> I've been warning friends and family about this for years.
How did it work out? I tried the same too, but it was falling into deaf years. Most common response. "Sean beta (means son in hindi). You are being excessively paranoid. Facebook is a closed community, and I only share info with friends and family, so don't worry."
I've had mostly the same responses. My family has said I'm being overly paranoid. My liberal friends don't think anyone cares what they think. And my conservative friends are afraid of the NSA and the government, but fully support this kind of spying and data collection by private companies as long as their team wins.
> If Mr. Zuckerberg takes seriously his oft-stated commitments to diversity and openness, he must grapple honestly with the fact that Facebook is no longer just a social network. It’s an advertising medium that’s now dangerously easy to weaponize.
The story is chilling. It more or less proves that Trump campaign and the Billionaire Republican donor who owns the Data Analytics site used Facebook to profile people and send targeted "fear" stories to them and swing the vote away from Clinton.
I'm not sure how the Dem's will compete with this going forward. Maybe it will become taboo and they won't have to. Maybe they already are.. I hope they don't go too deep into the mud on this.
It's almost impressive though how well the Republicans, and Trump specifically, are employing these, IMHO shady, tactics.
Is it scandalous how little scandal is made of all this(the FUD, populist rhetoric, phycological manipulation, etc)? I can imagine how this would be spun if "evil Hillary" was found to be targeting people with "dark posts".
It's not as if Donald Trump, or anyone else invented this tactic in 2016, or even the 21st century. Mass media has manufactured consent with those tools for as long as there has been a mass media. William Randolph Hearst was a master of it over 100 years ago. This is a subject that very few in the media are willing to report on, because it would delegitimize the media itself.
Even if there was a media outlet willing to destroy their reputation and business, good luck convincing human beings that they've been conditioned to behave as they do through media messaging. Brainwashing is Hollywood scifi mumbojumbo, not a scientific explanation for why basic training produces a uniform level of discipline in the military, or why millions of people pay for the privilege of inhaling carcinogens.
To top it off, I am well aware of how tinfoil the preceding two paragraphs must sound.
Google's Eric Schmidt proposed a plan similar to this (though in more ambiguous terms) back in 2014, sharing a draft with Cheryl Mills that was forwarded to the Clinton braintrust (John Podesta, Robby Mook and David Plouffe) and subsequently released by Wikileaks[0]. The use of quizzes as a front detailed in OP's article is especially insidious, but the idea of individually targeting voters with "stories" in such a manner was clearly in play. Whether they followed through with it or not, it seems naive to think they won't do something similar in the future now that Cambridge Analytica has been shown to have been so effective.
Obviously, this is not identical, but many of the same principles are in play. You can argue around the edges of who understood exactly who was getting what data but I pretty much guarantee you the bulk of the people didn't know exactly what they had just done then, either.
I also do not mean this as a partisan attack, because everyone's gonna do it, and do it better every election cycle, until something major stops them. In 2012 it was widely believed the Republicans simply had no good digital ground game, so I can't really link you to articles about theirs, or I would. And I'm having a hard time imagining what will stop this, short of total internet collapse.
I agree. However using the same methods in this election, 'establishment' Hillary would have probably come across as big brother-esque whereas Trump as more of a 'new awareness' message to some targeted users (fitting his rhetoric). Surely not in all cases but perhaps notable enough.
I think the fact that the Dems ran Clinton despite more support in key demos for Bernie shows that as of right now they aren't very interested in following data if it conflicts with their other agendas.
If this trend continues and extends down to congressional elections, etc. for both parties as it is now (Republicans ready to follow data to build campaigns, Democrats playing out of an opaque narrative), this could spell bad news for the future of the American Democratic party.
It's funny because people were playing this exact card during the 2012 election due to Obama's tech-savvy reëlection effort. A lot can change in four years.
That you are repeating this all over the thread doesn't make it a fact.
Sure, if you start with the lens that everything is controlled behind the scenes by shady billionaire puppet masters, then this fits in with that view. But that's just how all the other conspiracy theorists do it, too: hold fast to a predetermined conclusion, highlighting whatever situations you can grab ahold of that look like they fit.
How is this different from "everything Trump is doing is an evil Russian conspiracy" claim that most media seems to be pushing these days? E.g. check out the front page of r/politics. I'm sure Trump will suck or fail in many ways (as all elected leaders do), but we've long time ago lost objectivity.
Chilling. In fact, you could say it was a "fear" story.
All it's missing is the billionaire pulling the strings - except if you look at the tag line at the end you see it was written by someone who is an Open Society Fellow.
You know, those fellowships from the Open Society Foundation that are funded by Billionaire Democrat donor George Soros.
Did this article make you feel any negativity towards Trump and the Republicans?
If so, then for Soros, this was money on dark articles well spent.
Swaying votes away from one's opponents is the definition of running for office.
Back in 2008 the Obama campaign ran a very successful information shop and was widely lauded for it; why is it now chilling when a different candidate does the same thing?
> APIful is a blog dedicated to topics in web APIs and API based web services. Join us on moving the internet forward with APIs!
Not trolling, but seriously wondering what APIful.io's value proposition is. Home page is confusing and after stumbling around a bit, it looks like they crawl API usage on github and stackoverflow questions on those API.
