Facebook engineer guides San Antonio Trump team to victory, realizes the gravity of what he has done, goes soul searching in Peru and undoubtedly does Ayahuasca, then leaves Facebook and resolves to defeat his old partners.
Someone needs to contact this guy for the movie rights. It’s the perfect modern redemption arc, and peak Silicon Valley.
No, just a salesperson. He's a very good salesperson, mind you, and like many salespeople, he ends up as the front-facing person in these kinds of endeavours.
Why do people still joke as if the Russian hacks and russian social media war was fake. The republican led gop senate investigation concluded russian hackers were behind the dnc/podesta hacks and were working to boost trump on social media in ways never seen before in the states.
Edit: Adding relevant excerpts from the 5th, I think final, senate GOP led report's executive summary. This is the Republican led report. This was not led be democrats.
Hack and Leak
>"The Committee found that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the Russian effort to hack computer networks and accounts affiliated with the Democratic Party and leak information damaging to Hillary Clinton and her campaign for president. Moscow's intent was to harm the Clinton Campaign, tarnish an expected Clinton presidential administration, help the Trump Campaign after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, and undermine the U.S. democratic process. "
Social Media executive summary ("Influence for hire" section)
>"The Committee found that highly evolved tools used to shape popular sentiment were utilized in support of the Trump Campaign during the 2016 election season, and Russia has
made use of such tools in its influence operations, but a link between Russian efforts and the Campaign's use of these tools was not established. These commercially available services many of which are based overseas-rely on an array of personal information to build targeted messaging profiles. Russia applied these sam·technologies and methodologies to its influence· campaign during the 2016 election and, in doing so, conducted foreign influence operationsagainst the United States with a speed, precision, and scale not previously seen."
And from the intro of the actual section on Influence for hire.:
>"All three companies either aspired to apply micro-targeted social media messaging
techniques comparable to those employed by Russian information operatives with the Internet
Research Agency, or actively engaged in the application of these techniques. "
Why did he say hackers then? These ex-FB people aren't hacking anything. I don't agree with your interpretation one bit.
Not only are they not comparable in terms of hacking/espionage, there's a huge difference between a group of americans spending money to influence american elections compared to russian military and intelligences ops doing it.
And that's still true even if the russians weren't pushing both false/misleading propaganda and weaponizing the products of their targeted espionage.
Do you see a difference between citizens pooling small donations to run ads vs a foreign state running a misinformation campaign to affect an election?
I do see the difference, of course. But on the other hand, foreign or domestic, trickery is trickery. Check this:
"The data scientists found that showing certain Facebook ads to certain possible Trump voters lowered their approval of the president by 3.6%"
And:
"“We have found ways to find the right news to put in front of them, and we found ways to understand what works and doesn’t [..] And if you combine all those things together, you get a really effective approach, and that’s what we’re doing.”
This sounds like applying micro-targeted psychological tricks to damage one candidate or favour another. I'm sure the same was done on Trump's side, but it is scary nonetheless. This is pervasive and subtle high-tech manipulation, not political promotion and even less political information. You can be happy of the result today but it's hard to approve the methods.
Sadly this is what a polarized political system does:
if you believe that the opposing side is primarily motivated by racism and bigotry then you will not have any moral scruples about willfully manipulating human beings.
If you believe the other side wants to destroy America's founding principles you will be equally fine with doing the same thing for your side.
This is political advertising, which is different from political information. It has always had this purpose. As long as they're following the FEC rules, where ads are clearly marked as such along with who is paying for them, what's wrong?
Imagine there was no Facebook. I suspect the events of the last few years would have gone the same. 4 years of Trump is what got Biden elected.. not facebook ads.
Trump got 63 million votes in 2016. He got 7 million more in 2020. In the end, what decided the election is 3 votes every 100. The result is clear-cut: one wins, the other loses. But in reality what decided the election is a really tiny difference. Small enough for ads (from all sides) to have an effect on it, and really too small to say that anything has actually changed in the country.
Such an under appreciated fact. Without Cambridge Analytics Trump wouldn't have won in 2016, I'm glad a bunch of smart people decided to make a significant difference in this election and Trump didn't have a trump card this time.
I mean this genuinely - how do we know that CA impacted the election? How many votes were swung or non-voters converted?
I go back and forth. Sometimes I think this stuff must be super valuable because so much money gets spent in it. Then I work with medium businesses who have no clue how effective their spend is.
I mean this sincerely: what actual evidence is there that CA affected the 2016 election?
1. Advertisers wouldn't spend so much money if it didn't work
CA gave Trump an upgrade from a no clue operator to a very efficient marketing operation with hypertarget personalized ads. Trump ran/runs several paid conversion funnels on social media. He build a community of followers that he leverages as an army. He gamified the engagement with his community and monetizes their attention. Marketing innovation is like technology innovation, companies spend similar amount s on innovation but the ROI is very different.
