IMHO, that was the beginning of the deep troubles we are in right now, and cause of the political polarization. The brainwash was very effective, not only in the US, but also in Brazil.
Social media was definitely the start of that downfall. Yeah people used to spread misinformation longer before social media was a thing. But what Facebook changed was the way how misinformation could be targeted with surgical precision.
You can't expect that malicious actor would be fighting against malicious actors that are increase shareholder value. Tbh at this point it's governments fault. You can't expect British American Tobacco to fight against smoking. It's not really their job. Their job is increasing said shareholder value.
I'm not sure what the claim or charge would be. While I wouldn't feel comfortable participating in political campaigns for democracies of other countries, and I would feel defensive about attempts to influence elections in my country, in the end these 'attacks' rely on actual citizens to vote, so the citizen still holds the power and makes the final decision, so I don't think it's an issue of critical severity, and I don't think it's illegitimate to try to persuade citizens of another country to vote in such matter at a constitutional level (excluding specific laws), even if I personally would feel icky about it.
Now there may be other potential issues that would elevate the matter, if disinformation is used, or if personal information about citizens is obtained illegitimately, then they could constitute crimes in their own right. Whether the crime is aggravated by its intent to subvert the democratic institution would be a legitimate question, but without the accessory crimes, I don't think political campaigns from non citizen actors are themselves illegal, just icky.
>Now there may be other potential issues that would elevate the matter, if disinformation is used, or if personal information about citizens is obtained illegitimately, then they could constitute crimes in their own right.
Both of those happened. And are still happening.
This is algorithmic behaviour modification using sophisticated psychological priming that most people - including people who consider themselves educated and rational - have no defences against.
It very much was, and is, an issue of critical severity. CA and Nix specifically sold themselves as election fixers, but most people using FB would have been completely unware they were being influenced.
When I interviewed at Facebook in 2019, one interviewer was on an integrity team. I'm not sure if it was his take or what the org settled on, but it's that Cambridge Analytica wasn't Facebook's fault (users willingly granted access), but it was their problem. Not surprising some of the same techniques got used by others.
To argue that Facebook somehow magically tricks humans into voting against their will and overrides democracy is to argue that democracy itself inherently does not work.
It’s amazing that so many people don’t understand that.
It seems far harder to accept that people simply voted for trump because historical institutions had failed them so completely.
This would force the other party to recon with the failed parts of their platform. Which they still never have.
Before Trump they practiced on Brexit and the whole Leave.EU movement.
This link at best shows us Mark Zuckerberg playing his standard card of victim and faking (again) that he didn't know about anything, while all evidence point that he actively played a role in it.
Cambridge Analytica developed a database for The Trump campaign that classified 3.5 million Black Americans as “Deterrence”, used as audiences in FB advertising intended to discourage voting.
We know Cambridge Analytica weren’t afraid to subvert the core principle of democracy like that because we have documents from their campaigns in Trinidad and Tobago to do the same thing, presenting not voting as an act of youth rebellion with the aim of reducing turnout among young Black Trinidadians.
(Discouraging black people from voting seems to be a theme)
Sure, as Mark says, anyone with the voter data and capital could likely create that audience and run those ads, but anyone with integrity wouldn’t. The story is not about unbelievable sophistication, it’s about using the tools Facebook provided to subvert democracy.
Mark is right that they’re nothing special. But that doesn’t dismiss them, the fact that they’re nothing special is the scary part.
So what's the implication supposed to be? The obvious one is probably something like "facebook was undermining democracy and supporting Trump!", but a more careful reading reveals:
1. they apparently gave advice to both the clinton and trump campaign
2. the trump campaign did targeted marketing better (ie. targeting the base rather than the marginal voter)
3. "I'm skeptical that Cambridge Analytica has any data or expertise that couldn't be replicated readily by someone else"
Of course, you can still argue that facebook undermined democracy, by providing the marketing tools that allowed the trump campaign to effectively reach voters, but at what point can you blame a tool for the outcome of an election? Some say the mamdani effectively used tiktok to rally voters, so does that mean we should be up and arms about the mamdani campaign? How far back can we go? The invention of the printing press led to all sorts of partisan newspapers, was that anti-democratic?
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 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:
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.
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.
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.
There was that leaked video of a Cambridge Analytica exec bragging that they came up with the handcuffs in the Crooked Hillary meme. Except that was hardly a big thing. The phrase Crooked Hillary was arguably “linguistic killshot” by Trump; CA’s little riff on it was insignificant - and that was them trying to sell their services with their most impressive feats.
Yeah, I’d argue it shouldn’t have the (2017) added to it’s title, given that notation is supposed to be used when posting something which was published in the past, not something that simply occurred in the past.
They had a facebook app (disguised as a quiz) that scraped the profile data of the user using it, as well as their friends. It's the latter part that was considered shady, but it was all allowed by facebook. Moreover it's not too different than similar "growth hack" tactics that other startups use to this day, eg. linkedin scraping your contacts data. Their clients being right-wing didn't help, either.
counterpoint : animal rescues and shelters benefit greatly in getting adoptable animals before people scrolling, for super low cost to them, but of course because the scrolling people are seeing ads.
