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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.
Oddly this finally an on topic comment
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
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.
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.
The problem isn't FB.
The problem is the people that MAKE it.
Social Media is a scourge on our world.
FTFY
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
The problem isn't social media. Social media is great, allowing family and friends to keep in touch in ways not previously possible. The problem is people. People have always been the problem. The internet and social media have simply allowed both the good and bad things to be amplified. If it were never invented you'd still have people spreading lies for their own gain, stoking the fires of racism to give themselves power, and stomping on the poor to make themselves wealthier. This shit has always been around, and unfortunately will probably always be around.
It's more concerning how many people have their worldview shaped by Facebook ads and posts than by how those ads can be gamed.
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.
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).
The attribution is part of the message. If the identity is misreported, then that's fraud.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
well, there's that.
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
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.
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.
It can sometimes be. The attribution has to be a prominent part of the content for that to matter, and even then it is easy to distinguish the resulting sub-messages "X is true" and "It's me John Doe saying X is true" with their associated contexts and implications. I use my brain to figure that out.
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.
The attribution has to be a prominent part of the content for that to matter,
That is the case for every single political ad. Arguably, for all content ever produced, but that's another discussion.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
How can this be true? Consider any political statement you find true and imagine an ad that contains just this statement and nothing more. Perhaps with the word "Advertisement" in small print somewhere, and nothing readily pointing to the identity of the one who posted the ad. In this case, how does the validity of the message as it is for the reader and its impact on the reader depend on that identity?
How can this be true? Consider any political statement you find true and imagine an ad that contains just this statement and nothing more.
Because intent is always relevant. The Russians spent money to show ads specifically to people who would not be receptive to them in order to get them riled up, because their purpose was not to influence political thought directly, but simply to sow discord because they believed that would have a specific effect.
We place additional controls on political advertising because of the relevance of their impact. I'd argue that all advertising should be more controlled than it is in the USA, where it is permitted to use all kinds of sleazy trickery, but few argue that political ads should be permitted to be more deceptive. That's a hard sell.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I see you had no problem accepting the original post which was bull shit. You can't handle a reply. Idiot
Anonymous comments are as pathetic as the anonymous "sources" that contaminate gutless journalism from the New York Time
Intent cannot make attribution part of the message if there's no attribution as such in the message (as in my example above). So, not relevant, and any deceptiveness has to be contained in the message itself.
Besides, the "discord" you're talking about is already there in the readers' minds (you yourself mention receptiveness here). Without the evidence showing that a specific side was favored, it's more like multiplying the denominator and the numerator in a fraction by the same number, which causes them to mutually cancel. It really looks like all this rhetoric about "sowing discord" was launched in an attempt to make an impression of something scary without having anything specific and objective to say.
The only successful tactic of Russian trolls, used domestically, is littering up the discussion space with obvious garbage to create a disincentive for participating. That they can do well, and it's not something they seem to do at a notable scale in the US. Actually, no: there is another tactic they use, the one of getting Facebook etc. ban their opponents. They've made great strides with this recently at home.