Yeah, I’d argue it shouldn’t have the (2017) added to it’s title, given that notation is supposed to be used when posting something which was published in the past, not something that simply occurred in the past.
counterpoint : animal rescues and shelters benefit greatly in getting adoptable animals before people scrolling, for super low cost to them, but of course because the scrolling people are seeing ads.
So what's the implication supposed to be? The obvious one is probably something like "facebook was undermining democracy and supporting Trump!", but a more careful reading reveals:
1. they apparently gave advice to both the clinton and trump campaign
2. the trump campaign did targeted marketing better (ie. targeting the base rather than the marginal voter)
3. "I'm skeptical that Cambridge Analytica has any data or expertise that couldn't be replicated readily by someone else"
Of course, you can still argue that facebook undermined democracy, by providing the marketing tools that allowed the trump campaign to effectively reach voters, but at what point can you blame a tool for the outcome of an election? Some say the mamdani effectively used tiktok to rally voters, so does that mean we should be up and arms about the mamdani campaign? How far back can we go? The invention of the printing press led to all sorts of partisan newspapers, was that anti-democratic?
It wouldn't be a stretch but only it the rest of the investigation didn't happen and we knew absolutely nothing else about Cambridge Analytica or Facebook. As that is not the reality we live in, you could read more about the case or not let you biases show so clearly.
>Just because this is worded ambiguously, to clarify the "they" is Facebook. CA on the other hand was effectively the Trump's digital ad campaign.
Given that "cambridge analytica" wasn't even mentioned in my comment, and "facebook" was the last subject mentioned (ie. "facebook was ..."), I don't see how anyone could have interpreted "they" to mean cambridge analytica.
>This ignores that a lot of what made CA different is that they used microtargeting to discourage turnout via fake news stories.
What does this have to do with the email? Everything you mentioned was already known before this email was released. Is the complaint that boz didn't also tell zuckerberg "btw cambridge analytica works with conservatives are are super evil"?
>After CA's methods and actions became public, FB massively limited what you could do via their API.
Was the email sent before or after they locked down the API? Also, this feels like a nitpick, eg. suppose a mass shooter killed a bunch people with an assault rifle, and then the government banned assault rifles, it would still be correct to say "anyone could bought the weapons the mass shooter used", even though it wasn't true in the present.
IMHO, that was the beginning of the deep troubles we are in right now, and cause of the political polarization. The brainwash was very effective, not only in the US, but also in Brazil.
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.
I'd date it to around then, too, but for a different reason. Whether you think it was a good or bad thing, I don't think it's incorrect to characterize the pre-2010s web as "socially progressive libertarian". 2013 was the first time I (we?) saw unabashedly extremist right-wing sentiments break Stormfront/4chan containment (and as a deathly serious matter, rather than the ambiguously sardonic nature of the latter's meme-ing). Specifically, with the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman murder trial, and the way that that incident picked up a thread of America's deepest divide and dragged it into cyberspace. I had never heard people saying the things they were saying around that topic, things that would make an Xbox Live edgelord go, "Bro, dial it back," and certainly never from the people who were saying them. My parents never saw the need to give me "the talk", and that was my introduction to the fact that America was very much not "post-racial", in a real way, and often proudly so.
At the point, everything was on the table, and everyone was "welcome" into the everlasting flame war.
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.”
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 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.
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.
The spot were in now with regards to political polarization started well before this, perhaps with the end of the fairness doctrine. After that, conservative interests were allowed to consolidate ownership of media outlets, like talk radio stations. This then led to consolidation of newspapers, local and cable news and even social media.
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.
I won't dispute that 2015-2017 was a turning point in many areas, but "cause of the political polarization" is a huge stretch. Political polarization has been going up for most of my life. You could perhaps put a start of it at the 1994 midterms. It was raging in the 2000s too.
It's part of the causal chain, but far from the beginning. The root problem, as far as humanly controllable things go, is the way we manufacture computer hardware. That's upstream of the centralized structure of the Internet which all of human civilization is beginning to mirror.
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.
From: Mark Zuckerberg
Sent: Monday, January 30, 2017 8:10:16 AM
Subject: Cambridge Analytica
I'm seeing more articles like this one come out claiming the Trump's campaign used FB and analytics in very precise ways that go beyond
what others have done before:
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
My general understanding is the Trump campaign
actually took all the advice we gave unlike Hillary. They used all our tools. That *is* surprisingly novel as most advertisers have a "way of doing things" and are slow to adapt but speaks more of
our platform than CA. A few examples:
- 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).]
When I interviewed at Facebook in 2019, one interviewer was on an integrity team. I'm not sure if it was his take or what the org settled on, but it's that Cambridge Analytica wasn't Facebook's fault (users willingly granted access), but it was their problem. Not surprising some of the same techniques got used by others.
I'm pretty sure that is a mis-characterization of what actually happened: a 3rd party app collected user profile data from FB _through somebody's friend connection_ [1].
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.
