$1.5 billion was spent in the federal election season. 100k was bought by Russian interests and were questioning those 100k when we spend much more destabilizing other governments we oppose.
Still, we should look into why a campaign season wastes 1.5 billion on one contest and no one bats an eye, or some do a little but the media couldn't care less. It's one of their cash cows.
Don't dismiss a (even much) smaller amount; if properly targeted it can be a lot more effective than the crop dusting approach that traditional advertising takes.
Traditional media buys versus well targeted ads on Facebook. You don't need to sway everyone. That 100k stands up a lot more than one would think just comparing the two numbers.
How do you know? Have you ever worked in online advertising? Most companies easily spend 100k a month. Are you aware you are being manipulated by the media on this story?
There is no way that a crack Russian/Ukranian team understand or have better info on the American public than American "pundits" and campaign professionals.
Why couldn't Bernie buy 200k of highly targeted ads and beat Hillary or why couldn't a very well connected Hillary (who has good connections to Russia as well) not buy highly targeted and effective ads?
I don't buy that narrative. There is no way a rag-tag team with $100k beats a political machine with real connections in DC, Wall Street, etc. which happened to also spend over $1billion. It's a ridiculous assertion.
Why don't we, the US, buy these highly targeted ads in a place like Venezuela and get people to vote against Maduro (or any other gov't we don't like).
It just does not work that way. Or, if it were to, the likes of FB and Google are doomed. Whoever this band of propagandists are they can undercut Madison ave and rake in the money for pennies on the dollar from corporate America.
One of the questions being investigated is how such targeting might have been achieved. There just happened to be a data operation run by Jared Kushner, who is at the center of Mueller's investigation.
I also like to direct people to the following https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/07/the-great...
Also "no way a rag-tag team beats.." is straight from the plot of the movie Moneyball which is what we're talking about here. Also no-one is talking about GDPR which could stop this (please see below).
We're talking several orders of magnitude here. It's not comparable to the moneyball sitch.
The thing is, if that team has a secret sauce to convince people to change their minds, they are in the wrong game and would rake in billions serving corporate America and unseating Google and Facebook at their game.
I think you're right just wanted to highlight that some seriously impressive tech was applied. Any suggestion that it was a exclusively Russia/Ukrainian team that did everything could be a distraction so that the whole issue can be lumped into the popular dialogue. I'm sure there was a Russian or two on the real team.
Sure, it's a fake prop to enable tighter political regulations online. The entire thing is a sham that Facebook and Google are gleefully willingly going along with. There is a long, disgusting history of powerful corporations in the US working with politicians to achieve mutually beneficial goals that relate to carving up the economic or political spheres.
The sums are laughably trivial, precisely because anything larger would be too difficult to set the fraud up for (anything that could be considered business significant, millions of dollars, would be too easy to tightly audit; plus the smaller sums play to the angle that it's easy for it to get lost in the overall, so the company doesn't look too extremely negligent; no doubt that was part of the deal Facebook and Google made in helping with the setup).
This argument seems to fly in the face of the startup ethos (which I guessed had some currency at HN). It is precisely a rag-tag team with $100k and _a different way of thinking_ that brings down a $1bn machine. I'm not saying that this is what happened in this case, but it could happen (or have happened), so don't dismiss it just because of the resourcing asymmetry.
Campaign finance is a big topic, at least for the Democrats. Public financing plus constitutional amendment to overturn Citizen's United was in the party program.
And just because we do shitty things to other countries doesn't mean we should roll over and allow it to happen to us (see also: cyber attacks).
Because an ad that makes people angry over a lie is 10 thousand times more effective than "buy our brand next time you shop". Why are we here commenting over a political story instead of about what toothpaste brand is best?
You're basically arguing the angriest electorate will win. Obama won on Hope.
I think what won the election this time was that people were a bit sick and tired of pols who promised all kinds of things but never delivered. Hillary promised all kinds of things and I would venture she never intended on delivering on many. Personally, I voted third party.
I mean, if we look at her political history, it's always been opportunistic -by that I mean changing political position if it favored her. From the Super predator stuff to opposition to gay marriage to many things in between. I think people were tired of that and thought Trump offered an alternative which even if it didn't match up in all counts, they could at least believe he had the US interest in mind (as opposed to globalists who might have other priorities.)
