Two for one is a good deal.
imho, our concern should be of an extrapolative nature. we can guess where this will be in 5 or 10 years, nevermind Ted Cruz' future electoral successes. and we know how easy people are to psychologically "nudge". (sorry for assuming our agreement there)
How easy? I thought "Nudge theory" was beginning to unravel under the burden of empirical evidence?
So, nothing speaks against nipping that in the bud, right?
It's like a tiny person with no tools sneaking around your house to murder your whole family; sure you could ignore them, at least at the moment, but why would you?
2. Cruz was an establishment candidate. This electorate wanted an outsider.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_primaries_in_the_United_S...
Actually, the following states were lost by Cruz and have open primaries:
Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina (All races' primaries open for unaffiliated voters only), South Carolina
How did it work out? I tried the same too, but it was falling into deaf years. Most common response. "Sean beta (means son in hindi). You are being excessively paranoid. Facebook is a closed community, and I only share info with friends and family, so don't worry."
I will concede to typo/autocorrect, but wanted to make the comment in case someone reads your comment and assumes the phrase correct.
You might think from a casual reading of the Cambridge Analytica press release that they predicted the outcome of the election. They did not. A company spokesman called reporters before election day to say that Trump had only a 20 per cent chance of winning.
Source: http://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/12/the-british-data-cruncher...
I just read an anecdote about Sid Meier dealing with this in the Civilization games in Michael Lewis' Undoing Project: people couldn't stand losing battles of 33% 3 times in a row.
What you are essentially saying is that every prediction that doesn't claim certainty is always correct. If I "predict", by looking at a crystal ball, that there is an 80% chance of an asteroid destroying Earth tomorrow, and no asteroid destroys earth, do you think that it makes sense to say that I was correct in my prediction, because I said there was a 20% chance of it not happening? Surely you must agree that there some sense in which my prediction was wrong, or at the very least more wrong than NASA's prediction. The election predictions were wrong in the same sense.
Edit: the commenter who responded has pointed out that this is phrased fairly accusatory. Should the fact that there is probably a data cloud out there about me being used to manipulate me through subliminal type messaging not be upsetting? I don't think I have ever signed up for a service with the expectation that whatever information is collected will be collated in some over-arching cloud used for more things than just the service provided to me by the site. Maybe somewhere in a 30 page terms of service document, it said that, and I clicked "agree" upon skimming it. But should that really be enough?
Edit 2: Here's an idea: charge me $3/month to use your service without ads, and with full expectation that my data will not be sold or used inappropriately (you can give it to the govt. if they need it for security reasons, I don't care). I currently pay for e-mail without ads from both outlook and mail.com and would gladly do the same for a pure facebook / gmail / google search / etc service.
"Why do we allow people to voluntarily hand over their own information at their own will?"
Sounds much different when its phrase properly and not accusatory.
"Obtaining written informed consent from a potential participant is more than just a signature on a form. The consent document is to be used as a guide for the verbal explanation of the study. The consent document should be the basis for a meaningful exchange between the researcher and the participant. The participant's signature provides documentation of agreement to participate in a study, but is only one part of the consent process. The consent document must not serve as a substitute for discussion."
http://humansubjects.stanford.edu/new/resources/consent/inde...
Seems phrased fairly differently from the typical "terms of use" document we get when signing up for an online service. So I ask. Should these be vastly different things?
That's incredibly rare. Most peopled don't understand the type and amount of data being collected or the power of modern analysis methods. This kind of data collection needs to have the informed consent of those involved. That is a significantly higher standard than getting someone to click "I Agree" or pretending they read and understood the ToS.
Even among the minority that do understand at least the general shape of what will be done with their data, most people - correctly or incorrect -believe they don't have any choice (no alternatives).
> Sounds much different when its phrase properly and not accusatory.
Yes. It sounds like a cheap excuse that doesn't reflect reality. It may reduce conative dissonance and/or guilt to pretend that people are participating in a voluntary transaction, but it's still an attempt to manipulate and scam people... or worse.
The same can be said for someone wanting to keep their location private; It's harmless to let the public know you live next to a park, and it was relevant to the story you wanted to tell that day. A month later you complain about the noise, and someone links that you may be near a highway. A week later you complain about a storm, even going so far as to live tweet it from the comfort of your own home, at one point tweeting "wow the rain got real loud for a moment there. Glad to have a nice house :D".
And now Mr. Dedicated Bad Guy has a list of three locations your house could be, all from seemingly innocuous information.
Note how the examples proposed are all GOTV efforts targeted to the R base rather than anything appealing larger slices of the electorate. Despite all this black magic, R turnout wasn't that impressive and Trump lost the popular vote. Where it might have helped a little bit is in exploiting weaknesses that Dems shouldn't have had in the first place, i.e. Clinton's baggage, to reduce D turnout in key states, but again, that's more the Democrats' fault for fielding such a candidate knowing very well that she had such baggage.
