
Facebook is America’s scapegoat du jour - grej
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/facebook-is-americas-scapegoat-du-jour/2018/03/22/58699078-2dff-11e8-b0b0-f706877db618_story.html
======
WallWextra
Here is, roughly, the media's playbook:

1\. Never stop talking about Trump. Mention his name 300 times an hour on CNN.
He's not a serious candidate, but he is entertaining so they give him free
publicity until he _is_ a serious candidate.

2\. Start blathering about Hillary's emails, as if that were somehow
important.

3\. Now Trump is elected. In these tough times, it is more important than ever
to support high-quality independent journalism. Subscription numbers swell.

4\. We need someone to blame for the outcome of this election. Obviously it is
the fault of Facebook, Google, etc, who have been taking the media's ad
revenue. Not the fault of the media who would never shut up about Trump.

~~~
ixtli
I realize that this is tangential to what you're talking about but your
comment reminded me of it strongly: As much as it's clear that there was some
funny business with trump's people and russia, the way liberals are salivating
over mueller's investigation makes me uncomfortable. they need the legal
system to pronounce in some way that trump and his people broke the rules, in
order to avoid acknowledging that the general thrust of all of this is the
system working as it was designed.

~~~
WallWextra
It's like how the 2008 election didn't count, because Obama is actually a
Kenyan. People can't just lose an election anymore.

~~~
ixtli
I like to talk about social issues and politics and stuff but the more I do it
in public the more I run into what feels like "politics-as-basketball." It's
really begun to feel like team sports as opposed to a critical analysis of
conditions and power analysis.

~~~
mieseratte
As someone in their mid-twenties, I have to ask the older HNers: has it always
been this "stupid," so vitriolic and hateful? If not, when did it become this
way?

~~~
ams6110
It has, but it's never been so easy to spout off to the world before, or be
instantly informed about what other people are thinking.

In the 1980s the media hated Reagan about as much as they hated Bush or Trump.
Before that it was Nixon. But you really only heard about it if you watched
the evening news, and that was 30 minutes of the day. It wasn't being fed to
you continuously like an intravenous drip on your phone.

It's the speed and pervasiveness that have increased, not so much the
partisanship.

~~~
tim333
I'd disagree and say through the Bush Clinton Bush Obama period it wasn't as
bad. I guess the levels of stupid vitriolic and hateful come and go. The world
has definitely gone through worse phases as well, see the 1930s for example.

~~~
creaghpatr
They probably would have been worse to Bush up front had 9/11 not happened.
Blasting the President in the year(s) after 9/11 would have probably been in
poor taste through the eyes of the public.

------
madmax96
The meta-narrative of this thread: people have outsourced their thinking to
massive media companies who have a rational self-interest to capture their
audience's attention in order to increase revenue. People assume that these
media companies are portrayers of truth. While these companies are not
(usually) telling lies, they are presenting a point-of-view that suits their
interests. The narratives being consumed by the public are designed to keep
them in fear and outrage. By being in a state of fear and outrage, the mob
produces more stories for the media to sell back to it to induce more fear and
outrage.

The other day, I took a taxi. The driver was talking about how he stopped
logging into Facebook, consuming the news, etc. and was instead focusing on
spending more quality time with his wife and daughters. He was the happiest
person I spoke to yesterday.

We already had what we needed to be happy. Entertainment tools like Facebook
are good insofar as we are made better people. Perhaps it's time for us to
reflect on how satisfied we are with the people we've become, and accept the
personal responsibility of bettering ourselves before we try to save the
world.

"Turn on, tune in, and drop out."

------
KirinDave
This article is amazing to me. You've literally got the e staff and c suite on
camera talking about voter manipulation, compromising politicians with human
trafficking victims, revealing that state governments were cooperating with
Trump's media org directly, all while using a service that not only failed to
put adequate controls on how partners used data but also provided services
which are illegal when used for elections under the letter of the law.

But no, she implies, this mass panic is unjustified. After all, something
something Hilary Clinton. Something something information society. There is
nothing we can do because we can and should be powerless to regulate
companies.

What an awful opinion piece.

------
throwaway5752
Aren't scapegoats usually blameless?

edit: one of many, many articles you can find criticizing Megan McCardle
[https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2018/02/megan-
mcardle...](https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2018/02/megan-mcardle-
fails-upwards-again-this-time-to-the.html) ... this is not a non-sequitur
attack on her thesis, but I am saying that she has a long track record that
one should be aware of before reading her OpEds.

~~~
PunchTornado
No, but I seriously doubt the idiots at Cambridge Analytica and the guy with
pink hair were the genius masterminds who can swing political votes through
targeted advertising.

