"Here’s an ad targeted at voters who were deemed 'neurotic' by Cambridge Analytica’s methods."

From "These are the political ads Cambridge Analytica designed for you" (Quartz).

According to the OCEAN personality model, on which the company based its personality traits, “neuroticism” is a measurement of how much you tend to worry. Cambridge Analytica played to the anxious temperament of neurotic types in this ad by emphasizing the growing international risks and need for strong, stable leaders in the United States. The ad juxtaposed pictures of violent chaos, presumably overseas, with a picture of a young boy waving an American flag.

ADDED: How long before we targeted people see they think we're neurotic (or whatever) and hate them for it? (I'm neurotically afraid the answer is never.)

"Facebook has said it now believes up to 87 million people's data was improperly shared with the political consultancy Cambridge Analytica."

BBC reports.

The details were revealed in a blog by the tech firm's chief technology officer, Mike Schroepfer. It was published several hours after the US House Commerce Committee announced that Facebook's founder, Mark Zuckerberg, would testify before it on 11 April.

"The political action committee founded by John R. Bolton, President Trump’s incoming national security adviser, was one of the earliest customers of Cambridge Analytica...."

"... which it hired specifically to develop psychological profiles of voters with data harvested from tens of millions of Facebook profiles, according to former Cambridge employees and company documents.... The contract broadly describes the services to be delivered by Cambridge as 'behavioral microtargeting with psychographic messaging.'... 'The Bolton PAC was obsessed with how America was becoming limp wristed and spineless and it wanted research and messaging for national security issues,” [said Christopher Wylie, a data expert who was part of the team that founded Cambridge Analytica]. 'That really meant making people more militaristic in their worldview,' he added. 'That’s what they said they wanted, anyway.' Using the psychographic models, Cambridge helped design concepts for advertisements for candidates supported by Mr. Bolton’s PAC.... One advertisement, a video that was posted on YouTube, was aimed at people who scored high for conscientiousness, and were thought to respect hard work and experience. It emphasized Mr. Bolton’s time working for Ronald Reagan and how [a candidate] embodied the spirit and political ethos of the late president."

From "Bolton Was Early Beneficiary of Cambridge Analytica’s Facebook Data" (NYT).

"This is the first time that I've suspected that a WaPo editorial was driven by the interests of its owner and it's own business model rather than a stance on the merits."

A comment at the Washington Post editorial "Let’s take a deep breath about Facebook’s ‘breach of trust.'" (The editorial ends: "Facebook and others are under enormous pressure to behave more as publishers responsible for their content than as neutral platforms. They should not resist. Facebook faces a related set of questions about manipulation of the platform in the 2016 campaign... All of this should be pursued in the spirit of perfecting rules of the road to keep social networks free and open. In the end, they should remain what they are, great sharing machines.")

The owner of WaPo is Jeff Bezos, so what's his connection to Facebook? He's an investor in Facebook. I saw a comment (which I can't find anymore) that he lost billions when Facebook stock slid this week. Trying to research that factoid, I found this article from yesterday: "Jeff Bezos Is Now $40 Billion Richer Than Anyone Else on Earth."

But since the start of 2018, Jeff Bezos has seen his net worth skyrocket compared to his billionaire peers.... At the close of the stock market on Tuesday, the index estimated Jeff Bezos’ net worth at a whopping $132 billion. That’s thanks to Amazon’s stock price, which has jumped roughly 40% so far in 2018.... That’s obviously enough to make Bezos the world’s richest person. What’s particularly astounding is that no one else is even in the same ballpark as Amazon’s founder.

What do you think? Is he so rich it's stupid to think he cares what slant the piddling Washington Post takes in its editorials or is the Washington Post central to his machinations and part of why Amazon is up 40% in 2018?

If you go to the editorial urging gentle treatment of Facebook, you'll see, at the bottom, a list of additional Facebook related articles in WaPo:

Anne Applebaum: Does Cambridge Analytica have my data? I have no idea. That’s the problem.

Sandy Parakilas: I worked at Facebook. I know how Cambridge Analytica could have happened.

Jennifer Rubin: If Facebook isn’t forthcoming, voters might opt to ‘unfriend’ the network

Karen Tumulty: Maybe we should be thanking Facebook

The Post’s View: China’s intrusive, ubiquitous, scary surveillance technology

Does that all sound like gentle treatment of Facebook? Well, yeah, it kind of does.... especially since it leaves out an ungentle treatment of Facebook that's also currently in WaPo, "Yes, we should be outraged about Facebook" by E.J. Dionne.

