
I'm an ex-Facebook exec: don't believe what they tell you about ads - agd
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/02/facebook-executive-advertising-data-comment
======
metastart
"The fact that Facebook could easily throw the election by selectively showing
a Get Out the Vote reminder in certain counties of a swing state, for example,
was a running joke."

Woah. They're asking to be regulated.

~~~
jasonmp85
Not a very good joke. I'd have considered it a moral imperative to act on that
impulse.

~~~
H4CK3RM4N
As soon as Facebook takes a political stance, the other half of the population
will leave.

~~~
mattnewton
It is sad that voter participation is a partisan issue in the United States.

~~~
derefr
The idea was telling only those voters in certain counties (who predictably
would vote a certain way) to vote; i.e., a less-blatant version of telling
exactly the subset of people who are registered to vote for a given party, to
go out and vote. That is a partisan action.

~~~
H4CK3RM4N
That was what I meant, although I have to agree with the parent that Facebook
really should show everyone a get out and vote message.

~~~
mattnewton
If they did it would still be seen as a Democratic-leaning message.

~~~
brokenmachine
So Republicans don't want people to vote?

Real question, I'm in Australia and don't know.

~~~
smt88
That's correct. Get-out-the-vote efforts are seen as partisan. I volunteered
to help register people to vote (as a non-partisan without any messaging at
all) and was verbally abused by Republicans on the street.

Republicans also regularly impose laws to disenfranchise voters. An example is
Georgia's law where voters are purged from the rolls every 3 years. Minority
voters often only vote every 4 years.

The list goes on and on. These voter suppression tactics are very, very
targeted at minorities and Democrats, often to the point that the Supreme
Court has to strike them down as unlawful.

~~~
metastart
Yeah, basically if everyone always voted, the Democrats would generally win.
That's why Republicans don't want to encourage voter turnout and also want to
suppress ease of voting which usually harms poorer people who tend to be
Democratic.

------
agd
"And knowing the Facebook sales playbook, I cannot imagine the company would
have concocted such a pitch about teenage emotions without the final hook:
“and this is how you execute this on the Facebook ads platform”. Why else
would they be making the pitch?

The question is not whether this can be done. It is whether Facebook should
apply a moral filter to these decisions. Let’s assume Facebook does target ads
at depressed teens. My reaction? So what. Sometimes data behaves unethically."

This is the key quote for me. It's clear that if this data can be abused, it
will be.

~~~
FussyZeus
> This is the key quote for me. It's clear that if this data can be abused, it
> will be.

And it's so fucking sad that this is true. This kind of technology could
enable Facebook and entities like it to predict when people are feeling
depressed, hopeless and suicidal and instead of doing something like
presenting a simple message like "Hey are you alright? Do you need some help?"
nope, their thought is "this person is RIPE for some well placed marketing."

I get that this guy is likely a product of his industry and he didn't set out
from childhood to prey on people's emotions to sell them shit they don't need,
at least, in all likelihood. That said I certainly hope there is a hell if for
no other reason than this man and all like him really, really belong there.

------
cjhanks
I am surprised people are shocked by this. Personally, I live in Berkeley -
within a 20 mile footprint you have a nice sampling of exorbitant wealth and
abject poverty.

As you drive through you can see drastic changes of roadside advertisements
transitioning between English, Chinese, and Spanish. In the poor areas of town
bus stations are plastered with high-interest payday loans. Drive 5 miles
North and you will see advertisements for expensive art/music events. Drive
slightly more North and you will see endless advertisements for divorce and
accident lawyers.

It would be a miracle if all of this store location/advertisement placement
was coincidence.

It's such a shtark reality you can stand at the Bus Station, read the bus
outside advertisements, and estimate if it's likely to be going where you are.
But once you get _inside_ the bus where fewer people of wealth can see, you no
longer can.

------
rrdharan
So wait, remind me why we should believe Antonio Garcia Martinez?

The guy trumpeted the fact that he lied to his investors as a point of pride:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5b4tqe/i_am_antonio_g...](https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5b4tqe/i_am_antonio_garcia_martinez_a_tech_entrepreneur/)

"Trust me, they're lying, I know because I'm a liar" doesn't seem terribly
convincing.

~~~
mercer
Why not? I'm inclined to trust the security advice of a 'reformed' criminal
hacker, assuming this individual has no clear reason to be lying to me.

------
Mendenhall
Ahh the old "so what" argument.

So what if I can target recovering alchoholics with alchohol ads?

So what if I target gambling addicts with my gambling platform?

So what?

