The status quo outside FB is not newspapers, it's other web ads, television, sms, and phone calls. FB may be more or less transparent, but the status quo is not transparent in the way you're describing.
The research participants are voluntarily sharing their ads with NYU. Facebook is objecting.
I have bought voter rolls for direct mail campaigns. On the mailer, I had to disclose who was paying for it. I knew a fraction of my mailers would end up in the opposition’s hands, just as their messaging ended up in mine, and that from who got which mailers we could deduce which voter roll query was used. If I lied they would call me out to the people I lied to. That is an incentive to stay honest and a promoter of a common fact base.
Direct mail, SMS and phone outreach has gotten more targeted. But it’s nowhere close to Facebook. That deserves elevated transparency to a regulatory force. Given these are political ads government regulation is out of the question. So the next best options are total public disclosure, adversarial disclosure (i.e. someone identifying the opposition, which is complicated, and giving them full transparency) or mandatory or voluntary disclosure to academia. The last is the weakest since it introduces sampling biases and requires private collection resources. But it’s better than nothing. Facebook still fights it.
American politics are no longer a debate. We can’t agree on common facts and can’t agree on a common set of institutions. Broad political interaction has devolved into a competition of facts over one of governing philosophies. That is not a way to govern and is a direct result of social media promoting separate, targeted “facts” that spread faster and more insidiously than they can be countered. If we want to continue making decisions as a democracy, this has to be checked.
This has precedent. Every new form of media (print, radio, broadcast television, phone, cable television, e-mail, et cetera) has been followed by new rules for political discourse. To inform that rule making we need research. If the media controls the data the research will be useless, the rules garbage and our discourse corrupted.
FB gives off serious Emil Kaschub vibes with its willingness to run non-consensual psychological experiments on people.
I totally agree. I think that we as a nation (US) (and possibly all over world) have a blind spot where social media, surveillance capitalism, and targeted ads are. The power of the algorithm is so strong that people truly believe they’re being recorded (the whole FB is listening because I got such and such ad).
Policy is always many years behind technology. My biggest concern is that this technology poses an existential threat to our current zeitgeist (?). I always trouble putting the threat into my own words.
But I can’t agree more. We need immediate transparency. And we need to study the cause and effect so we can better understand. That will lead to the best form of whatever regulation we may need to move to the next stage.
They also mine and sell your activity.
Recently on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24756042
There should be a law against that.
Tons of posts on HN are about how individuals should own their data, yet you think you should also have access to that of others?
A real breakdown of theory of mind would mean that there is a breakdown in common understanding. Like with an animal, you don't have complete theory of mind with an animal, and it certainly does not with you -- there is an inability to account for the reasoning of a dog.
The way current social media and search engines optimize for engagement and tailor information to each user, people have really different views on the universe right now as is; and this has already had real-world consequences. (eg. corona-response, motivations for or against Brexit, etc. )
Oh, come on. You are bringing that into this discussion. The topic is not people's private search or browsing history. Political advertisements are very clearly a public issue.
advertisement is part of public discourse, in particular political advertisement.
>But that library excludes information about the targeting that determines who sees the ads.
>The researchers behind the NYU Ad Observatory said they wanted to provide journalists, researchers, policy makers, and others with the ability to search political ads by state and contest to see what messages are targeted to specific audiences and how those ads are funded.
The point of the research is to figure out what ads Facebook shows to which users, which is of course particularly important for people who try to do research on how ads on Facebook intersect with politics.
I have someone on my contact list in fb who honestly thinks that QAnon exposes pedophiles. I can't wrap my head around how the heck they've reached that conclusion.
On Fox News, the left is nothing but a violent BLM mob being cheered on by supportive governors. Supported by Soros.
On MSNBC, the right is nothing but a violent fascist mob being cheered on by a supportive president. Supported by the Koch brothers.
Thankfully, we live in a country where the average person is not crazy. Unfortunately, you'd never know that from watching what passes for news these days.
