Slashdot Mirror
Facebook Plans To Use US Mail To Verify IDs of Election Ad Buyers (reuters.com)
Facebook will start using postcards sent by U.S. mail later this year to verify the identities and location of people who want to purchase U.S. election-related advertising on its site, a senior company executive said on Saturday. From a report: The postcard verification is Facebook's latest effort to respond to criticism from lawmakers, security experts and election integrity watchdog groups that it and other social media companies failed to detect and later responded slowly to Russia's use of their platforms to spread divisive political content, including disinformation, during the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Hey Facebook! Here's a better idea: Don't allow any election ads in the first place.
I know being a company you want all the business you can get, but sometimes it may actually be for the common good that you don't try to squeeze every penny out of everything you can squeeze.
"Why should I want to make anything up? Life's bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it."
it verifies that you have obtained the information on a post card. Two simple ways of subverting it (you can probably dream up more):
* Set up postal redirection
* Offer someone a small payment: ''when you receive a postcard addressed to Mr Smith, use your mobile to send a photograph of it to me"
Cause the money-laundering Russian mafia isn't gonna simply pivot and start laundering postcards as well...
"I make 5K a week working from home! Want to know my secret?"
Well, at least Facebook can say they really are creating jobs now.
This is literally the dumbest fucking thing i've heard this week. And its technically a new week! Seriously, Facebook really does need to hire a 5 year old to sit on their board and any flaws in the plans they make he points out should result in the entire plan being scrapped for sheer stupidity and the person who came up with the plan should be beaten with a rubber hose and then fired.
Ivan will simply find a sucker to take out the ad for him, for a small fee. This is feel good fake news security theatre.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
If only the people who support this supported voter ID laws.
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Facebook VP: "The Majority Of Russian Ad Spend Happened AFTER The Election"
"many of these ads did not violate our content policies. That means that for most of them, if they had been run by authentic individuals, anywhere, they could have remained on the platform."
"Shouldn't you stop foreigners from meddling in US social issues?
The right to speak out on global issues that cross borders is an important principle. Organizations such as UNICEF, Oxfam or religious organizations depend on the ability to communicate â" and advertise â" their views in a wide range of countries. While we may not always agree with the positions of those who would speak on issues here, we believe in their right to do so â" just as we believe in the right of Americans to express opinions on issues in other countries."
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Ivan will simply find a sucker to take out the ad for him, for a small fee. This is feel good fake news security theatre.
Precisely, if it doesn't already, the Russian embassy will soon have an attaché for shell company management, political action committee administration and political advertisement design, sucker recruitment will be outsourced to the fisheries attache (aka. the FSB operations guy).
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
How many non-citizens participate in U.S. elections? More than 14 percent of non-citizens in both the 2008 and 2010 samples indicated that they were registered to vote. Furthermore, some of these non-citizens voted. Our best guess, based upon extrapolations from the portion of the sample with a verified vote, is that 6.4 percent of non-citizens voted in 2008 and 2.2 percent of non-citizens voted in 2010.
Because non-citizens tended to favor Democrats (Obama won more than 80 percent of the votes of non-citizens in the 2008 CCES sample), we find that this participation was large enough to plausibly account for Democratic victories in a few close elections. Non-citizen votes could have given Senate Democrats the pivotal 60th vote needed to overcome filibusters in order to pass health-care reform and other Obama administration priorities in the 111th Congress. Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) won election in 2008 with a victory margin of 312 votes. Votes cast by just 0.65 percent of Minnesota non-citizens could account for this margin. It is also possible that non-citizen votes were responsible for Obama's 2008 victory in North Carolina. Obama won the state by 14,177 votes, so a turnout by 5.1 percent of North Carolina's adult non-citizens would have provided this victory margin.
They do say
We also find that one of the favorite policies advocated by conservatives to prevent voter fraud appears strikingly ineffective. Nearly three quarters of the non-citizens who indicated they were asked to provide photo identification at the polls claimed to have subsequently voted.
However if you look at their paper
http://www.judicialwatch.org/w...
Nonetheless, identification requirements blocked ballot access for only a small portion of non-citizens. Of the 27 non-citizens who indicated that they were "asked to show picture identification, such as a driver's license, at the polling place or election office," in the 2008 survey, 18 claimed to have subsequently voted, and one more indicated that they were "allowed to vote using a provisional ballot." Only 7 (25.9%) indicated that they were not allowed to vote after showing identification. These results are summarized in Fig. 1. Although the proportion of non-citizens prevented from voting by ID requirements is statistically distinguishable from the portion of citizens5 (Chi-Square 161, p < .001), the overall message is that identification requirements do not prevent the majority of non-citizen voting. The fact that most non-citizen immigrants who showed identifi- cation were subsequently permitted to vote suggests that efforts to use photo-identification to prevent non-citizen voting are unlikely to be particularly effective. This most likely reflects the impact of state laws that permit noncitizens to obtain state identification cards (e.g. driver's licenses
I.e. voter ID laws don't work if by voter ID you mean "driving license" and the state gives out driving licenses to non citizens which are indistinguishable from the ones they hand out to citizens. Which is not impossible. E.g.
https://immigration.procon.org...