People don't like to admit that the people in swing states are mostly against
globalisation, wall street and the system as it is.

Trump spent less than half what Clinton did on ads. I truly believe he could
have spent nothing and still won. Voters are just pissed off at the current
state of affairs.

~~~
dwild
Did you forget the fake news during the election? I'm from Quebec and I
remember being ashamed to learn that some people near I lived made a living
pushing fake news website just with the help of Google Ads on these pages.
They made a profit with fake news. Do you see now how much cheaper it is to
push a fake narrative that people want to believe?

The share button is the cheapest ad campaign you can ever hope for. You only
pay for the first view, all the share are free.

It also helps when another country pays for your ad campaigns ;) but that's a
whole other story.

~~~
PunchTornado
The deal here is the "want to believe". People who believed those faked news
were voting for Trump anyway.

It takes a lot to switch from Democrat to Conservative, not just some news
that you read on the net. Political opinions are not that fluid and don't
change easy.

~~~
jessaustin
The theory is that it's about turnout. You want to demoralize opponents'
supporters and energize your own.

I agree with you, though. If Vlad can swing our elections by posting shit on
social media, then he absolutely should. All those gun-hating Europeans we
hear from constantly should, as well: I'll have to turn in my rifle by this
time next year. Any other person, anywhere should voice her own opinions about
our elections. That is fundamental to our system of government. When we made a
list of important rights, that one came First. The news media liked that, back
when they had different concerns than they have now.

The preceding notwithstanding, Facebook is horrible.

------
bshastry
I like the critical thinking in this article. Problem is, I am critical about
it's critique. Just because Ted Cruz made use of the same platform and did not
win, does not mean there is no problem with what Facebook is doing. They are
still thieving people's data and selling it for a nice sum.

~~~
throwawayyx96
I don't think the author was trying to excuse Facebook's business model by
bringing up Cruz. She was pointing out that if this 'psychological profiling'
technique from CA was really a silver bullet for swaying votes, Cruz would
have done better in his run the Republican nomination. It's a single data
point that arguably isn't worth much, but it was interesting to me as I'd not
heard of any other prominent politicians using the service. Balanced article
by WAPO in my view.

~~~
jessaustin
I thought Cruz came in 2nd? To the guy who was on every channel of TV _all the
time_. Keep in mind R primary voters get more of their news from TV than the
general electorate, which explains why Trump beat Cruz more than he beat
Clinton. Keep in mind also that Cruz is a total pariah in Washington. The only
people who will talk to him are those who are paid to do so. Based on previous
form, one would not have expected Jeb and the rest to all lose to Trump and
Cruz.

------
charlysl
I find the use of the word "scapegoat" interesting. From the little I know
about anthropology, when some calamity befell the village/horde/tribe
(disease/drought/crime etc) the shaman would magically point out the scapegoat
as the culprit, who invariably was someone people didn't like to begin with;
because of this, such decisions were rarely contested regardless of their
plausibility and the scapegoat was promptly disposed of.

I suspect that most people are as clueless about what is really going on as
those villagers.

Those who control the media, though, just like the shaman, are extremely adept
at sizing up the public emotion.

For what it's worth, if I understand it correctly, the most interesting aspect
of this is that using machine learning techniques they managed to translate
the actual tags that they wanted to target
(gay/square/racist/unemployed/man/rightwing/white/latino etc etc) to the less
revealing tags actually offered by fb, and in this way direct propaganda more
accurately.

------
dalbasal
All the terms and templates we are using legally and in the media... they are
painting a totally (imo) misleading picture.

FB's "crime" is painted as data security. The "criminals" are trump, Bannon,
Putin or whoever is alleged to have used this data to "manipulate public
opinion." This misses the entire point.

FB's business model is based on using large datasets of mundane (in isolation)
information in order to "profile" people. More specifically, score people for
likelihood to do X, where X is refinance a loan, go to a diet seminar or
whatever an advertiser wants.

The key point is large quantities of _mundane data_ , not necessarily stuff
that is protected.

Someone got a hold of a small subset of FBs dataset and presumably used it to
target political messages or whatnot.

This is exactly what all FB advertiser's do every day.

If we're calling this incident "manipulating public opinion" or "foreign
meddling"... Then the problem is 10,000X times bigger than this case. This
stuff is all around us.

~~~
maxerickson
As I understand it, the Trump campaign mostly used Facebook's in house ad
targeting services. In contrast to the Clinton campaign that relied on their
own data team for targeting.

