Might be a challenge to some, but one can find out things if they pay enough attention to data.
Your first sentence is purely descriptive.
In your second sentence, I'm either "challenged" or blatantly too stupid to understand what you are trying to say.
Are you letting yourself being riled up by random X comments or is there some unknown part of the discussion I've never heard about?
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?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...
If that was the advice, it seems pretty terrible.
Now there may be other potential issues that would elevate the matter, if disinformation is used, or if personal information about citizens is obtained illegitimately, then they could constitute crimes in their own right. Whether the crime is aggravated by its intent to subvert the democratic institution would be a legitimate question, but without the accessory crimes, I don't think political campaigns from non citizen actors are themselves illegal, just icky.
Both of those happened. And are still happening.
This is algorithmic behaviour modification using sophisticated psychological priming that most people - including people who consider themselves educated and rational - have no defences against.
It very much was, and is, an issue of critical severity. CA and Nix specifically sold themselves as election fixers, but most people using FB would have been completely unware they were being influenced.
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.
From: Mark Zuckerberg
Sent: Monday, January 30, 2017 8:10:16 AM
Subject: Cambridge Analytica
https://motherboard.vice.com/read/big-data-cambridge-analyti...
I can't tell how much of this is just a dramatic telling the best practices of marketing today seen through the lens of survivorship bias, or how much of what they're done is truly novel and interesting work, at least in the field of politics.
Can someone explain to me what they actually did from an analytics and ads perspective, and how advanced it actually was?
From: Andrew Bosworth
Sent: Monday, January 30, 2017 9:58:03 AM
Subject: Re: Cambridge Analytica
- They ran tens of thousands of creatives and iterated quickly to find what was working, further sub segmenting audiences (using custom audiences) based on response.
- They used different formats early but found video was most effective so were using that primarily by the end (90+%)
- They were primarily fundraising on Facebook, which means rallying the base instead of trying to win over marginal voters. That was an effective strategy that lead to very low CPMs and makes iterating to find market fiit for your message much easier. The rumor is that they turned tens of millions spent on FB into hundreds of millions for the campaign, which they spent elsewhere.
I've heard separately that their entire electoral strategy was to rally the base rather than send a broadly appealing message. Few marketers are interested in doing that so it stands to reason they would have unusual results.
Net net, my guess is that CA did have to do some interesting work to quickly take results from campaigns and spin them into the next, and the campaign had to do some interesting work to generate so much creative, but I'm skeptical that Cambridge Analytica has any data or expertise that couldn't be replicated readily by someone else. I'm suspect we will find that the majority of the advantage was using our platform to the fullest.
boz
[This document is from In re Facebook, Inc. Securities Litigation (2026).]
Where's the lie?
>If that was the advice, it seems pretty terrible.
If you read either my comment or the email, you'd know what the advice was.
What's going on is that this is a very early email, and it's being brought up during discovery on a current legal proceeding (and it's not necessarily the first time it's made public).
It's also clear to anyone that knows about the case that this isn't an accurate explanation of what Cambridge Analytica was doing and why it was causing concern. There's no mention of Facebook Apps unrelated to politics being used to collect user data, and there's no mention of the data being collected not only of the users that install these apps, but also their friends (which would lead to the revision of the Graph API and the implementation of minimum demographic controls).
So to me it reads like a document that Meta puts forward to prove that Zuckerberg:
- Had no idea at the time of what was going on
- Was making efforts to understand what was going on
I haven't checked which party used this document as an exhibit in an argument, although this might be available information, but I'd wager a guess that it will or has been used by Meta.
So if you are looking at this document as "the truth uncovered", I'd suggest to look for more nuance instead of easy answers.
… or swobu
said the french
No, we should be up and arms about TikTok.
calldacopsidc•50m ago
Cider9986•41m ago