I think it's interesting that at one time the left campaigned against the mainstream left's globalist interventionist agenda but now they are proponents of globalism and interventionism and open borders. It's an interesting dynamic to witness.
Inject 100k on a fake news items like "The pope is a paedofile" for instance and see the whole world talking and reposting it the next day.
Spend a billion promoting something real but boring and you might see almost non-existent tracktion.
By definition disinformation and destabilization campaigns are 1000x more effective, especially if organized by entities specializing on those for decades.
You're mistaken if you think there were not opposition ads against the opposition. Even just looking at the mainstream traditional ads by Hillary, they were very dark ads. Just the other day she was still chiding women for not voting for her, as if she was owed their vote. Who has that much entitlement?
In your example Satan is accused of owning the pope and all other miscreants.
FB, Amazon and Google have to be split up. It is not in the interest of the society or safe to have such huge companies with such huge power.
For Google at the very least the search engine has to become a separate independent entity with restrictions on how and what information is exchanges with the rest.
I would argue that they do not to be split up, but commercial advertising has to be banned from the internet. This would fix pretty much every issue we face now.
while we're doing things we'll never actually do, let's decide that money is not speech, ban all political contributions and publicly finance all election campaigns and fix every American problem for real.
Many of the valuable projects that we get from FB (AI Research), Amazon (Echo, Kindle, etc.), Google (Brain, Waymo, GMail, Android, etc.), are due to their strong market position and a product that throws off cash. They have this market position because they are the best at what they do. These companies don't have monopolies because of government mandate, they have them because they make the best products.
It's frightening to think that there are people out there who want to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs but comforting that they are nowhere near the majority opinion. I hope it stays that way. I would hate to see Google Brain, Waymo, and Deep Mind go the way of Bell Labs.
The fraction of income that goes into research is not that large for the companies that you mention.
Lets remember that these are not traditional monopolies, in the sense of Standard Oil. They are much worse, as they are so embedded in the lives of people today. Their status as monopolies will be tolerated by society only as far as they don't exhibit anti-competitive practices.
I generally agree with you that they are doing good things but the bigger question is what harm are they doing? We need to stop having these huge mergers. Think what a different landscape we'd have if Facebook didn't own Instagram and WhatsApp. Those companies had a choice, fight FB with limited money or cash out. (I'm not judging them...) Look at Snap. They've said no and so FB threw all their money at duplicating all their features in all their own properties. This is the downside of the products that just throw off cash. All the money and time in the world they can devote to squashing all competition.
It reminds me of the same things that happened with the banks and Comcast. Most people who have Comcast got there because Comcast bought their provider and the investors wanted to cash out, not because people voted with their dollars. The banks got too big to fail, not because everyone rushed to switch all their money to bank X but because bank X bought up all the smaller players with money bet on the bubble.
I think they do need broken up but I would argue all we really need to do is "unmerge" these acquisitions and spin them back out separate. Absolute power has always corrupted absolutely. To be fair, this isn't new. Gates did a lot of the same things but now their foundation is doing wonderful things. However, it is easy to be a philanthropist with spare billions. What I would love to see from one of these founders is to attack one of the world's biggest problems personally and with the same ruthlessness they did their main companies. Musk is the only one who really seems to be "walking the walk".
You lost me at "Musk is the only one who really seems to be "walking the walk"", which is inconsistent with the rest of your theory, but luckily for you that was the last sentence. :)
It's clear Musk is also interested in consolidation and expansion of his empire, probably one day under X.com brand, but I guess since he is good at working on his fan base and talking about imaginary ideas, he should be treated differently than Larry Page or Jeff Bezos.
When you think about it from another perspective (playing devil's advocate here for the sake of illustration), SpaceX is not about going to Mars, it's just another satellite launching business working its underpaid employees 80-hour-weeks with that line; SolarCity was just another put solar panel on your roof business you see a ton of in Costco without any clear differentiation (how about "unmerging" that too, by the way?) Heck, look at Tesla "Autopilot", nothing but a joke.