This was a fake scandal. "Democrats seem to like Harry Potter" is not some genius psychographic ad targeting strategy. The Cambridge Analytica people were selling snake oil
That said they did buy user data from a quiz app which is not really how you were supposed to use the Facebook Platform so that still wasn't really FB's fault I think
So the real issue was just people trying to blame the 2016 election (adverse to their interests if they were anti-Trump) on Zuck.
Heck to this day Ben Shapiro is one of the biggest podcasts and Tucker's show is even bigger than him so the right wing is a real force in American politics and not just propped up by FB's old newsfeed algo
Sorry that you were downvoted because you were 100% right. Cambridge Analytica is a fake scandal.
I'm an advertiser who has managed hundreds of millions of dollars for small startups and big corporations, brands, as well as a few small political campaigns.
Even at the time of the Trump election, the kind of targeting that Cambridge Analytica says they were offering through the personality quizzes was absolute garbage. There is a reason why the official response from Bosier doesn't even mention the personality quiz stuff, because it was essentially irrelevant to the Trump campaign's performance on paid advertising on Meta. And I would go further to say that, except for his success in fundraising, all of his Meta advertising probably didn't move that many votes.
Cambridge Analytica, the organization, of course, loves to claim that they're the dark evil viziers behind the Trump campaign and they've advertised themselves as such to dictators all over the world. But that's just like Edward Bernays writing "Propaganda" back in the day, it is a way to sell their services.
Not to mention, the only reason that Cambridge Analytica had that open graph information available is because communities like Hacker News begged again and again for Facebook to open the graph and not have a walled web. After that they cut off that graph access.
From: Mark Zuckerberg
Sent: Monday, January 30, 2017 8:10:16 AM
Subject: Cambridge Analytica
I'm seeing more articles like this one come out claiming the Trump's campaign used FB and analytics in very precise ways that go beyond
what others have done before:
I can't tell how much of this is just a dramatic telling the best practices of marketing today seen through the lens of survivorship bias, or how much of what they're done is truly novel and
interesting work, at least in the field of politics.
Can someone explain to me what they actually did from an analytics and ads perspective, and
how advanced it actually was?
From: Andrew Bosworth
Sent: Monday, January 30, 2017 9:58:03 AM
Subject: Re: Cambridge Analytica
My general understanding is the Trump campaign
actually took all the advice we gave unlike Hillary. They used all our tools. That *is* surprisingly novel as most advertisers have a "way of doing things" and are slow to adapt but speaks more of
our platform than CA. A few examples:
- They ran tens of thousands of creatives and iterated quickly to find what was working, further sub segmenting audiences (using custom audiences) based on
response.
- They used different formats early but found video was most effective so were using
that primarily by the end (90+%)
- They were primarily fundraising on Facebook, which means rallying the base instead of trying to win over marginal voters. That was an effective strategy that lead to very low CPMs and makes iterating to find market fiit for your message much easier. The rumor is that they turned tens of millions spent on FB into hundreds of millions for the campaign, which they spent
elsewhere.
I've heard separately that their entire electoral strategy was to rally the base rather than send a broadly appealing message. Few marketers are interested in doing that so it stands to reason
they would have unusual results.
Net net, my guess is that CA did have to do some interesting work to quickly take results from campaigns and spin them into the next, and the campaign had to do some interesting work to generate so much creative, but I'm skeptical that Cambridge Analytica has any data or expertise that couldn't be replicated readily by someone else. I'm suspect we will find that the majority of the advantage was using our platform to the
fullest.
boz
[This document is from In re Facebook, Inc. Securities Litigation (2026).]
Social media was definitely the start of that downfall. Yeah people used to spread misinformation longer before social media was a thing. But what Facebook changed was the way how misinformation could be targeted with surgical precision.
Now there may be other potential issues that would elevate the matter, if disinformation is used, or if personal information about citizens is obtained illegitimately, then they could constitute crimes in their own right. Whether the crime is aggravated by its intent to subvert the democratic institution would be a legitimate question, but without the accessory crimes, I don't think political campaigns from non citizen actors are themselves illegal, just icky.
Both of those happened. And are still happening.
This is algorithmic behaviour modification using sophisticated psychological priming that most people - including people who consider themselves educated and rational - have no defences against.
It very much was, and is, an issue of critical severity. CA and Nix specifically sold themselves as election fixers, but most people using FB would have been completely unware they were being influenced.
It’s amazing that so many people don’t understand that.
It seems far harder to accept that people simply voted for trump because historical institutions had failed them so completely.
This would force the other party to recon with the failed parts of their platform. Which they still never have.
This link at best shows us Mark Zuckerberg playing his standard card of victim and faking (again) that he didn't know about anything, while all evidence point that he actively played a role in it.
It looks like we only have access to this now? If yes, this would be development and I’d remove the “2017” from the title.