The law provides driver's licenses to people who filed Colorado state income taxes in the previous year and can show proof of current state residence, or who have an Individual Taxpayer ID and proof of 24 months of state residency, with a passport, consular ID, or military ID. The license will state "Not valid for federal identification, voting, or public benefits purposes."
The paper also contains th
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From the Internet Research Agency Indictment:
5. Certain Derfendants traveled to the United States under false pretenses for the purpos of collecting intelligence to inform Defendants' operations.
Defendants also procured and used computed infrastructure, based partly in the United States, to hide the Russian origin of their activities and to avoid detection by U.S. regulators and law enforcement.
...
12. b. For example, on or about May 29, 2016, Defendants and their co-conspirators, through an ORGANIZATION-controlled social media account, arranged for a real U.S. person to stand in front of the White House in the District of Columbia under false pretenses to hold a sign that read "Happy 55th Birthday Dear Boss."
Defendents and their co-conspirators informed the real U.S. person that the sign was for someone who "is a leader here and our boss... our funder."
PRIGHOZHIN's Russian passport identifies his date of birth as June 1, 1961.
...
30. c. Only KRYLOVA and BOGACHEVA received visas, and from approximately June 4, 2014 through june 26, 2014 KRYLOVA and BOGACHEVA traveled in and around the United States, including stops in Nevada, California, New Mexico, Colorado, Illinois, Michigan, Louisiana, Texas, and New York to gather intelligence.
After the trip, KRYLOVA and BURCHIK exchanged an intelligence report regarding the trip.
d. Another co-conspirator who worked for the ORGANIZATION traveled to Atlanta, Georgia from approximately November 26, 2014 through November 30, 2014.
Following the trip, the co-conspirator provided POLOZOV a summary of his trip's itinerary and expenses.
...
41. In and around 2016. Defendants and their co-conspirators also used, possessed, and transferred, without lawful authority, the social security numbers and dates of birth of real U.S. persons without those persons' knowledge or consent.
Using these means of identification, Defendants and their co-conspirators opened accounts at PayPal, a digital payment service provider, created false means of identification, including fake driver's licenses, and posted on ORGANIZATION-controlled social media accounts using the identities of these U.S. victims.
Defendants and their co-conspirators also obtained, and attempted to obtain, false identification documents to use as proof of identity in connection with maintaining accounts and purchasing advertisements on social media sites.
And then there's that bit where they organized rallies, offered money to cover rally expenses, paid someone to "BUILD A CAGE ON A FLATBED TRUCK" and another person to "WEAR A COSTUME PORTRAYING CLINTON IN A PRISON UNIFORM".
They can steal identities, travel around U.S., pay people to construct motorized cages and other people to dress up and be driven around in those cages... but they'll somehow not be able to mail in a postcard?
Which part of "run like a KGB operation by former KGB people for current FSB people" is Facebook pretending to not understand?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
If facebook wanted to stop messing with elections, they would just ban election advertising.
Those who can, do. Those who cannot, sue.
Read the rebuttals and the author's response to them. It's just the WashPo trying to discredit Inconvenient Truths.
Rebuttals
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
Author's response which seems to cover them all :
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
I think the authors are onto something. Their paper was peer reviewed too. And the peer reviewed paper the WashPo claims debunks it is in the same journal but is paywalled. Unlike theirs, which I linked to. It seems to be claiming their sample size is too small and that constitutes cherry picking.
tl;dr - they did a study which was very cautious about interpreting the data. Even that found evidence of 620,000 non citizens voting. People criticized them. They responded. Peer reviewed is not the same as 'true', and in fact can't be given both their paper and the paper critiquing it were published in the same journal.
And the comments are full of anecdotal evidence that illegals voting is well known.
It's true they said Trump's claim that non citizens voting accounted for all of Hillary's popular vote lead. However they reckon significant numbers of non citizens voted.
https://fs.wp.odu.edu/jrichman...
If the assumptions stated above concerning non-citizen turnout are correct, could non-citizen turnout account for Clintonâ(TM)s popular vote margin? There is no way it could have. 6.4 percent turnout among the roughly 20.3 million non-citizen adults in the US would add only 834,318 votes to Clintonâ(TM)s popular vote margin. This is little more than a third of the total margin.