If what Musk does is Good, I like to point out Larry Page's company had a self-driving car project since ages ago; they tried doing breakthrough work on life sciences, and a lot of other things. Perhaps Larry Page should have dated Hollywood actresses all-year-long to get more positive press coverage.
The point is, yes, there are pros and cons. And you basically agreed to the parent post's when you brought up Musk's example.
What you say is fair, I wasn't saying Musk is 100% altruistic. I think the push for solar and electric cars are good for the planet though even if they are good for his checkbook too. I was using him as an example of someone who is actively working on the projects not simply funding others to do good work. (Incidentally, I don't think self-driving cars is something that I'd call altruistic)
So much power concentrated in a single entity cannot be good for democracy in the long run.
For example look at the web. Google has pretty much free pass to crawl and index any website, while smaller players get blacklisted and blocked immediately. Paywalled websites open their door if the link comes from Facebook. If you get black listed by gmail, your emails have no chance of reaching user’s inboxes. And the list goes on.
In the same way the ancient Athenians used to exile citizens who were getting too powerful, it’s a good idea to split up companies that become too powerful. Even if they haven’t violated any laws.
I don’t think that any research gap will left unfilled by smaller startups if they get split up.
The "Russia, Russia, Russia" Democrats are the same ones who want to regulate everything except silicon valley, this isn't even on the radar for the Republicans, and even Europe is somewhat in their thrall thanks to branch offices and the Dutch sandwich.
All of this just proves to me that my US public school education on communism and the eastern bloc was simple propaganda. We are perfectly OK with having an unaccountable surveillance state as long as it makes money.
It was apparently $100k spent by RT to promote news stories. Why is it so unusual for a news company to spend money promoting news stories on social media sites?
This is nothing out of the ordinary (including if a government did try small actions to impact an election), and yet it has become such an intense witch hunt during the 2016 election.
Who is "they"? If this isn't a bipartisan issue, that's a travesty and a mockery of our democracy. Another nation interfering in our elections shouldnt be a partisan issue.
Mueller's investigation has gone far beyond buying ads. But yes,I absolutely think it should be illegal for foreign nations to participate in our political process either through direct means (donations), or indirect (funding political ads), and I consider both interference in our elections.
Do the foreign countries you want to ban from influencing US elections include other western countries like Canada, Britain or Germany? What about Mexico? What if Mexico also bought ads to promote legalizing undocumented immigrants from Mexico? What if the undocumented immigrants themselves bought ads, do they count as foreign or domestic?
> Why is it so unusual for a news company to spend money promoting news stories on social media sites?
Because its not a "news company", it is a known propaganda arm of the Russian Govt. masquerading as a news company. If it was an independent news agency, it would be OK.
So where do you suggest we draw the line between what state-sponsored news is allowed vs forbidden to do? Should we only forbid them from buying advertising? Why not forbid their reporting of news altogether?
Also, I don't think people have similar complaints about Al Jazeera's reporting on Russian election campaigns?
Every major country does this, every election, to every other major country. It's something we live with and I don't get the overreaction.
> Every major country does this, every election, to every other major country. It's something we live with and I don't get the overreaction.
Please don't normalize this kind of behavior. Every country does not do "this". There is no major news agency supported directly by US Federal Funds, except perhaps NPR, but that has been openly critical of the US all the time.
And that is perhaps the test of truly independent news outlet: if its willing to criticize its own Government, if its able to do so, even when the information paints the Govt. in a really bad light.
NPR has been openly critical of the GOP all the time. I'm sure RT is willing to deliver a scathing criticism of Putin's opposition if anyone cares to listen.
Pedantic, but Voice of America is basically a US "propaganda" outfit. But a lot of countries do not really have this.
RT is totally at a different scale. It's clearly being used as a political outfit. Other state-owned media in many countries have rules about editorial independence. RT clearly does not.
He's not normalizing anything, he's setting the context which I happen to account for as well; for example our country directly attempted to (and did) influence the Brexit campaign and Scottish referendum – and not just our media but our elected officials.
Our news outlets have been caught colluding with certain candidates – federal funds is one of countless vectors in which governments/elites can steer the news. Think of Donna Brazil, for example. She had to leave MSNBC after forwarding debate questions to Clinton.