We know Cambridge Analytica weren’t afraid to subvert the core principle of democracy like that because we have documents from their campaigns in Trinidad and Tobago to do the same thing, presenting not voting as an act of youth rebellion with the aim of reducing turnout among young Black Trinidadians.
(Discouraging black people from voting seems to be a theme)
Sure, as Mark says, anyone with the voter data and capital could likely create that audience and run those ads, but anyone with integrity wouldn’t. The story is not about unbelievable sophistication, it’s about using the tools Facebook provided to subvert democracy.
Mark is right that they’re nothing special. But that doesn’t dismiss them, the fact that they’re nothing special is the scary part.
1. they apparently gave advice to both the clinton and trump campaign
2. the trump campaign did targeted marketing better (ie. targeting the base rather than the marginal voter)
3. "I'm skeptical that Cambridge Analytica has any data or expertise that couldn't be replicated readily by someone else"
Of course, you can still argue that facebook undermined democracy, by providing the marketing tools that allowed the trump campaign to effectively reach voters, but at what point can you blame a tool for the outcome of an election? Some say the mamdani effectively used tiktok to rally voters, so does that mean we should be up and arms about the mamdani campaign? How far back can we go? The invention of the printing press led to all sorts of partisan newspapers, was that anti-democratic?
- 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.
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.
… or swobu
said the french
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...
If that was the advice, it seems pretty terrible.
Where's the lie?
>If that was the advice, it seems pretty terrible.
If you read either my comment or the email, you'd know what the advice was.
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.
What was revealed that we didn't already know?
>I'd suggest to look for more nuance instead of easy answers.
Shouldn't you be looking for said answers and presenting them, instead of chastising me for not having the answers?
No, we should be up and arms about TikTok.
Of course, all that existing regulation is being undone, thanks in part to TikTok, Facebook, etc.
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.
Because it was shady, deception is deception.
Might be a challenge to some, but one can find out things if they pay enough attention to data.
That said they did buy user data from a quiz app which is not really how you were supposed to use the Facebook Platform so that still wasn't really FB's fault I think
So the real issue was just people trying to blame the 2016 election (adverse to their interests if they were anti-Trump) on Zuck.
Heck to this day Ben Shapiro is one of the biggest podcasts and Tucker's show is even bigger than him so the right wing is a real force in American politics and not just propped up by FB's old newsfeed algo
I'm an advertiser who has managed hundreds of millions of dollars for small startups and big corporations, brands, as well as a few small political campaigns.
Even at the time of the Trump election, the kind of targeting that Cambridge Analytica says they were offering through the personality quizzes was absolute garbage. There is a reason why the official response from Bosier doesn't even mention the personality quiz stuff, because it was essentially irrelevant to the Trump campaign's performance on paid advertising on Meta. And I would go further to say that, except for his success in fundraising, all of his Meta advertising probably didn't move that many votes.
Cambridge Analytica, the organization, of course, loves to claim that they're the dark evil viziers behind the Trump campaign and they've advertised themselves as such to dictators all over the world. But that's just like Edward Bernays writing "Propaganda" back in the day, it is a way to sell their services.
Not to mention, the only reason that Cambridge Analytica had that open graph information available is because communities like Hacker News begged again and again for Facebook to open the graph and not have a walled web. After that they cut off that graph access.
Whatever it was some amazing insight is irelevant!
https://motherboard.vice.com/read/big-data-cambridge-analyti...
I can't tell how much of this is just a dramatic telling the best practices of marketing today seen through the lens of survivorship bias, or how much of what they're done is truly novel and interesting work, at least in the field of politics.
Can someone explain to me what they actually did from an analytics and ads perspective, and how advanced it actually was?
My general understanding is the Trump campaign actually took all the advice we gave unlike Hillary. They used all our tools. That *is* surprisingly novel as most advertisers have a "way of doing things" and are slow to adapt but speaks more of our platform than CA. A few examples:- They ran tens of thousands of creatives and iterated quickly to find what was working, further sub segmenting audiences (using custom audiences) based on response.
- They used different formats early but found video was most effective so were using that primarily by the end (90+%)
- They were primarily fundraising on Facebook, which means rallying the base instead of trying to win over marginal voters. That was an effective strategy that lead to very low CPMs and makes iterating to find market fiit for your message much easier. The rumor is that they turned tens of millions spent on FB into hundreds of millions for the campaign, which they spent elsewhere.
I've heard separately that their entire electoral strategy was to rally the base rather than send a broadly appealing message. Few marketers are interested in doing that so it stands to reason they would have unusual results.
Net net, my guess is that CA did have to do some interesting work to quickly take results from campaigns and spin them into the next, and the campaign had to do some interesting work to generate so much creative, but I'm skeptical that Cambridge Analytica has any data or expertise that couldn't be replicated readily by someone else. I'm suspect we will find that the majority of the advantage was using our platform to the fullest.
boz
[This document is from In re Facebook, Inc. Securities Litigation (2026).]
A: Yo! did we do anything wrong?
B: No. someone else messed up. we're good.