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Out of context: Reply #137
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- yuekit0
As easy as it is to hate on FB and Zuckerberg...how is any of this news to people? Did journalists really need the pink hair guy to tell them that Facebook runs a business based on microtargeting ads to their users?
Deep down I think the media is still searching for an explanation for why Trump was elected. The media mostly hates Trump but they still cling to this idea of American voters as good, decent, well-informed, tolerant..
They don't want to confront the fact that Americans really did vote for a racist wannabe dictator TV celebrity, so they latch onto any allegation of outside interference without asking how consequential it actually was.
- I don't think targetted sales ads were ever the issue, as you say everyone knew their data was used for those.
This is about misuse of data (users were misledfadein11 - when installing the CA app).
Also was anyone aware or did they agree to their data being used in election campaigns? and that data being used in the creationfadein11 - of masses of fake news to influence an election.
Both the UK referendum and the presidential campaign were extremely close. So did it affect the results?fadein11 - The reason this story is so big has nothing to do with standard targeted marketing everyone agrees to when using Facebook.fadein11
- I do agree with the latter part of what you say though. It's time to move on. But surely it's worth preventing it happening again.fadein11
- If that is even possible.fadein11
- Putting aside the fact that they were working for Trump and Brexit, I'm not convinced that what Cambridge Analytica did was all that unique.yuekit
- well I guess those were 2 huge recent elections so prob the most significant. One we got Trump the other we prob started the end of the EU.fadein11
- This is simply how modern political campaigns are run. Of course it is disturbing if you look at it from a certain perspective, but it's not really new.yuekit
- But nope I doubt it is unique. Facebook massively tightened up its 3rd party API right after discovering what CA had done so it is far harder to do the same nowfadein11
- regardless of what comes from all of this.
They knew they had fucked up and tried to keep it quiet (another reason it's big news).fadein11 - @yuekit. agree to a degree but this is about ease of use, scale and personalisation. Fake news on this scale is also a new thing, combine that with a userfadein11
- profile and you have a hugely powerful weapon. Way more powerful than any TV ad (that is legally obliged to tell you who it is from). This kind of targettingfadein11
- is v.misleading. Not so worrying for a younger generation who can spot a fake news site a mile off but v.effective for older users.fadein11
- I don't think targetted sales ads were ever the issue, as you say everyone knew their data was used for those.