Agree with this. Regardless of the politics involved, this exchange seems pretty mundane in the grand scheme of corporate emails. Taking Bosworth at face value here, it sounds like both camps got the same advice, one acted on it in full, the other didn't, the party that did saw better results, and on top of that had a better ads/targeting strategy that maximized platform ROI. If we removed the political parties from this and made them two companies, I'm not sure HN would have much of an issue with its content.
I doubt the Clinton campaign could have had as much of an impact with the same strategy. The Republican Party is fortunate in that it has a limited number of constituents:
- white
- Christian
- rural
- guns
- lower and upper class
The upper class votes on taxes, so that is an easy one.
The rest are relatively easy to target.
The Democratic Party tries to capture everyone else, which is more people but hugely diverse. There’s hardly a single message (or single digit number of them) that resonates universally.
Identifying someone as Republican gives your clear signal for targeting if you want to get out the base, as Trump did.
Identifying someone as Democratic means they could care about a huge range of things, but you don’t know what.
I can understand why you would think this - or rather, why you'd want to think this - because it lets you lean really hard into the "Republicans dumb lol" trope. But just to pick two of your examples, there are plenty of establishment Republicans who are quick to vote for increased gun control, and at least a few establishment Democrats who need quite a bit of convincing to do so. One side is better than the other (which is which depends on which side you're on, of course), but I'd say it's 80/20 when the media presents it more like 95/5.
And I don't know what "low class" means but if you're referring to socioeconomic status that doesn't match what you said either. According to Pew the bottom quintile (<36k/yr) is about 60/35 Democrat. The top quintile (215k/yr+) is about 53/46. Upper-middle ($144-215k/yr) is the only one with a Republican edge, and the other two (36-48, 48-144) are within the margin of error to 50/50.
I think of all your examples you probably have the strongest case to make with "rural" but I've met plenty of rural Dems in my life.
> The Republican Party is fortunate in that it has a limited number of constituents:
That's not at all true. The biggest contradiction is on trade. The "business" faction is against tariffs, but the worker base was for it. Same for immigration. Business is generally for it, the worker base is against it.
>Just because this is worded ambiguously, to clarify the "they" is Facebook. CA on the other hand was effectively the Trump's digital ad campaign.
Given that "cambridge analytica" wasn't even mentioned in my comment, and "facebook" was the last subject mentioned (ie. "facebook was ..."), I don't see how anyone could have interpreted "they" to mean cambridge analytica.
>This ignores that a lot of what made CA different is that they used microtargeting to discourage turnout via fake news stories.
What does this have to do with the email? Everything you mentioned was already known before this email was released. Is the complaint that boz didn't also tell zuckerberg "btw cambridge analytica works with conservatives are are super evil"?
>After CA's methods and actions became public, FB massively limited what you could do via their API.
Was the email sent before or after they locked down the API? Also, this feels like a nitpick, eg. suppose a mass shooter killed a bunch people with an assault rifle, and then the government banned assault rifles, it would still be correct to say "anyone could bought the weapons the mass shooter used", even though it wasn't true in the present.
It wouldn't be a stretch but only it the rest of the investigation didn't happen and we knew absolutely nothing else about Cambridge Analytica or Facebook. As that is not the reality we live in, you could read more about the case or not let you biases show so clearly.
I get your point but its hard not to look past the fact that only 1 of the 4 mentioned mediums have real time, user-personalized, opaque algorithmic endless scrolling, and a disproportionately higher rate of addiction.
Uhh, until recently, didn't those three undergo exactly the same kind of scrutiny and have had the regulations we are talking about here put in place for them?
Of course, all that existing regulation is being undone, thanks in part to TikTok, Facebook, etc.
>Uhh, until recently, didn't those three undergo exactly the same kind of scrutiny and have had the regulations we are talking about here put in place for them?
