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Reporter Posed as Cambridge Analytica To Run Political Ads on Facebook. Facebook, To No One's Surprise, Failed To Catch That They Were Frauds. (businessinsider.com)
From a report: Facebook's new political ad transparency tools allowed Business Insider to run adverts as being "paid for" by Cambridge Analytica, the political consultancy that dragged Facebook into a major data scandal this year. The investigation demonstrates that political advertising on Facebook is still open to manipulation by bad actors, even with greater efforts at transparency. This is despite commitments from chief executive Mark Zuckerberg to solve the company's misinformation problem. Vice first reported last week that the Facebook political ads tool could be manipulated, with the publication securing approval to buy fake Facebook ads on behalf of US Vice President Mike Pence, terrorist group ISIS, and 100 US senators. Business Insider carried out a similar test, setting up false political ads that were captioned as being "paid for by Cambridge Analytica," the defunct political advertising firm which harvested Facebook data and weaponized it during the 2016 US election. Cambridge Analytica is banned from Facebook and has gone into administration.
EVIL TRUMP get elect by RUSSIA
msmash
Oddly this finally an on topic comment
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
The problem isn't FB.
The problem is that people use it.
Social Media is a scourge on our world.
And I'm here to make your name Mudd
Big tech companies do not have humans monitoring anything. That would cost too much money, and they want to make everything as frictionless as possible. I'm pretty sure the "solution" they came up with was that the ads needed to be displayed with a "paid for" name on the ad. The name itself can be anything.
Facebook is not law enforcement.
This is no different from most businesses... If you place a pickup order under your neighbor's name, then go to the restraurant to pick up your order and tell them it's your neighbor's name and pay for cash; there's nothing gonna detect that you used a fake name.
If you get caught doing this, then they may cancel your order or close your account, but that's about it.
Reporter Posed as Cambridge Analytica To Run Political Ads on Facebook. Facebook, To No One's Surprise, Failed To Catch That They Were Frauds.
This on the heels of previous slashdot article Reporters Posed as 100 Senators To Run Ads on Facebook. Facebook Approved All of Them. Tiny bit of irony there.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
If you got the money honey, I got the time.
With all the focus on using social media s a political tool and the social media companies' efforts to increase transparency, I understand why the media is interested in seeing how successful those efforts are at achieving their stated goals. however, I think using the name of a real company, even one in receivership, to test the effectiveness is wrong. It asserts an opinion that may or not be the current one of the organization and is, IMHO, fraud. News organizations would be up in arms, and rightly so, if someone claimed to be a reporter and used their name to gain access to information. Imagine the editorials if a politician ran a "Paid for by "Insert News Organization Name" and then said "just testing the filter effectiveness..."
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
It's more concerning how many people have their worldview shaped by Facebook ads and posts than by how those ads can be gamed.
At least in the case of political ads, I don't care if the advertiser lies about their true identity unless the validity of the message itself depends on it (most often, it doesn't). Yes, the advertiser may be insincere or hypocritical—so what. After all, it's advertising we're talking about here. The only thing I want to know is that a particular message is an advertisement, and I'll take care of the rest using this thing called brain. I know it's not perfect, but then nobody's brain is.
The whole story assumes that Facebook actually bothered with anything more than being certain the payment processed.
As far as I can tell they don't give a crap about the message of people who are paying them. The only time they do seem to care is when people are making money using their service and they can take it off the table.
"The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them."
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
well, there's that.
It's just about generic gullibility, not social media. Social media is only a problem because it gets gullible people talking to one another, and it's always a bad thing when gullible people talk to one another no matter how they do it. (Oh, and nearly everyone is gullible, even you and me. I'm not talking about other people, "them.")
If these people were talking to each other in a bar or being programmed at a church, or getting groupthink ideas from Slashdot (just in case you're under the delusion that some websites where users communicate aren't "social media") it would be just as bad. And sometimes it actually is just a bad, but people forget all about the last few thousand years of history and concentrate on where the bad stuff is happening today. Nobody wants their current problems compared to the crusades or the third reich or shit like that, because it seems like you're over-dramatizing, even if the mechanisms really are exactly the same.
Facebook is merely a high-profile, well-known place where dogma is valued. Some day it will be somewhere else, and everyone will every bit as pissed off as they are right now, because the consequences will continue to be as severe as they always have. If we wanna do something about it, then figure out a way to undermine dogma itself. I think the only way to do that is to teach people to stop valuing dogma over thinking and researching (i..e paying attention to evidence), but that's easier to say than to actually do (or at least I have no idea how).
It's like we need a memetic virus that spreads skepticism or something. The ad industry would probably be great at crafting such a thing, but it would also be a totally irrational/suicidal thing for them to do. Maybe we should recruit heroes from religion or Amway or political parties or whatever (or ex-ad people!) -- people who know how to get other people to think a certain way but maybe no longer feel like using their powers for evil, or aren't currently running a business which requires them to use their powers that way.
I don't know if it is because I do not share political posts. Or that I do not follow any politician. But, I do not nor did I before get bombarded with political ad's.
And I am a conservative. Guess I must be smarter then the pussy liberals that seem to rant and rave about all of these ad's that I never see.
Anonymous comments are as pathetic as the anonymous "sources" that contaminate gutless journalism from the New York Time
That's all the validation they need
Tom Steyer the billionaire 1 percenter is still running political ads on Facebook that are just made up garbage. As are all political ads, but Facebook has done nothing because he is a big lefty and so are they.
Now do this with voting.