> There is no major news agency supported directly by US Federal Funds
Voice of America is a major global news agency directly funded by the federal government, which, because of concerns of the government propagandizing it's own electorate, was prohibited from broadcasting directly to American citizens until 2013. (Radio Free Europe, etc., used to part of a separate federal government office, too.)
Does anyone know how FB is planning to adhere to GDPR coming into force next year? Google are said to have stopped analysing peoples gmail. Could it be as simple as reducing the variables collected/predicted to a unashamed set that can be shown to users about themselves and could FB afford that?
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 69.3 ms ] threadStill, we should look into why a campaign season wastes 1.5 billion on one contest and no one bats an eye, or some do a little but the media couldn't care less. It's one of their cash cows.
I don't know enough about what happened in this case, but you can't dismiss the entire argument purely on the spend amount.
There is no way that a crack Russian/Ukranian team understand or have better info on the American public than American "pundits" and campaign professionals.
Why couldn't Bernie buy 200k of highly targeted ads and beat Hillary or why couldn't a very well connected Hillary (who has good connections to Russia as well) not buy highly targeted and effective ads?
I don't buy that narrative. There is no way a rag-tag team with $100k beats a political machine with real connections in DC, Wall Street, etc. which happened to also spend over $1billion. It's a ridiculous assertion.
Why don't we, the US, buy these highly targeted ads in a place like Venezuela and get people to vote against Maduro (or any other gov't we don't like).
It just does not work that way. Or, if it were to, the likes of FB and Google are doomed. Whoever this band of propagandists are they can undercut Madison ave and rake in the money for pennies on the dollar from corporate America.
The thing is, if that team has a secret sauce to convince people to change their minds, they are in the wrong game and would rake in billions serving corporate America and unseating Google and Facebook at their game.
It's a tempest in a teapot.
The sums are laughably trivial, precisely because anything larger would be too difficult to set the fraud up for (anything that could be considered business significant, millions of dollars, would be too easy to tightly audit; plus the smaller sums play to the angle that it's easy for it to get lost in the overall, so the company doesn't look too extremely negligent; no doubt that was part of the deal Facebook and Google made in helping with the setup).
And just because we do shitty things to other countries doesn't mean we should roll over and allow it to happen to us (see also: cyber attacks).
You know, even if the amount were $10 million, in the face of over $1 Billion, it's still peanuts.
If it were that easy, we'd be toppling regimes all over the world for pennies on the dollar but we're not because that's dreamland stuff.
You're basically arguing the angriest electorate will win. Obama won on Hope.
I think what won the election this time was that people were a bit sick and tired of pols who promised all kinds of things but never delivered. Hillary promised all kinds of things and I would venture she never intended on delivering on many. Personally, I voted third party.
I mean, if we look at her political history, it's always been opportunistic -by that I mean changing political position if it favored her. From the Super predator stuff to opposition to gay marriage to many things in between. I think people were tired of that and thought Trump offered an alternative which even if it didn't match up in all counts, they could at least believe he had the US interest in mind (as opposed to globalists who might have other priorities.)
I think it's interesting that at one time the left campaigned against the mainstream left's globalist interventionist agenda but now they are proponents of globalism and interventionism and open borders. It's an interesting dynamic to witness.
Inject 100k on a fake news items like "The pope is a paedofile" for instance and see the whole world talking and reposting it the next day.
Spend a billion promoting something real but boring and you might see almost non-existent tracktion.
By definition disinformation and destabilization campaigns are 1000x more effective, especially if organized by entities specializing on those for decades.
In your example Satan is accused of owning the pope and all other miscreants.
For Google at the very least the search engine has to become a separate independent entity with restrictions on how and what information is exchanges with the rest.
It's frightening to think that there are people out there who want to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs but comforting that they are nowhere near the majority opinion. I hope it stays that way. I would hate to see Google Brain, Waymo, and Deep Mind go the way of Bell Labs.
Lets remember that these are not traditional monopolies, in the sense of Standard Oil. They are much worse, as they are so embedded in the lives of people today. Their status as monopolies will be tolerated by society only as far as they don't exhibit anti-competitive practices.