Is it plausible that non-citizen votes added to Clintonâ(TM)s margin. Yes. Is it plausible that non-citizen votes account for the entire nation-wide popular vote margin held by Clinton? Not at all.
Then when that number got picked up by people they disagree with they disowned it
https://fs.wp.odu.edu/jrichman...
As a primary author cited in this piece, I need to say that I think the Washington Times article (http://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/jan/26/hillary-clinton-received-800000-votes-from-nonciti/) is deceptive. It makes it sound like I have done a study concerning the 2016 election. I have not. What extrapolation I did to the 2016 election (https://fs.wp.odu.edu/jrichman/2016/11/28/is-it-plausible-that-non-citizen-votes-account-for-the-entire-margin-of-trumps-popular-vote-loss-to-clinton/) was purely and explicitly and exclusively for the purpose of pointing out that my 2014 study of the 2008 election did not provide evidence of voter fraud at the level some Trump administration people were claiming it did. I do not think that one should rely upon that extrapolation for any other purpose. And I do not stand behind that extrapolation if used for ANY other purpose.
In the original article they point out things like
This post is not intended to make a specific claim on my part concerning how many non-citizens
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The ones that make it illegal for foreigners to say "Clinton is a cunt and Trump is too" during an election.
I'd say that's common knowledge for anyone with more than two brain cells, core voters of both being beyond redemption.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Also if you look here
https://fs.wp.odu.edu/jrichman...
The 2008 estimate is inherently uncertain. It depends upon a number of assumptions including assumptions about the validity of the survey data. Our critics have made a variety of arguments and I encourage readers to evaluate those arguments along with our responses to them. The underlying study on which the extrapolation is based has been the subject of some cogent criticisms, and this leads me to believe that the actual rate of non-citizen involvement is on the low end of our initial estimates rather than anywhere close to the high end.
The critics paper is the ' peer-reviewed article [sciencedirect.com] argued that the findings reported in this post (and affiliated article [sciencedirect.com]) were biased and that the authors' data do not provide evidence of non-citizen voting in U.S. elections'
Well it turns out they've issued a response to that
https://fs.wp.odu.edu/jrichman...
Conclusion
Ansolabehere et. al. (2015) make a useful point - that group-membership measurement error rates must be considered very carefully when analyzing small subsamples. However, there are ways to estimate this error rate, and to validate the estimated error rate using other measures. We have shown that each of four independent approaches to evaluating electoral participation by non-citizens indicates that in fact a small number of non-citizens do most likely participate in US elections. Analysis of group-specific error rates, repeatedly measured individuals, higher frequency behaviors, and hypotheses that follow from the assumption that responses are driven by group-identification errors all yield the same independent conclusion, refuting the Ansolabehere et.al. (2015) contention that the Richman et. al. (2014) non-citizen participation results "are completely accounted for by very low frequency measurement error" among citizens. A more thorough analysis of the data makes clear that response error in the citizen-status question cannot account for the entirety of observed non-citizen verified and reported voting in the CCES. Hence, the CCES survey does provide substantial evidence that in the United States non-citizens hold verified registration status, cast verified votes, report they are registered, and report they are voters.
The analysis offered above should not be a stopping point, however. There are design choices that can improve the capability to engage in test-retest validation of group status and assessment of differential group-level rates of measurement error. Inclusion of specific followup questions aimed at verifying group membership status in the CCES should be pursued by those interested in making specific inferences about small subpopulations in large sample surveys. In the context of the non-citizen subsample such questions could include closed-ended and open-ended follow-up inquiries aimed at confirming or disconfirming self-identified noncitizen status and thereby ensuring that measurement error does not contaminate estimates of non-citizen sub-population behaviors.
Incidentally in the first source they say
If the percentage of non-citizens voting for Clinton is held constant, roughly 18.5 percent of non-citizens would have had to vote for their votes to have made up the entire Clinton popular vote margin. I don't think that this rate is at all plausible. Even if we assume that 90 percent voted for Clinton and only 10 percent for Trump, a more than fourteen percent turnout would be necessary to account for Clinton's popular vote margin. This is much higher than the estimates we offered. Again, it seems too high to be plausible.
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The United States spends billions every year to influence or outright overthrow other countries every year. The United States needs a stadium-sized cup of STFU when it comes to "meddling". This is the point where western exceptionalists start blurting "whatabboutery", so I'll go ahead and tell you first to cram hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, Syrians and Libyan's up your asses while you're whining about $5000 in Facebook ads.