When I was at FB, I worked on a project whose entire goal was to use compiler/type checker technology to prevent intentional and unintentional leaking of personal data in FB back-end code. If you can believe that. The project had a fair amount of resources and high-level support.
I don't know if it was a psy-op or deception campaign or what.
Man, if I'd interviewed with FB and even heard the word "integrity" I'd have started laughing my ass off till I was covered in a puddle of my own piss. Not a single person at facebook has integrity, it's been that way since day one.
> but it's that Cambridge Analytica wasn't Facebook's fault (users willingly granted access), but it was their problem.
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.
Careless People is not a serious work, and it shouldn't be treated as some sort of anthropological study. In any case, Cambridge Analytica (the marketing firm) had no discernible impact on either the Brexit vote or the 2016 US election, so the point is moot.
to me it feels like the entire email exchange is scripted. Would Zuck really ask a question that would end up in a lawsuit over __email__ of all mediums?
There was that leaked video of a Cambridge Analytica exec bragging that they came up with the handcuffs in the Crooked Hillary meme. Except that was hardly a big thing. The phrase Crooked Hillary was arguably “linguistic killshot” by Trump; CA’s little riff on it was insignificant - and that was them trying to sell their services with their most impressive feats.
This was a fake scandal. "Democrats seem to like Harry Potter" is not some genius psychographic ad targeting strategy. The Cambridge Analytica people were selling snake oil
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 an not just propped up by FB's old newsfeed algo
Sorry that you were downvoted because you were 100% right. Cambridge Analytica is a fake scandal. Cambridge Analytica absolutely broke Facebook's terms of service with its personality quiz scheme but it absolutely did not affect the 2016 election.
I'm an advertiser who has managed hundreds of millions of dollars for small startups and big corporations, brands, as well as a few small political campaigns.
Even at the time of the Trump election, the kind of ad targeting that Cambridge Analytica says they were offering through the personality quizzes was absolute garbage. There is a reason why the official response from Boz doesn't even mention the personality quiz stuff, because it was essentially irrelevant to the Trump campaign's performance on paid advertising on Meta. And I would go further to say that, except for his success in fundraising, all of his Meta advertising probably didn't move that many votes.
Cambridge Analytica, the organization, of course, loves to claim that they're the dark evil viziers behind the Trump campaign and they've advertised themselves as such to dictators all over the world. But that's just like Edward Bernays writing "Propaganda" back in the day, it is a way to sell their services.
Trump digital director Brad Parscale said the campaign did not even use Cambridge Analytica’s controversial psychographic targeting.
Not to mention, the only reason that Cambridge Analytica had that open graph information available is because communities like Hacker News begged again and again for Facebook to open the graph and not have a walled web. After that they cut off that graph access.
It was in CA's interest to have people believe they had some sort of magic algorithm.
And it was on the losing side's interest to believe that they would have won the vote if not interference by magic.
The Information Commissioner Office carried out an extensive investigation and concluded that CA were not involved at all with either of the two leave supporting organisations.
But this fact is simply ignored and undefined campaign by CA still used as the simple excuse for why they lost.
Cambridge Analytica developed a database for The Trump campaign that classified 3.5 million Black Americans as “Deterrence”, used as audiences in FB advertising intended to discourage voting.
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.
Before Trump they practiced on Brexit and the whole Leave.EU movement.
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.
My "expert" (/s) conclusion of Zuck is that he's a kid who knew some PHP and got really lucky that a website he made went "viral". He's got billions but is clueless, e.g. blowing a lot of money on animated VR avatars "because it's the future", and then blowing lots of money on AI. To be fair that's what the other dumb tech billionaires are doing too, they're building datacenters full of GPUs because they think throwing money at LLM will get them AGI, and they're desperate to be first.
(And no, I don't know if they'll reach AGI, my uninformed bet is: no).
> they're building datacenters full of GPUs because they think throwing money at LLM will get them AGI, and they're desperate to be first.
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.
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.
To argue that Facebook somehow magically tricks humans into voting against their will and overrides democracy is to argue that democracy itself inherently does not work.
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.
There is a difference between historical institutions failing people, and monkey A getting to a wrench quicker than monkey B (exactly what that email points to)
It doesnt quite imply democracy does not work. It implies that propaganda works. And if propaganda works, then that would mean that having the bulk of the ability to propagandize concentrated in a few hands in a threat to democracy, as it means that few people effectively have a much more powerful vote. Which, if you'll allow me to shortcut the rest of the argument, just brings us to the fundamental threat to democracy is concentrated wealth and concentrated power.
It doesn't require concentrated wealth, but if wealth is evenly distributed, then presumably the power to apply propaganda is also equally distributed. Propagandizing information effectively become a meta-level form of voting. With concentrated wealth and power, those with all of the resources hold all of these meta-level votes.