~~~
lucasmullens
There are alcohol and gambling ads on Facebook? Those two in particular often
aren't allowed on ad networks.

~~~
Mendenhall
That defeats his whole "so what" argument, Because if those 2 matter others do
as well.

------
moomin
Wow, I can't decide if this guy is more morally or intellectually bankrupt.
Seriously, "sometimes data behaves unethically"?

Data doesn't do anything. Not even analysis or deep learning does anything.
People (or programs written by people) execute decisions on the basis of data.
It's still the people being unethical. Big data isn't some magic wand that
absolves you of moral responsibility, but it's extremely interesting that at
least one marketer at Facebook seems to believe it does.

And that's just one of the many things that manage to be simultaneously
offensive and just plain incorrect in what is frankly, a pretty short article.

~~~
hammock
You ought to continue to read past that. Because you missed his point. He goes
on to basically question "ethics" entirely:

 _> What did this tool start spitting out? Every ethnic stereotype you can
imagine....People who liked Jay Z were more likely to like Obama – it was one
of the statistical truths Facebook couldn’t be seen espousing.

I disagreed. Jay Z is a millionaire music tycoon, so what if we associate him
with the president? In our current world, there’s a long list of Truths That
Cannot Be Stated Publicly, even though there’s plenty of data suggesting their
correctness, and this was one of them.

African Americans living in postal codes with depressed incomes likely do
respond disproportionately to ads for usurious “payday” loans. Hispanics
between the ages of 18 and 25 probably do engage with ads singing the charms
and advantages of military service.

Why should those examples of targeting be viewed as any less ethical than,
say, ads selling $100 Lululemon yoga pants targeting thirtysomething women in
affluent postal codes like San Francisco’s Marina district? _

~~~
jolux
That's not questioning, that's rejecting wholesale without a proper argument
as to why. And frankly I don't at all see the ethical analogy between luxury
athleisure and payday loans, and it seems to me you'd have to be pretty damn
fucking self-deluded to think they're remotely comparable.

~~~
devoply
it's a good that a demographic buys. that's the way that ethically bereft
corporations see it. i would even guess that this is how zuck sees it. people
who buy jay-z buy obama. people with lower income buy payday loans. there is
nothing ethical about any of this unless you want to add the ethical
dimension. corporations are expected not to. and yet the data is allowing them
more and more to target these "opportunities".

i wanted to catch some flies over the weekend. i used some soap and vinegar as
the vinegar attracts them and the soap breaks the surface tension to drown
them. corporations act much the same way. perhaps we need to see them as
predators rather than someone looking to solve our problems, much like flies
should see me. i don't provide what they want, but they don't see it that way
until it's too late.

we sell bad food to overweight people. facebook can help with that. we also
sell diets to overweight people. facebook can help with that too. either we
add an ethical dimension to business or quit criticizing marketers for doing
what they are expected to be doing.

i would even go as far as to argue that a system based on desire is not a good
system. as the case with the flies, we can be led to death through our desires
and various drives that have another purpose, but have been subverted to
achive different objectives. whether as individuals or as a civilization.

~~~
enraged_camel
>>it's a good that a demographic buys.

Oxygen and carbon monoxide are both gases. One of them is poisonous to humans.

~~~
devoply
Corporations will sell you just enough rope to hang yourself unless the
government steps in and tells them not to through regulation. But that's the
antithesis of business, neo-liberal economics will argue. Canada still sells
asbestos to third world countries for instance.

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
Apparently asbestos mining in Canada has ended.

 _Asbestos opponents and those weary of seeing Canada 's mesothelioma rate
rise celebrated in 2011 when the country's asbestos industry ground to a
standstill. Canada's last two remaining active mines, the Jeffrey Mine in
Asbestos, Quebec, and the Lac d'amiante du Canada in the nearby town of
Thetford Mines, Quebec, shut down because of financial, labor and development
issues — the first time in 130 years that the Canadian asbestos production
stalled._[1]

1\.
[https://www.asbestos.com/mesothelioma/canada/](https://www.asbestos.com/mesothelioma/canada/)

------
delphinius81
Misleading title - since when did FB product managers become executives?