Wow, and yet politics is the one place where everyone should be discussing violence and threats of violence, since dealing with violence and being violent is what government is for (and theoretically, if we're on our game, nothing overlaps with this). Trying to limit violence to enforcement of justice is the entire motivation for having government at all.
Political advertising without some occasional violence is not real political advertising, since violence should often be the subject matter. If Facebook can't really run political ads, then maybe they should stop pretending to try.
Oil rich Venezuela is bleeding caravans. Mind how you vote.
I don't. You are a 'dumbfuck' (I am quoting the Zuck) for even using it in the first place. It will not get any better.
I guess Facebook hates minorities and women, since those are the only ads they seem to be blocking. Typical liberal racists.
Wow. Just. Wow. (Hey Ivan, have you had your daily dose of vodka today?)
This is like American fascists claiming the exceedingly conservative American media has a "liberal" bias, which successfully pushed the already conservative American media even further to the right, so that now we have right-leaning media (CNN, CBS, NBC, ABC) and right-wing-nutball media. MSNBC is about the only thing left of center, and by the standards of the rest of the developed world they fall squarely in the center if not slightly right-of-center. Facebook has been used for several years, very effectively, as a tool for disseminating right-wing and right-wing extremist views in formerly democratic nations, like the United States, and replacing them with would-be fascist dictatorships such as Trump, but nice try in getting them to not police the fascists spewing their hatred at all.
As for calling liberals racist, well, that's absurd to anyone who looks at empirical facts rather than Fox-News fiction and disinformation. But then, it's just another page from the fascist playbook ("accuse the other side of what you're doing", paraphrased, originally attributed to Goebbels[1]) the right has been using since the late 1970s, when they committed treason by agreeing with the Iranians to hold onto the hostages until after the elections, thereby securing a win for their old god, Reagan, since replaced by their new Orange God.
[1] http://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/goeb59.htm
tl;dr: You're clearly just another filthy fascist misrepresenting reality to promote their own vile agenda
Trump's team bought the names, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses of the evangelicals that Analytica scraped from facebook and contacted all of them multiple times, saying Trump would bring about the second coming of Christ and the thousand year reich of Israel. The NYT censors that information.
Oil rich Venezuela is bleeding caravans. https://www.yahoo.com/news/fox-news-shep-smith-ridicules-001426849.html
Happy Halloween.
On the other hand, Business Insider's use of that name may very well constitute fraud as well as a trademark violation. What's up with that?
Have gnu, will travel.
Harvard being sued for discrimination again Asians
Facebook blocked Diamond and Silk (two black women) for no reason given, while Zuck was in Congress testifying he lied saying they had been unblocked and apologized to.
Candice Owens blocked on twitter for repeating comments from NYT editor, I assume Candice was blocked and not the NYT editor because Candice is black (no other logical reason)
Comments about Kayne West over last couple of weeks.
DNC had a KKK leader as a Senator for 60 years, Robert Byrd.
DNC ran presidential candidate that said that KKK leader was her "mentor" in the senate.
DNC opposed Civil Rights Act of 1964, would have passed in 30s if they didn't oppose it.
There is a distinct pattern of recent ACTUAL racism from the DNC and liberals. Just because you agree with it doesn't mean it isn't racist, it means that you are also racist.
Justifying censorship of minorities, check. He is saying mentioning genocide should not be allowed in a political discussion and that is the proper way to deal with mass killings based on race (don't allow it). Are you a Holocaust-denier as well?
Yep, you probably are a racist as well. I'm actually getting tired of liberals acting racist, like you are, while calling everyone else one. If you want to be a bigot and not be called out, go back to making your Robert Byrd bust in private and stop posting your racism here.
They will abuse discretion, and you will get no discretionary. Don't vote for loser economics. The Caravan rolls for you.
An information source is either curated, or it's not.
Most newspapers and weekly magazines are curated, though some better than others. Social media falls squarely in the "not" category. Yes, there attempts to find a middle ground (wikipedia), and Facebook and the like are trying very hard to find this middle ground, and failing hard.
When I buy a copy of a newspaper, I'm the customer and I expect the info to be curated. It's what I demand, it's what I pay for. A failure of curation means that I find a better quality news source.
When I log onto Facebook, I expect the experience to be FREE FREE FREE. Meaning that someone else with a checkbook is paying and they are the ones calling the shots. Facebook pays real attention to the customer. The "attention" that Facebook pays to the users is entirely illusory. It's pure spin.
Anyone with a checkbook can put almost anything into Facebook and get it seen by hordes of people. That's how Facebook makes money. It's not going to change, unless they start charging users a subscription fee. Obviously this isn't gonna happen.
Almost all , social sites, allow some kind of anonymity. Even if they don't without physical proximity proving identity is nearly impossible.
Register for an account with a fake name , a new e-mail account you created just for the purpose then delete , if you had to use a Walmart phone to register.
Without someone looking @ you all anyone on the internet has is an IP and data and any and all data can be faked.
SOO... you cannot solve the people of one person posing as 1 or many other people ( assuming they are determined enough to do so). You might be able to make it hard, but that is about it.
To No One's Surprise, Failed To Catch That They Were Frauds
Actually, I was surprised.
That they can detect Russians, and other undesirables with high accuracy. Facepalmbook is perhaps a better name for them.
If people are still getting their political news and views from Facebook, then they deserve what they get.
as part of your normal course of business, you will get in trouble eventually.
this is not like someone delivering food to the wrong party,
this is like if a drug dealing ring was running out of your back room and you ignored it, then when you got reprimanded for it, said you were sorry and would stop it, people with the same name came in the same room and started acting the same and you did nothing.
just because you are involved in business doesnt mean you can ignore illegal activity on your premises.