See this video for how Alexander Nix (former CEO) presented the data he had on every adult in the united states https://youtu.be/APZUrj8SN0M?t=297 (start at 4:55 min)
But your video doesn't show that? It's just shows high level aggregations. It doesn't say "homer simpson living at 123 evergreen terrace, springfield" is 47 years old, votes republican, earns $50.1k, and rates 3/5 on agreeableness.
I really feel the need media in their crusade against tech really did the public a disservice by not explaining what happened precisely.
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 of what’s going on frankly Ridiculous and makes it easy for corporations to dismiss detractors as kooks.
Apparently they used facebook to incite backlash against the Indian government to bully them into allowing their Internet.org initiative to continue there (essentially a stripped down, anti-net-neutrality version of the internet which only allows people to use facebook and a couple other sites).
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
78 comments
[ 0.27 ms ] story [ 33.2 ms ] threadBet Facebook hated this got leaked just in time for midterms.
Might be a challenge to some, but one can find out things if they pay enough attention to data.
1. they apparently gave advice to both the clinton and trump campaign
2. the trump campaign did targeted marketing better (ie. targeting the base rather than the marginal voter)
3. "I'm skeptical that Cambridge Analytica has any data or expertise that couldn't be replicated readily by someone else"
Of course, you can still argue that facebook undermined democracy, by providing the marketing tools that allowed the trump campaign to effectively reach voters, but at what point can you blame a tool for the outcome of an election? Some say the mamdani effectively used tiktok to rally voters, so does that mean we should be up and arms about the mamdani campaign? How far back can we go? The invention of the printing press led to all sorts of partisan newspapers, was that anti-democratic?
No, we should be up and arms about TikTok.
Just because this is worded ambiguously, to clarify the "they" is Facebook. CA on the other hand was effectively the Trump's digital ad campaign.
> 2. the trump campaign did targeted marketing better (ie. targeting the base rather than the marginal voter)
This ignores that a lot of what made CA different is that they used microtargeting to discourage turnout via fake news stories.
3. "I'm skeptical that Cambridge Analytica has any data or expertise that couldn't be replicated readily by someone else"
After CA's methods and actions became public, FB massively limited what you could do via their API.
Given that "cambridge analytica" wasn't even mentioned in my comment, and "facebook" was the last subject mentioned (ie. "facebook was ..."), I don't see how anyone could have interpreted "they" to mean cambridge analytica.
>This ignores that a lot of what made CA different is that they used microtargeting to discourage turnout via fake news stories.
What does this have to do with the email? Everything you mentioned was already known before this email was released. Is the complaint that boz didn't also tell zuckerberg "btw cambridge analytica works with conservatives are are super evil"?
>After CA's methods and actions became public, FB massively limited what you could do via their API.
Was the email sent before or after they locked down the API? Also, this feels like a nitpick, eg. suppose a mass shooter killed a bunch people with an assault rifle, and then the government banned assault rifles, it would still be correct to say "anyone could bought the weapons the mass shooter used", even though it wasn't true in the present.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
My general understanding is the Trump campaign actually took all the advice we gave unlike Hillary. They used all our tools. That *is* surprisingly novel as most advertisers have a "way of doing things" and are slow to adapt but speaks more of our platform than CA. A few examples:- 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).]
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.
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.
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 an not just propped up by FB's old newsfeed algo
Whatever it was some amazing insight is irelevant!
I'm an advertiser who has managed hundreds of millions of dollars for small startups and big corporations, brands, as well as a few small political campaigns.
Even at the time of the Trump election, the kind of ad targeting that Cambridge Analytica says they were offering through the personality quizzes was absolute garbage. There is a reason why the official response from Boz doesn't even mention the personality quiz stuff, because it was essentially irrelevant to the Trump campaign's performance on paid advertising on Meta. And I would go further to say that, except for his success in fundraising, all of his Meta advertising probably didn't move that many votes.
Cambridge Analytica, the organization, of course, loves to claim that they're the dark evil viziers behind the Trump campaign and they've advertised themselves as such to dictators all over the world. But that's just like Edward Bernays writing "Propaganda" back in the day, it is a way to sell their services. Trump digital director Brad Parscale said the campaign did not even use Cambridge Analytica’s controversial psychographic targeting.
Not to mention, the only reason that Cambridge Analytica had that open graph information available is because communities like Hacker News begged again and again for Facebook to open the graph and not have a walled web. After that they cut off that graph access.
It was in CA's interest to have people believe they had some sort of magic algorithm.
And it was on the losing side's interest to believe that they would have won the vote if not interference by magic.
The Information Commissioner Office carried out an extensive investigation and concluded that CA were not involved at all with either of the two leave supporting organisations.
But this fact is simply ignored and undefined campaign by CA still used as the simple excuse for why they lost.
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.
A: Yo! did we do anything wrong?
B: No. someone else messed up. we're good.
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.
(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.
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.
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.
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.
I’m having a hard time imagining you didn’t know this.
If campaign spending is strictly regulated, I imagine it would be difficult for such work.
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 of what’s going on frankly Ridiculous and makes it easy for corporations to dismiss detractors as kooks.
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