Though completely believe FB will use their data in any way possible to make
money, ethical or not.

~~~
AdamSC1
To be fair "Executive" means "A person or group having administrative or
managerial authority in an organization."

Seniority of the product manager role depends on a number of factors. Sure,
most FB product managers are not considered execs these days, but he was their
first Product Manager responsible for ad targeting and then their advertising
exchange all the way back in 2011. That probably brought with it a team, a
good salary and a lot of sway.

Unlike the cookie-cutter 9-5 corporations of yesteryear, startups have been
pretty loose with standard job naming convention. You can be fresh out of a BA
and get called "CMO" or you can be a 20-year veteran leading a team making
executive decisions and just be a "Product Specialist."

The responsibilities and compensation define executives far more than titles.

------
kristianc
The problem with any platform like Facebook (though Facebook happens to be
have the richest seam of user data, at scale and across devices) is that the
segment with the highest clickthrough rate will inevitably be one which draws
on shady factors.

It will be the segment deliberately concocted to find that most vulnerable /
subsceptible to buy. If you're looking to ship garbage self help books, you're
going to target people who like garbage self help book writers. Rinse and
repeat for preppers etc.

To prevent this you essentially either have to ask marketers to hobble their
own search terms even when they know there is likely a higher CTR out there
(like payday loan companies willingly deciding not to advertise on daytime
TV), or asking Facebook to hobble its own platform.

Until there is some kind of regulation or FTC pushback I can't see the
situation improving.

------
siliconc0w
This is a tricky problem in pretty much the entire consumer-facing ML space.
For example, even if you don't feed in 'protected classes' \- you can say 'the
algo finds a way'. It might figure out a certain zip code won't pay back a
loan, so it will down weight them accordingly - even though that zip may
predominantly be one ethnicity. Is that discriminating on a protected class?
Well, kinda. It's discriminating on a proxy for a protected class which, if
we're getting technical, is really a (poor) proxy for cultural, genetic, and
socio-economic backgrounds.

So it's in some ways 'more fair' but it does take away our ability to
'socially engineer' certain decisions by prohibiting use of one feature or
another.

------
ThrustVectoring
Advertisers and Facebook don't have to try to target emotionally troubled
teens in order to target emotionally troubled teens. All they have to do is
have an advertisement that works well on emotionally troubled teens, have
sufficiently correlated targeting tools, and run an optimization algorithm
like gradient descent.

To take a slightly different example: it doesn't matter if Facebook doesn't
offer racial targeting if a payday loan company runs ads segmented by zip code
and picks the best performing areas that happen to be predominantly black.

EDIT: This should teach me to read the entire article first, since I made up
an example that was literally used in the article. My bad.

~~~
fnbr
The main problems they're talking about are PR problems, not ethical problems
(if you assume that advertising itself is ethical, which I don't necessarily
think is true). Specific types of targeting are then bad because of the
optics, not because of their efficacy.

Put another way, there's no ethical problem with recommending that people who
follow Jay-Z should follow Obama, but there's a PR problem there.

~~~
eridius
> _Put another way, there 's no ethical problem with recommending that people
> who follow Jay-Z should follow Obama, but there's a PR problem there._

I agree with that specific statement, but I would say there is an ethical
problem with the similar situation of recommending payday loans to poor
people.

The difference is recommending Obama to Jay-Z followers isn't harmful to those
followers, but recommending payday loans to poor people is.

~~~
fnbr
I mean, is it any less ethical than recommending that poor people purchase
things in general? The _point_ of advertising is to convince people to make
purchasing decisions that they wouldn't have otherwise made, which is almost
always damaging financially.

To be clear, I'm not arguing that you're wrong- I think that the argument you
made applies to advertising in general, and that it's correct.

~~~
eridius
> _The point of advertising is to convince people to make purchasing decisions
> that they wouldn 't have otherwise made, which is almost always damaging
> financially._

That's not really true. People purchase things because they decide that the
benefit is worth the cost. Advertising makes people pick one brand over
another when they already plan to buy something, and it helps sway someone's
decision when they're not sure if it's worth buying. It also brings their
attention to products that they wouldn't otherwise have known about. But this
sort of advertising is almost never "damaging financially", unless you think
the act of buying something counts as financial damage.

------
lucasmullens
>Why should those examples of targeting be viewed as any less ethical than,
say, ads selling $100 Lululemon yoga pants targeting thirtysomething women in
affluent postal codes like San Francisco’s Marina district?

Because one can cause poverty and the other doesn't.