However I'm willing to bet you don't see anything about Q in right wing news sources is there is literally nothing to write about them except "these guys think Trump is fighting a deep underground pedo cabal" and I'm sure they don't want to antagonize their readers.
And Q... doesnt? What are you implying?
>see nearly every day in downtown Portland
>https://twitter.com/MrAndyNgo
So Q doesn't exist, despite "plenty of imagery and video on twitter", but I should take "MrAndyNgo", a Twitter nobody completely at face value? I've been to Portland recently. Plenty of people were outside eating at restaurants. The "anarchy" is greatly overblown by the media.
I don't mean to downplay the impact of either movement, but to dismiss QAnon as "liberal conspiracy" when simultaneously only getting news from, what seems like a Twitter agitator, AndyNgo is concerning.
Bruh what? Qanon has incited a lot of violence. Getting someone to commit acts of violence on your behalf is worse than specific acts of violence by people that choose to do so without provocation. [0].
Anyways, comparing qanon, an anonymous conspiratorial propagandist to BLM:
>decentralized political and social movement advocating for non-violent civil disobedience in protest against incidents of police brutality and all racially motivated violence against black people. [1]
...or antifa, [2]:
>an anti-fascist action and left-wing political movement in the United States comprising an array of autonomous groups and individuals that aim to achieve their objectives through the use of both nonviolent and violent direct action rather than through policy reform.
...which are basically spontaneously formed groups of people supporting specific political causes...
indicates that you do not understand the complexity of events since qanons appearance. yet you speak confidently as if you did and go on to condemn countless millions that support antifa or blm for their tenuous proximal association to anarchists or looters. Such irrational comparisons indicate an emotional response to whatever you perceive antifa and blm to represent.
Proud boys, kkk, Aryan Brotherhood and countless others are violent terrorist organizations that have initial ceremonies, membership lists, and responsibilities. Antifa and blm do not. Trump can't even condemn white supremacists in the most generic of terms. On top of that he's frequently referenced q conspiracies lending whatever credibility you attribute to trump to qanon.
The link between trump, qanon, and racist terrorist organizations is stronger than any links between the countless millions of people who fly antifa or blm signs.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/oct/15/qanon-violen...
Repeating the same videos of isolated incidents make BLM seem ultra-violent, but that's more of the same smearing tactics used for a decade now.
Second part of the quote which you have not heard so far: "And I'm not talking about the neo-nazis and white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally."
Trump has never said: "I condemn white supremacists". Four words. Dead simple.
Here I'll say it. I condemn white supremacists. I condemn white supremacy. Your turn.
Saying they should be condemned is different.
It's also not about knowing what a specific user sees. The targeting configurations that advertisers use should be made public, but nobody needs to know which individual users see which individual ads.
So, you should be able to click a "?" link in the corner of any ad and see which demographics or groups the ad is targeting. And likewise, you should be able to look at individual demographics or groups and see which ads are targeting them at any given moment.
This sort of transparency would go a long way towards restoring trust, but I suspect that it would also reveal what a cesspit their ad market is. The advertisers would also probably object, because many would consider their targeting parameters to be a sort of trade secret. And whoever pays the piper calls the tune.
You can do this on Facebook, for maybe four years now. It's not particularly informative, but it exists.
FB/Google/Twitter etc work by measuring some kind of conversion (pixel hit, app install etc). Micro-targeting in terms of voting doesn't have this signal, and as such any of these ads will be difficult to make work on FB.
You can optimise for engagement, but I suspect an ad targeting black voters saying about the 94 crime bill is unlikely to elicit much engagement.
Of course, one could argue that Facebook has a right to communicate with their users confidentially. But it's a bit of a stretch to treat ads as private communication.
The advertiser, The ad, the targeting given.
None of this contains private information and it‘s equivalent to what‘s known about ads in a newspaper.
What bullshit. If I want to know what ads are targeting my parents in print, I can buy the locally distributed newspapers. If I want to know what they see on Facebook, I have to literally shoulder surf. That or wait for the week’s crack cure-all to surface in a family message thread.