It's hard to get a read on it, but there are plenty of people slagging
Cambridge Analytica as being pretty worthless.

~~~
neuronexmachina
Maybe he's just overtooting his own horn, but CA's CEO claimed differently:

[https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/20/cambridge-analytica-
claimed-...](https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/20/cambridge-analytica-claimed-firm-
ran-digital-campaign-for-trump-report-says.html)

> In the video posted by Channel 4, Nix is heard saying that the company did
> much of the work behind Trump's campaign, which resulted in a shocking upset
> victory over Hillary Clinton in November 2016.

> "We did all the research, all the data, all the analytics, all the
> targeting," Nix says on the video. "We ran all the digital campaign, the
> television campaign, and our data informed all the strategy."

~~~
maxerickson
Yeah, that's why I say it's hard to get a read on it. There's also plenty of
people claiming that they were crucial to the effort.

This article seems pretty clear headed and makes the Nix quote sound like a
sales pitch:

[https://www.wired.com/story/what-did-cambridge-analytica-
rea...](https://www.wired.com/story/what-did-cambridge-analytica-really-do-
for-trumps-campaign/)

~~~
jessaustin
Victory has a thousand fathers...

------
tyu100
Beautiful article. The moral panic around social media is getting ridiculous,
and as mentioned in this article and elsewhere, there's very little evidence
that any of the C.A. targeting had any measurable effect on anything.

~~~
jessaustin
It is a moral panic, but since the likely outcome is fewer people using
Facebook, which is an awful blight on humanity, that's fine.

------
jklinger410
Considering how many different companies hate Facebook for stealing your
attention from them...this is long overdue.

Here's looking at you ISPs, Telcos, Ad Platforms, so-on. Your campaign is
working pretty well so far.

------
mdekkers
I stopped reading after _" Facebook feeds lit up with outraged Hillary Clinton
voters announcing that they were shutting down their accounts"_

Not because of my politics (non-american) but because that set the
intellectual level of the author. Life is too short to be reading this kind of
garbage

------
matt_s
Giving the visceral comments and opinions on Facebook, those that probably saw
ads were already committed to one candidate or another. There is rarely a
discussion on the internet where someone is convinced to switch to a different
candidate/party. I doubt an advertisement would get someone to switch.

However, if there were bots and trolls posting inflammatory content that
motivated voters that would have other wise stayed home - that could have
influenced turnout and an election. If those bots and trolls were funded by a
foreign government, then that is even more concerning.

I would like to see 'mainstream media' focus more on that part of it, this
Cambridge Analytica company sounds like they were really good at taking
campaign money.

------
bshastry
BTW, how does Google fare on these counts? I am sure they have as much data,
or perhaps more, on all of us.

------
notacoward
The references to Obama (and Cruz) are empty both-sides-ism, but then this is
McMegan. On the other hand, she might almost unintentionally have a point
about the need for people to feel that they've identified and fixed the single
root cause of a problem. We see that all the time in programming - bug fixes
and rewrites that are highly satisfying until the bug reappears and turns out
to have had an entirely different cause. Even if these things don't work in
practical terms, they have an important psychological effect of providing
closure. Seeking that might well be at least part of why this story has driven
even more important ones out of this news cycle.

------
supernumerary
I have writen about why we scape-goat Facebook here - basically we are trained
to be highly sceptical of illusions (cf. Plato's allegory of the cave):

[http://iain.land/posts/20170201-transitional-
object.html](http://iain.land/posts/20170201-transitional-object.html)

And this kind of scape-goating - throws the 'baby out with the bath-water' as
it were. Basically we need illusions and they effect how we all live.
Especially when we all agree on what illusions we want to share...

------
sandov
How can anyone read that website with all that crap around the text?

------
scardine
Oh, poor Mark! Such a patsy is the perfect scapegoat. /s

The company he founded reflects his work ethics.

Personally I don't care that much when the bully starts being bullied. You
reap what you sow.

~~~
hanspeter
This sentiment confuses me. Why do people dislike Zuckerberg by default? How
does it happen that anyone sees him as a bully?

~~~
908087
What does "dislike by default" mean? Are you implying that people don't
actually have reasons to dislike him based on the actions of himself and his
company through the years?

It's not like people just decided "I don't know who Mark Zuckerberg is yet,
but I despise him".

~~~
hanspeter
It seems that anything praiseworthy Zuckerberg does never generates praise. On
the other hand any opportunity to criticize him is always exercised.

------
blunte
"A new communications medium" ... "panic"...?

Since when is Facebook a new communciation(s [sic]) medium?

Her word choices and her not so deft deflections make me almost wonder if this
is very subtle satire. The only other conclusion I can come up with is that
she's a Mercer or Koch shill.

The tactics employed with this CA/FB saga were far seedier and subversive than
just standard targeted advertising (and I believe she knows this).

What tripe.

------
knowThySelfx
[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5520303/Obama-
campai...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5520303/Obama-campaign-
director-reveals-Facebook-ALLOWED-data.html)

"'They were on our side': Obama campaign director reveals Facebook ALLOWED
them to mine American users' profiles in 2012 because they were supportive of
the Democrats"

Is this news in the USA?