~~~
ferongr
How does an ad cause poverty?

~~~
lucasmullens
If it encourages someone to do something that will cause them to go into
poverty, such as taking a payday loan they can't afford.

~~~
ferongr
I don't think it's actually responsible for the problem then. The choice rests
entirely with that person.

------
Unknoob
"In our current world, there’s a long list of Truths That Cannot Be Stated
Publicly, even though there’s plenty of data suggesting their correctness"

Truer words were never spoken.

------
Bodell
So yeah obviously Facebook like any other large advertising platform is gonna
use its data for seedy means. What's crazy to me is that the author seems to
be using the word 'ethics' synonymously with the concept of political
correctness. As if he actually does not know the difference.

------
dxbydt
He's a nice guy. But his book is way past its sell-date - time to stop milking
it so much & get on to the next gig/book/whatever.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=antongm](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=antongm)

~~~
antongm
Lol. Nope. It's been out less than a year. How many writing careers do you
follow?

~~~
dxbydt
Everybody I know and his cat has read the book. Give us another book. How
about reprinting the old adgrok blog posts about why SF is better than nyc
because person in NYC is significant only if they showed up in the Sunday
marriage section, whereas the SF guy can build something out of thin air and
climb the rings of Fame. I dug that.

~~~
antongm
That's on the Wayback Machine, not that it was the Gettysburg Address or
anything.

------
el_memorioso
"Sometimes data behaves unethically."

No, data doesn't behave at all. This is quite a cynical deflection of
responsibility for ethically questionable actions taken by people.

~~~
erpellan
Ethics is a human construct. So data could very well show that unethical (by
some definition) behaviour is profitable.

I think this is the point being made: the data shows, beyond statistical
doubt, that payday loan ads aimed at a certain demographic have better
conversion, ergo profit. The data also shows, beyond statistical doubt, that
[current fashionable brand] yoga pant ads aimed at a certain demographic have
better conversion, ergo profit. The data doesn't care. If you are an ad-funded
company (as both facebook and google are), you can't afford to ignore the
data, it's your differentiator.

I'm not saying I agree with it, I am saying that ethics is an opinion, data is
fact. I long for a time when we as a species evolve beyond being so
predictably influenced by propaganda.

------
Animats
Can you run an ad for Final Exit [1] aimed at depressed teens?

If you ask Amazon "suicide how to", you get exactly what you asked for.[2] Is
that wrong?

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Final-Exit-Digital-2011-Self-
Delivera...](https://www.amazon.com/Final-Exit-Digital-2011-Self-Deliverance-
ebook/dp/B004TGU1VY/) [2]

~~~
datashovel
"Brawndo: The Thirst Mutilator. It's like a monster truck you can pour into
your face."

------
hackuser
I don't agree with his claims that the following are among "a long list of
Truths That Cannot Be Stated Publicly". I don't think anyone would care; I
care very much about racism and can't imagine anyone I know objecting to
these.

* "people who liked Jay Z were more likely to like Obama"

* "Hispanics between the ages of 18 and 25 probably do engage with ads singing the charms and advantages of military service."

(I'm skipping the other example because it's an issue of economic
exploitation, not ethnicity.)

~~~
empath75
Yeah, basically if you have any kind of oppressed category of people, you can
take advantage of them by exploiting their vulnerabilities (lack of education,
lack of access to credit, etc). If you aren't careful with how you use your
algorithms, you can come up with all kinds of systems that reinforce systemic
racism.

~~~
hackuser
A good point that I overlooked; thanks.

------
seanca
Dumb article is dumb. Ex-product manager = / = Facebook exec, this person also
hasn't worked there in four years. "Targeting emotionally troubled teens"
without detailed explanation as to how someone could implies simplicity in the
matter, but it's not like an advertiser is typing in "show my ads to
emotionally troubled teens please."

~~~
antongm
Dumb reader is dumb. It's an op-ed not an article. For the details, perhaps
open FB's ad creation UI. You are indeed correct you don't target ads like you
enter a search query.

