companies are in the right or not, but more about how we as a society address the consequences of how their products operate.
When the media mischaracterizes this stuff it makes the public perception's of what’s going on frankly becomes ridiculous and makes it easy for corporations to dismiss detractors as kooks.
This link at best shows us Mark Zuckerberg playing his standard card of victim and faking (again) that he didn't know about anything, while all evidence point that he actively played a role in it.
To create evidence that he didn't know about it?
But more, CA was created as consequence and a way to profit out of the 2012 Six4Three scandal, after Mark Zuckerberg personally designed/approved the permissive data-sharing ecosystem specifically for these use cases (as several internal mails show).
(And no, I don't know if they'll reach AGI, my uninformed bet is: no).
Another factor (which can also be seen in the "metaverse" business) is that how our investment/economy system makes these companies "need" [0] to always be a "growth stock" with something even bigger, even after they're already enormous quasi-monopolies.
Google later offered a prompt in their own services, because Facebook was hoovering up contacts or... something, I forget
Zuckerberg actively wants a monopoly. He's, in my estimation, a sociopath. He got lucky, but 'lucky' also means 'internet 2006'. If you steal the Winklevoss' product (something he apparently also did with 'Metaverse'. The twins meant it in some sort of bitcoin sense, Zuckerberg co-opted it) you too can capture the literally entire global market, because the world was just coming online in those years
Fully agree. Facebook apps on Android can/could scan what apps are installed on the phone, and they could see if another social media app's install base was growing. He bought Instagram, he bought WhatsApp, he copied the Snapchat concept of "24 hour stories" when they refused the purchase.
TBH if I had the billions, I'm not sure I'd be any different (at least with the monopoly, I sure as hell wouldn't be blowing it on metaverse).
I think people wanted to believe there was some external hand at work, and it suited CA to pretend they were more capable than they were.
Cummings spoke about using normal Facebook ad segmentation to target some demographics.
Cambridge Analytica had substantial discussions with Leave.EU, the campaign associated with Arron Banks and Nigel Farage. It attended meetings, appeared at a Leave.EU press event, prepared proposals, and discussed using data and psychological profiling. At the time, both Leave.EU figures and Cambridge Analytica publicly made statements suggesting a working relationship.
Here is the actual text from 4.7.
> We have investigated the allegation that Cambridge Analytica provided data analytics services to Leave.EU. Our focus has been on the use of personal data and whether Leave.EU breached the DPA98. We served Information Notices on Leave.EU and Cambridge Analytica to gather evidence as part of our investigation.
> Information placed in the public domain by some of those subject to investigation suggested a relationship between Cambridge Analytica and Leave.EU, and both sides have acknowledged there was an initial exploration of how to work together during the Referendum campaign. Brittany Kaiser, Director of Program Development at Cambridge Analytica, appeared at a Leave.EU news conference in 2015. Statements by representatives of Leave.EU made in 2016 also indicated that Cambridge Analytica had worked for them. Senior Cambridge Analytica staff also claimed they worked with Leave.EU.
> In response to Information Notices served on them, both parties have stated that only preliminary discussions took place, and the relationship did not move forward when Leave.EU failed to attain the designation as the official Leave campaign. In evidence provided to the ICO, Leave.EU stated that four meetings took place:
> 23 October 2015 representatives of Leave EU met with CA staff, this was a basic introductory meeting to express interest in potentially working together
> 18 November 2015 CA appeared at a press conference with Leave.eu
> 20 November 2015 CA went to Leave.EU’s Bristol offices and pitched their product.
> 8 January 2016 representatives of Leave.EU met CA in London, and CA presented a proposal for future work together.
The ICO report does not specify that any work was carried out, or what exactly that work was.
Also worth noting that the pdf in interim report The related findings of the final report after 3 year investigation are summerised here
https://cy.ico.org.uk/media2/migrated/2618383/20201002_ico-o...
> From my review of the materials recovered by the investigation I have found no further evidence to change my earlier view that SCL/CA were not involved in the EU referendum campaign in the UK - beyond some initial enquiries made by SCL/CA in relation to UKIP data in the early stages of the referendum process. This strand of work does not appear to have then been taken forward by SCL/CA.
A: Yo! did we do anything wrong?
B: No. someone else messed up. we're good.
That said they did buy user data from a quiz app which is not really how you were supposed to use the Facebook Platform so that still wasn't really FB's fault I think
So the real issue was just people trying to blame the 2016 election (adverse to their interests if they were anti-Trump) on Zuck.
Heck to this day Ben Shapiro is one of the biggest podcasts and Tucker's show is even bigger than him so the right wing is a real force in American politics and not just propped up by FB's old newsfeed algo
Whatever it was some amazing insight is irelevant!
We know Cambridge Analytica weren’t afraid to subvert the core principle of democracy like that because we have documents from their campaigns in Trinidad and Tobago to do the same thing, presenting not voting as an act of youth rebellion with the aim of reducing turnout among young Black Trinidadians.
(Discouraging black people from voting seems to be a theme)
Sure, as Mark says, anyone with the voter data and capital could likely create that audience and run those ads, but anyone with integrity wouldn’t. The story is not about unbelievable sophistication, it’s about using the tools Facebook provided to subvert democracy.
Mark is right that they’re nothing special. But that doesn’t dismiss them, the fact that they’re nothing special is the scary part.