Do people remember 'bullshit jobs'? One class was 'goons'. You only need them because the opposition have them. I guess it looks like targetted ads to influence voting is here to stay.
Tech wise, this is really impressive when I think about how much effort goes in to building systems like this, but as a believer in democracy it horrifies me.
There are just so many people who doesn't care about their data or doesn't understand what information they share has consequences for all of us. "I/you are not someone important, its okay if X company has access to my data" is something I hear quite often whenever the topic of data privacy is brought up among some of my friends, and the worst thing is when you hear this sort of speak from people with a good education people with access to information people who are earning a good living and are considered to be "doing well".
We need to start putting even more effort in to educating the average non-technical person about privacy and how it can harm democracy and so many other things in our life and we have to as an industry start taking more responsibility for the tech we develop.
At the moment I feal that it's a lost cause. There is no longer any connection between the people running the ads and the communities they are impacting. When the printing press was invented, the people writing the paper and publishing stories tended to live in the communities they published in. As media empires started being built in the 1980s and 1990s, local ownership vanished, and local content disappeared as well. The internet then amplified this effect as the advertising empires of Google and Facebook began to grow in the '00s. I don't think this is healthy for humanity. And I don't think we have the collective political will to fix this.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 31.8 ms ] threadSomeone needs to contact this guy for the movie rights. It’s the perfect modern redemption arc, and peak Silicon Valley.
Edit: Adding relevant excerpts from the 5th, I think final, senate GOP led report's executive summary. This is the Republican led report. This was not led be democrats.
Hack and Leak
>"The Committee found that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the Russian effort to hack computer networks and accounts affiliated with the Democratic Party and leak information damaging to Hillary Clinton and her campaign for president. Moscow's intent was to harm the Clinton Campaign, tarnish an expected Clinton presidential administration, help the Trump Campaign after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, and undermine the U.S. democratic process. "
Social Media executive summary ("Influence for hire" section)
>"The Committee found that highly evolved tools used to shape popular sentiment were utilized in support of the Trump Campaign during the 2016 election season, and Russia has made use of such tools in its influence operations, but a link between Russian efforts and the Campaign's use of these tools was not established. These commercially available services many of which are based overseas-rely on an array of personal information to build targeted messaging profiles. Russia applied these sam·technologies and methodologies to its influence· campaign during the 2016 election and, in doing so, conducted foreign influence operationsagainst the United States with a speed, precision, and scale not previously seen."
And from the intro of the actual section on Influence for hire.:
>"All three companies either aspired to apply micro-targeted social media messaging techniques comparable to those employed by Russian information operatives with the Internet Research Agency, or actively engaged in the application of these techniques. "
Not only are they not comparable in terms of hacking/espionage, there's a huge difference between a group of americans spending money to influence american elections compared to russian military and intelligences ops doing it.
And that's still true even if the russians weren't pushing both false/misleading propaganda and weaponizing the products of their targeted espionage.
"The data scientists found that showing certain Facebook ads to certain possible Trump voters lowered their approval of the president by 3.6%"
And:
"“We have found ways to find the right news to put in front of them, and we found ways to understand what works and doesn’t [..] And if you combine all those things together, you get a really effective approach, and that’s what we’re doing.”
This sounds like applying micro-targeted psychological tricks to damage one candidate or favour another. I'm sure the same was done on Trump's side, but it is scary nonetheless. This is pervasive and subtle high-tech manipulation, not political promotion and even less political information. You can be happy of the result today but it's hard to approve the methods.
If you believe the other side wants to destroy America's founding principles you will be equally fine with doing the same thing for your side.
TV ads? That's a whole different ball game that has clear signal in the polling.
Trump got 63 million votes in 2016. He got 7 million more in 2020. In the end, what decided the election is 3 votes every 100. The result is clear-cut: one wins, the other loses. But in reality what decided the election is a really tiny difference. Small enough for ads (from all sides) to have an effect on it, and really too small to say that anything has actually changed in the country.
I go back and forth. Sometimes I think this stuff must be super valuable because so much money gets spent in it. Then I work with medium businesses who have no clue how effective their spend is.
I mean this sincerely: what actual evidence is there that CA affected the 2016 election?
1. Advertisers wouldn't spend so much money if it didn't work
2. ...?
There are just so many people who doesn't care about their data or doesn't understand what information they share has consequences for all of us. "I/you are not someone important, its okay if X company has access to my data" is something I hear quite often whenever the topic of data privacy is brought up among some of my friends, and the worst thing is when you hear this sort of speak from people with a good education people with access to information people who are earning a good living and are considered to be "doing well".
We need to start putting even more effort in to educating the average non-technical person about privacy and how it can harm democracy and so many other things in our life and we have to as an industry start taking more responsibility for the tech we develop.