~~~
phronese
I quick scan through the news search engine finds that almost exclusively
right wing sources publish on this. Be critical about such news articles.

~~~
knowThySelfx
So what about left wing published news? Automatically becomes legit? By the
way, I didn't know that site was right or left.

~~~
skocznymroczny
"Independent" "fact-checkers" will make sure of that.

~~~
jessaustin
They've thought of _everything!_

------
AndrewKemendo
This is probably the most even keeled and concise analysis of this story to
date, with a reasonable laymans exposition on the technical subtlety between
what CA did starting in 2013 and what the Obama Administration did in 2012.

Not sure that it's a perfectly direct line between [Trump won] > (Facebook is
to blame), because the story seems to be mostly about user data, but it's
pretty close.

------
zxcb1
Advertising and propaganda are basically the same thing. It is reasonable to
believe that if one works, the other does too. They are tools to shape
preferences, question is how they have been used and will be.

------
NiklasMort
as always way too late

the people with the tinfoil hats predicted all this in the 90s but nobody was
listening (except "THEM")

------
yohann305
I saw it coming a few months ago. Didn't you? There is a group of
people/organizations acting as puppet masters, dictating what's going to be
the next big topic. This is a lot more scarier than the FB story itself. It
would be great if someone starts digging it out and uncover what's really
happening, who are they and what their motives are.

Media started feeding us stories how social networks are "bad for you", then
slowly ramped up to give us the "piece de resistance": your soul (your data)
has been sold to the devil.

Come on, isn't anyone else seeing it?!

ps: we have been programmed to believe this is not happening so i won't be
surprised if this gets down-voted by the sheeple...

ps#2: it might not be a group or organization but just the result of a poorly
built internet eco-system.

~~~
mcphage
> There is a group of people/organizations acting as puppet masters, dictating
> what's going to be the next big topic.

It’s almost like there’s a “trending news” sidebar that these shadowy people
added and put in whatever they feel like and whoops we’re talking about
Facebook again aren’t we?

~~~
yohann305
touché! You're bringing up a good point. It might actually not be someone, but
just a poorly built internet eco-system.

------
supernumerary
Our most trenchant and persistent criticism of Facebook has been rooted in a
skeptical view of its illusory component; one where illusory experience is
scapegoated as our fatal flaw to be subsequently exploited by Facebook’s evil
machinations. We view the net-worth of its board of directors as being
directly proportional to their malign influence in our society, pulling the
wool over our eyes with an addictive illusion while voraciously funneling our
private information into vast data-centers where AI is trained to new heights
of persuasiveness. In this view ‘The Filter Bubble’ and ‘Fake News’ can easily
be seen to be be mere effects of the following feedback loop:

User engages with material that matches their base desires, they are seduced
and enveloped by these illusions, and the illusory experience of having their
internal life seemingly manifest in the real world, this feels important to
them so they form groups on this basis, like the prisoners in Plato's allegory
of the cave. Facebook optimizes for engagement, presenting this user with more
specialized material, eventually this material detaches from reality
altogether. However this results in a skeptical cul-de-sac where the
meaningfulness of Facebook is ignored. Instead it is scapegoated so that we
can largely avoid taking responsibility for our actions. To refute these
claims Mark Zuckerberg has emphasised our agency in deciding what Facebook is
for and does. Regarding Fake News he has said:

> “I do think there is a certain profound lack of empathy in asserting that
> the only reason someone could have voted the way they did is they saw some
> fake news … If you believe that, then I don’t think you have internalized
> the message the Trump supporters are trying to send in this election.”

And regarding the Filter Bubble:

> “The research also shows something that is a little bit less inspiring,
> which is that we study not only people’s exposure in Newsfeed to content
> from different points of view, but then what people click on and engage
> with. By far the biggest filter in the system is not that the content isn’t
> there, [or] they don’t have friends who support the other candidate or are
> of another religion, [it’s that] you just don’t click on it. You actually
> tune it out when you see it. You have your world view. You go through, and I
> think that we would all be surprised how many things that don’t conform to
> our world view that we just tune out.”

Usefully Winnicott’s transitional object helps us out of the skeptical cul-de-
sac by foregrounding our agency in choosing our illusory experiences and
thereby restoring their hopeful character. It also matches Mark Zuckerberg’s
informed view on what happens on Facebook.

\- [http://iain.land/posts/20170201-transitional-
object.html](http://iain.land/posts/20170201-transitional-object.html)

