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.

[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...

> 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.

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?

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.

Faster captcha: https://nitter.privacyredirect.com/TechEmails/status/2099214...

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 would date this beginning to 2013. That's around when Facebook feed ceased to be chronological. That's when everyone became rabid.

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.

Social media + engagement algorithms = societal cancer.

I think you're missing the forest for the tree.

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.

> brainwash

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.

>but also in Brazil

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.

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.

And in Europe too.

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.

Brainwash on what subjects?

I'm not sure what the claim or charge would be. While I wouldn't feel comfortable participating in political campaigns for democracies of other countries, and I would feel defensive about attempts to influence elections in my country, in the end these 'attacks' rely on actual citizens to vote, so the citizen still holds the power and makes the final decision, so I don't think it's an issue of critical severity, and I don't think it's illegitimate to try to persuade citizens of another country to vote in such matter at a constitutional level (excluding specific laws), even if I personally would feel icky about it.

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.

The spot the US is 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.

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.

> 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.

But we know that propaganda works. That doesn't sit well with your claims.

Is it surprising or an indictment against democracy that reminding people the election is in N days makes them more likely to vote?

If you only remind people who are likely to vote the way you want, that's likely to swing the vote a little bit.

Maybe you do a little convincing with your reminder and that helps a little bit more.

Some jurisdictions have a blanket ban on political advertisement or media coverage as a way to reduce the effects of campaigning in an attempt to get a less influenced result. But we don't have that in the US and I suspect it would fall afoul of US free speech, and may be hard to enforce, anyway.

Nobody is suggesting that Facebook magically tricked people into voting against their will.

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)

Both could be true.

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.

They had a facebook app (disguised as a quiz) that scraped the profile data of the user using it, as well as their friends. It's the latter part that was considered shady, but it was all allowed by facebook. Moreover it's not too different than similar "growth hack" tactics that other startups use to this day, eg. linkedin scraping your contacts data. Their clients being right-wing didn't help, either.

A large ICO investigation concluded that they were not involved in Brexit at all.

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.

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).

There were a lot of factors involved in Brexit. The BBC played a large part in it although it will never admit it.

What evidence shows he wanted this? Why would he play the victim internally?

In this specific case it also takes some of the burden away from Feckless political campaigns that failed to effectively use the tools at their disposal. The public then doesn’t have as clear of a picture of who might actually be capable Of winning next time.

They were selling private hacked data. It is amazing they are not all in prison.

Whatever it was some amazing insight is irelevant!

It's pretty incredible that people claim CA was somehow running the world and magically turning elections and brainwashing masses.