Newspapers were never regulated, with "the press" being specifically mentioned in the first amendment. Talk radio and broadcast TV were only regulated because the airwaves were a shared resource and therefore subject to government regulation. Cable news was never subject to the fairness doctrine.
The only restriction currently[1] in place on newspapers in the United States is that you cannot write libel i.e you cannot knowingly falsely write something that hurts another’s reputation. This is the same restriction as in verbal speech where you cannot say slander which is like libel but spoken.
[1] There have been other restrictions placed at various times but these other restrictions have over time been found to be contrary to the First Amendment.
I think it would be an inmensely naive and unnuanced take to look at this email and think that the truth is finally being revealed about CA.
What's going on is that this is a very early email, and it's being brought up during discovery on a current legal proceeding (and it's not necessarily the first time it's made public).
It's also clear to anyone that knows about the case that this isn't an accurate explanation of what Cambridge Analytica was doing and why it was causing concern. There's no mention of Facebook Apps unrelated to politics being used to collect user data, and there's no mention of the data being collected not only of the users that install these apps, but also their friends (which would lead to the revision of the Graph API and the implementation of minimum demographic controls).
So to me it reads like a document that Meta puts forward to prove that Zuckerberg:
- Had no idea at the time of what was going on
- Was making efforts to understand what was going on
I haven't checked which party used this document as an exhibit in an argument, although this might be available information, but I'd wager a guess that it will or has been used by Meta.
So if you are looking at this document as "the truth uncovered", I'd suggest to look for more nuance instead of easy answers.
Oh quit clutching your pearls, he was perfectly civil.
You're the one trying to downplay things we know weren't at all covered in full by these emails (and we've known that for quite a long time). And know about them since you're downplaying them in other comments in this thread (things like exploring the quizz apps and how Facebook knew CA had exploited the API since 2015, how CA initially said the data was for academic purposes, etc).
The latter part of your comment ("how far should we go, the invention of the printing press?") shows me you're not only crying about being corrected but being disingenuous to push a narrative based on lies. Since you're doubling down and running cover for Facebook/CA/Trump's campaign all over the thread it suggests there's more than plain stupidity and dishonesty as motives.
>Oh quit clutching your pearls, he was perfectly civil.
I'm not criticizing him for not being "civil", I'm criticizing him for criticizing me for a failing that he himself is committing.
>You're the one trying to downplay things we know weren't at all covered in full by these emails (and we've known that for quite a long time). And know about them since you're downplaying them in other comments in this thread (things like exploring the quizz apps and how Facebook knew CA had exploited the API since 2015, how CA initially said the data was for academic purposes, etc).
>The latter part of your comment ("how far should we go, the invention of the printing press?") shows me you're not only crying about being corrected but being disingenuous to push a narrative based on lies. Since you're doubling down and running cover for Facebook/CA/Trump's campaign all over the thread it suggests there's more than plain stupidity and dishonesty as motives.
You can't seem to distinguish between me questioning the importance/implication of this email with me "downplaying" facebook or cambridge analytica's ill deeds, and unlike the parent commenter, are not being civil. I think most people got the first part, otherwise they would replied with "yeah, but facebook and cambridge analytica is still evil/destroys democracy because of all the other things we know".
"Cambridge Analytica then arranged an informed consent process for research in which several hundred thousand Facebook users would agree to complete a survey for payment that was only for academic use.[15][17] However, Facebook allowed this app not only to collect personal information from survey respondents but also from respondents' Facebook friends.[15] In this way, Cambridge Analytica acquired data from millions of Facebook users.[15]"
CA acquired access to the data of ~90 million users from the actions of several thousand other users whom they paid to fill out forms that stated they were for non-political use.
FB said data was private that they then shared with CA without user consent.
This was widely reported on, and people admitted to these behaviors. I am not sure an internal email is enough to rewrite history.
> If you read either my comment or the email, you'd know what the advice was.
I read both of these, and many of your recent comments seem to be some form of directed motivated reasoning or trolling, not sure.