------
TECHnickAlly
Just started reading Chaos Monkeys. Thoroughly enjoying it so far (am up to
Zuck's inner circle of desks). Guardianistas are a funny lot aren't they. They
write as if people who can endure the push and shove of business long enough
to try to improve things from the inside (unlike themselves) are going to be
anti-business (like themselves).

------
milesf
"We are not Facebook's customer. We are their product."

I have stated that fact so many times to so many people, and yet most people
don't care. They continue to use Facebook.

It's almost as if people are addicted to Facebook.

~~~
nix0n
We're both the customer and the product.

I'm the product to advertisers, but also to my friends.

Similarly I am the customer to the products that are my friends.

~~~
qbrass
The product is bait.

You're keeping your friends there, they're keeping you there, and now the
group of you brings in the bigger fish.

------
rs86
Sometimes data behave unethically -- I just can't take that much of cynism

------
apozem
> Let’s assume Facebook does target ads at depressed teens. My reaction? So
> what. Sometimes data behaves unethically.

Stop right there. Data has no behavior. _You_ behave unethically. Data informs
a decision, but _you_ are making the decision. Take responsibility.

~~~
andrewflnr
I think you and he have sort of the same point: data has no ethical
orientation. If you unpacked that sentence, he would probably clarify it to
"data behaves in ways that, if there was a human making that call, would be
unethical".

What makes the situation interesting is that there's not necessarily a person
that makes the decision to do potentially damaging ad targeting: if you want
to prevent it, you probably have to specifically prevent it in each case. Is
Facebook responsible for preventing every single unethical ad targeting? Given
the unfeasibility of that, does this problem mean we should call it quits on
targeted ads entirely?

------
danso
A little off-topic, but from the article:

> _I’ll illustrate with an anecdote from my Facebook days. Someone on the data
> science team had cooked up a new tool that recommended Facebook Pages users
> should like. And what did this tool start spitting out? Every ethnic
> stereotype you can imagine. We killed the tool when it recommended then
> president Obama if a user had “liked” rapper Jay Z..._

The author left Facebook in 2013 [0], so I had assumed by now Facebook could
do a proper job of recommendations. It's been awhile since I've "Liked" a
page, so I just tried it (In-N-Out Burger) and was extremely surprised to see
that Facebook apparently still doesn't provide a popup for related pages I may
also "Like", in the same way that Twitter does whenever you follow _any_ user.

That's _really_ surprising. For starters, Twitter has had user suggestions for
several years now, and it has _much_ less structured data to work with than
Facebook does -- for example, a FB page can specify its category, address, and
many other attributes; Twitter has nothing to go by other than user's name,
account screen name, biography, a location field, and connection metadata
(i.e. geolocated IP). Yet it's been awhile if ever since I've seen Twitter
recommend someone truly off, e.g. President Obama and Jay-Z.

In contrast, Facebook provides a _related stories_ feature for news stories a
user shares in the feed - or at least it did before the fake news thing blew
up. Is this a signal that Facebook doesn't really care about user engagement
with brand pages? Or did the fuckup that the author describes make it so that
this was a feature that no product manager wants to be associated with?

(Or it could be that I'm just missing the Related Pages feature. Maybe it
shows up in mobile and not the browser version)

edit: It's strange that the feature doesn't exist in 2017, but this anecdote,
as portrayed by the author, reflects badly on both Facebook's data science and
the author. I mean, how is it possible for so many smart people to not figure
out how to fix such undesired associations? There are so many other signals
for clustering related users beyond similar followers.

edit 2: This feature _does_ exist -- you have to like a post in your news feed
(on the website), and then Facebook will append a "Related" box in your
newsfeed. Unless your browser window is open particularly high, the fact that
the "Related" box was triggered by the Like action is obfuscated (because it
is out of view). Still doesn't explain why they couldn't make the feature work
in 2012-2013.

edit 3: Appears author is wrong about the tool being "killed". Seems to still
exist, though maybe it was only temporarily "killed"

[http://www.adweek.com/digital/facebook-suggests-similar-
page...](http://www.adweek.com/digital/facebook-suggests-similar-pages-after-
users-click-like-on-pages-timeline/)

[https://www.facebook.com/addpage](https://www.facebook.com/addpage)

[0]
[https://www.linkedin.com/in/antongm/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/antongm/)

~~~
antongm
There have been dozens of page recommender units, which have come and gone.

~~~
danso
Thanks for clearing that up!