How would a full-stack engineer like me use the site, and for what purpose / value? Also, their about page list over 10 people. How is the site monetized??
API Harmony is a research prototype we develop here at IBM Research. Using it, we explore things like mining API specifications, static code analysis of web API requests, or API recommendation. Some of this research shows directly in API Harmony (with sometimes good, sometimes fair, and sometimes rather poor results, admittedly), and others are disseminated as more fundamental research results (like our static analysis of web API requests, which made it to the International Conference on Software Engineering this year).
APIful.io is a blog about our work, within API Harmony and beyond. We use it to expose our results and (hopefully) foster discussions.
> Every year there's a study that contradicts the last one.
That's from Astroturfing by <_INSERT_INDUSTRY_LOBBY_NAME_HERE_>
Every time a real study with facts comes out saying X_____ is bad for you, the Corporations and Special Interest Lobbyists working on behalf of X____ will astroturf the media with "No really, X____ is good for you"
X_____ = Coffee, Diary, Wine, Eggs, Wheat, Soy, Stevia, ..... you get the idea.
> Smoking is going out of fashion pretty fast in USA too.
Source?
Yes, Smoking traditional tobacco is going out of fashion pretty much around the world. It's been replaced by the increasing popular E-Cigarrettes / "Vaping", which is also Tobacco and poses the same health risks as traditional tobacco.
Especially very prevalent among-st Teenagers and young people. Heavily marketed by Big Tobacco as "Safe".
>E-Cigarrettes / "Vaping", which is also Tobacco and poses the same health risks as traditional tobacco.
This is wrong, and absolutely harmful information to spread. Cigarette smoking causes cancer through burning tobacco plant matter, a process that releases a variety of toxic chemicals. Vaporization of e-liquid does not burn tobacco plant matter, and thus doesn't have the same issues.
E-liquid is basically nicotine, glycerol and/or proplyene glycol solute, and flavoring. Nicotine replacement products aren't associated with cancer risk. The solute is much the same stuff as in asthma inhalers. There isn't really good research for the flavoring, but it's generally ingredients that are recognized as safe to put in food.
Overall, vaping is likely at least an order of magnitude safer than smoking. Probably two. That's not anywhere near "the same health risks as traditional tobacco." I'm personally more worried about spending lots of time near busy roads. If a policy causes X more people to vape per person that no longer smokes, X would have to be at least 100 for me to think it's a net negative.
Nicotine replacement products aren't associated with cancer risk
There is evidence that Nicotine replacement products do increase the risk of cancer. Every source I've read says that the risk is less than smoking cigarettes, but vaping (for example) is still an increased risk over not using nicotine at all.
Current NHS advice puts vaping at 95% less risk than smoking, which is to say an increased risk (5% of the smoking risk), compared to not vaping.
Yeah, the research on nicotine replacement products isn't very mature. The links you gave are interesting, but more along the lines of "nicotine can do the same sort of things to mouth cells that happens when you have mouth cancer", not "we took a look at X number of people and looked at mouth cancer incident rates".
The NHS advice is interesting, thanks for contributing it. It's a good sign that I'm on the right track - I put it at "one to two orders of magnitude", or to use the same units, 1% to 10% of the cancer risk of cigarettes. The NHS is likely biased towards saying things cause cancer (because incentives - nobody causes a ruckus if something they thought causes cancer is safe, but everyone gets way riled up if something the NHS thinks is safe causes cancer). So my updated belief is now that vaping causes less than 1% of the cancer that smoking does, per user.
Combine the two estimates at their most conservative, add a tad of fudge factor, and heavy vaping use will at worst cost you two months of healthy living. People regularly make worse tradeoffs than this - obesity, amount and recklessness of driving, playing professional American Football, and many others are likely worse.
Whether or not that counts as "safe" is up to you and your risk tolerance, of course. As a non-smoker, that's safe enough for me to try vaping to see if nicotine a stimulant worth using.
> poses the same health risks as traditional tobacco
I'm sorry, what? It may pose health risks, but I have not seen anything remotely resembling evidence it poses the same health risks as smoking or chewing.
I'm familiar with the idea of astroturfing. I majored in biochemistry. And while I haven't read the research, it seems fairly straight-forward.
Nicotine and some flavors are dissolved into food-safe glycerin.
Then that mixture is raised to a temperature where it becomes a gas, but not a temperature high enough for it to burn. Then it is inhaled.
If you compare that to smoking--- a cigarette actually _burns_, and during that oxidation process it'll make thousands upon thousands of variants of chemicals. And because they've been oxidized, they're more reactive.
I'm not saying vaping is safe. But I'm saying that it's obvious that it's safer than cigarettes.
You should also check out this. I am open to the idea that vaping might be _as bad_ as cigarettes, but currently the evidence shows that they're way better, and can be a good tool for quitting. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/e-cigarettes-around-95-le...
> I'm not saying vaping is safe. But I'm saying that it's obvious that it's safer than cigarettes.
Agreed. Saying something is 'safer' than something else, doesn't make the original thing 'Safe'. Vaping causes Cancer, so does Tobacco smoking. All of you are saying "Vaping is Safer because it isn't AS BAD AS smoking Tobacco". Agreed. But another way of saying is "We think Vaping is Safer because it causes Cancer in 20 years, whereas Tobacco smoking is will cause Cancer in 10 years"