Really? Sending ads is suppressing the vote of certain people? Like the soviet union suppressed dissenters by sending them to the gulag?
I don't think so. But I think the New York Times has a secret agenda of its own, I just don't know what it is. Portraying the election as somehow "unfair" could result in civil unrest, who could possibly want that?
How is this suppressing the vote? It's giving potential voters accurate information about your opponent. Frankly, how is it any different from Mr. Biden shouting, 'they're gonna put y'all back in chains!' — other than the former being true and probably in good taste?
N.b.: I did not vote for President Trump.
>Federal Election Commission rules are unclear when it comes to Facebook posts, but even if they do apply and the facts are skewed and the dog whistles loud, the already weakening power of social opprobrium is gone when no one else sees the ad you see — and no one else sees “I’m Donald Trump, and I approved this message.”
So basically, it's counter propaganda.
Careful -- you've mentioned his name twice in this thread. Do it a third time and he'll appear in your bathroom mirror.
Also, nothing in the article was particularly surprising, nor is any of it outside the realm of what we already know is technically possible at Facebook. Give it four years and see if Zuckerberg makes his rumored run for President, after beta-testing the tools in 2016...
How was it a surprise? With huge crowd sizes at his rallies (that NYT didn't show, but RSBN for example did), strong populist message that worked, and the awful candidate the other side put up (while sadly destroying Bernie), I was not surprised.
Certainly an underdog, but with a reasonable chance of success.
Until they find a way to poll a significant slice of the population truly representative of the electorate, I'm surprised people can take them seriously. Since we're on HN, there is a startup idea here somewhere.
(Edited to remove an electoral hypothesis, so that we can discuss polls and not politics.)
It helps to keep some mental ecology.
Anyway, I eventually set up a placholder Facebook account. Once I typed my name into the setup form, they provided a frighteningly detailed list of friends and acquaintances. Since then, due to "do you know" emails, I get the impression they slurp other people's call and sms logs (or maybe just contacts, if FB types are more OCD about address books than me) into their social network graph.
Anyway, it is not much of an exaggeration to say that facebook gets more metadata to sell every time you make a phone call, regardless of whether you have an account.
(Of course, I don't have their software installed on any of my devices. However, I did give them my phone number for 2FA purposes. How naive I was. Assuming the phone app grabs people's address books and/or call logs, they probably had it before I gave it to them)
The story is chilling. It more or less proves that Trump campaign and the Billionaire Republican donor who owns the Data Analytics site used Facebook to profile people and send targeted "fear" stories to them and swing the vote away from Clinton.
Fear is a great motivator.
It's almost impressive though how well the Republicans, and Trump specifically, are employing these, IMHO shady, tactics.
Is it scandalous how little scandal is made of all this(the FUD, populist rhetoric, phycological manipulation, etc)? I can imagine how this would be spun if "evil Hillary" was found to be targeting people with "dark posts".
Even if there was a media outlet willing to destroy their reputation and business, good luck convincing human beings that they've been conditioned to behave as they do through media messaging. Brainwashing is Hollywood scifi mumbojumbo, not a scientific explanation for why basic training produces a uniform level of discipline in the military, or why millions of people pay for the privilege of inhaling carcinogens.
To top it off, I am well aware of how tinfoil the preceding two paragraphs must sound.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/feb/17/obama-digital-...
Obviously, this is not identical, but many of the same principles are in play. You can argue around the edges of who understood exactly who was getting what data but I pretty much guarantee you the bulk of the people didn't know exactly what they had just done then, either.
I also do not mean this as a partisan attack, because everyone's gonna do it, and do it better every election cycle, until something major stops them. In 2012 it was widely believed the Republicans simply had no good digital ground game, so I can't really link you to articles about theirs, or I would. And I'm having a hard time imagining what will stop this, short of total internet collapse.
If this trend continues and extends down to congressional elections, etc. for both parties as it is now (Republicans ready to follow data to build campaigns, Democrats playing out of an opaque narrative), this could spell bad news for the future of the American Democratic party.
Chilling. In fact, you could say it was a "fear" story.
All it's missing is the billionaire pulling the strings - except if you look at the tag line at the end you see it was written by someone who is an Open Society Fellow.
You know, those fellowships from the Open Society Foundation that are funded by Billionaire Democrat donor George Soros.
Did this article make you feel any negativity towards Trump and the Republicans?
If so, then for Soros, this was money on dark articles well spent.
Swaying votes away from one's opponents is the definition of running for office.
Back in 2008 the Obama campaign ran a very successful information shop and was widely lauded for it; why is it now chilling when a different candidate does the same thing?
N.b.: I did not vote for President Trump.