(Recode/FactSet data)
Amazon: 136B
Alphabet: 90B
Intel: 60B
Microsoft: 90B
Apple: 214B
----------------
And Gross Income:
Amazon: 58B
Alphabet: 55B
Intel: 36B
Microsoft: 55B
Apple: 83B
It reminds me of the same things that happened with the banks and Comcast. Most people who have Comcast got there because Comcast bought their provider and the investors wanted to cash out, not because people voted with their dollars. The banks got too big to fail, not because everyone rushed to switch all their money to bank X but because bank X bought up all the smaller players with money bet on the bubble.
I think they do need broken up but I would argue all we really need to do is "unmerge" these acquisitions and spin them back out separate. Absolute power has always corrupted absolutely. To be fair, this isn't new. Gates did a lot of the same things but now their foundation is doing wonderful things. However, it is easy to be a philanthropist with spare billions. What I would love to see from one of these founders is to attack one of the world's biggest problems personally and with the same ruthlessness they did their main companies. Musk is the only one who really seems to be "walking the walk".
It's clear Musk is also interested in consolidation and expansion of his empire, probably one day under X.com brand, but I guess since he is good at working on his fan base and talking about imaginary ideas, he should be treated differently than Larry Page or Jeff Bezos.
When you think about it from another perspective (playing devil's advocate here for the sake of illustration), SpaceX is not about going to Mars, it's just another satellite launching business working its underpaid employees 80-hour-weeks with that line; SolarCity was just another put solar panel on your roof business you see a ton of in Costco without any clear differentiation (how about "unmerging" that too, by the way?) Heck, look at Tesla "Autopilot", nothing but a joke.
If what Musk does is Good, I like to point out Larry Page's company had a self-driving car project since ages ago; they tried doing breakthrough work on life sciences, and a lot of other things. Perhaps Larry Page should have dated Hollywood actresses all-year-long to get more positive press coverage.
The point is, yes, there are pros and cons. And you basically agreed to the parent post's when you brought up Musk's example.
For example look at the web. Google has pretty much free pass to crawl and index any website, while smaller players get blacklisted and blocked immediately. Paywalled websites open their door if the link comes from Facebook. If you get black listed by gmail, your emails have no chance of reaching user’s inboxes. And the list goes on.
In the same way the ancient Athenians used to exile citizens who were getting too powerful, it’s a good idea to split up companies that become too powerful. Even if they haven’t violated any laws.
I don’t think that any research gap will left unfilled by smaller startups if they get split up.
All of this just proves to me that my US public school education on communism and the eastern bloc was simple propaganda. We are perfectly OK with having an unaccountable surveillance state as long as it makes money.
This is nothing out of the ordinary (including if a government did try small actions to impact an election), and yet it has become such an intense witch hunt during the 2016 election.
When you say "interfering," are you talking about buying ads?
Because its not a "news company", it is a known propaganda arm of the Russian Govt. masquerading as a news company. If it was an independent news agency, it would be OK.
Also, I don't think people have similar complaints about Al Jazeera's reporting on Russian election campaigns?
Every major country does this, every election, to every other major country. It's something we live with and I don't get the overreaction.
Please don't normalize this kind of behavior. Every country does not do "this". There is no major news agency supported directly by US Federal Funds, except perhaps NPR, but that has been openly critical of the US all the time.
And that is perhaps the test of truly independent news outlet: if its willing to criticize its own Government, if its able to do so, even when the information paints the Govt. in a really bad light.
RT is totally at a different scale. It's clearly being used as a political outfit. Other state-owned media in many countries have rules about editorial independence. RT clearly does not.
Anecdotally, I've literally never heard of this before.
Our news outlets have been caught colluding with certain candidates – federal funds is one of countless vectors in which governments/elites can steer the news. Think of Donna Brazil, for example. She had to leave MSNBC after forwarding debate questions to Clinton.
Voice of America is a major global news agency directly funded by the federal government, which, because of concerns of the government propagandizing it's own electorate, was prohibited from broadcasting directly to American citizens until 2013. (Radio Free Europe, etc., used to part of a separate federal government office, too.)
We need to more closely regulate what is 'really news' and what is not.