Dionne writes: "We must decide when Facebook and comparable companies should be held accountable as public utilities." Notice how closely that tracks the line from the editorial I quoted in the first paragraph of this post: "Facebook and others are under enormous pressure to behave more as publishers responsible for their content than as neutral platforms. They should not resist."

Dionne continues: "And when do they look more like publishers who bear responsibility for the veracity of the 'information' they spread around?" Well, if they are publishers, then they have freedom of speech, which means they have less responsibility and can lie and distort and pass along private information (subject to very few legal limits) just like the Washington Post.

More Dionne: "We also need to confront conflicts between the public interest and the ways that social media companies make their profits. Where do privacy rights come in? Are they unduly blocking transparency about how political campaigns are conducted and who is financing them? Were they indifferent to their manipulation by foreign powers?" The questions he forgets/declines to ask: What about the freedom of speech of users of Facebook? Is Facebook unduly censoring speech based on political viewpoint?

(By the way, I hope some of you remember how vehemently I took the position (back in 2011) that free speech on Facebook matters even though Facebook is a private company. I had a big email debate about it with Bob Wright (after a Bloggingheads discussion). You can read that here.)

"'Utterly horrifying': ex-Facebook insider says covert data harvesting was routine/Sandy Parakilas says numerous companies deployed these techniques – likely affecting hundreds of millions of users – and that Facebook looked the other way."

The Guardian reports (and this is different insider from the one I quoted earlier today).

Sandy Parakilas, the platform operations manager at Facebook responsible for policing data breaches by third-party software developers between 2011 and 2012... [said] “My concerns were that all of the data that left Facebook servers to developers could not be monitored by Facebook, so we had no idea what developers were doing with the data” ... Parakilas said Facebook had terms of service and settings that “people didn’t read or understand” and the company did not use its enforcement mechanisms, including audits of external developers, to ensure data was not being misused....

“It has been painful watching,” he said. “Because I know that they could have prevented it.” Asked what kind of control Facebook had over the data given to outside developers, he replied: “Zero. Absolutely none. Once the data left Facebook servers there was not any control, and there was no insight into what was going on.”

Here's the earlier post: "'Facebook allowed the Obama campaign to access the personal data of users during the 2012 campaign because they supported the Democratic candidate...'"

And here's my post from 2 days ago, criticizing Facebook for making a narrow, legalistic argument Facebook... for itself." I said: "That's not going to work. We didn't give it to X. We gave it to Y who gave it to X. It's a laundering argument." And I recommended that Facebook fall back onto the argument that "It's good to use this data to facilitate communication, especially on topics of great public concern."

I'm still trying to get a grip on this story, but my orientation to it is that I'm skeptical that there was any "leak" or "breach" of security. It think Facebook did what it intended to do, but there's just some static over that choice because it became apparent that Mercer money had energized a right-wing use of the data.

ADDED: Bloomberg reports this morning that the Federal Trade Commission is investigating Facebook for possibly violating a consent decree:

Under the 2011 settlement, Facebook agreed to get user consent for certain changes to privacy settings as part of a settlement of federal charges that it deceived consumers and forced them to share more personal information than they intended. That complaint arose after the company changed some user settings without notifying its customers, according to an FTC statement at the time.

Did Facebook make changes that they didn't tell users about or did users just not "read or understand" what Facebook told them?

"Facebook allowed the Obama campaign to access the personal data of users during the 2012 campaign because they supported the Democratic candidate..."

"... according to a high ranking staffer. Carol Davidsen, who worked as the media director at Obama for America and has spoken about this in the past, explained on Twitter that she and her team were able to ingest massive amounts of information from the social network after getting permission from Facebook users to access their list of friends. 'Facebook was surprised we were able to suck out the whole social graph, but they didn't stop us once they realized that was what we were doing,' wrote Davidsen. Facebook allowed the Obama campaign to access the personal data of users during the 2012 campaign because they supported the Democratic candidate.... Davidsen posted this in the wake of the uproar over Cambridge Analytica, and their mining of information for the Trump campaign."

From "'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" (Daily Mail).

The day the rise of the robots ended?

1. "A woman in Tempe, Ariz., has died after being hit by a self-driving car operated by Uber.... The Uber vehicle was in autonomous mode with a human safety driver at the wheel when it struck the woman, who was crossing the street outside of a crosswalk.... Uber said it had suspended testing of its self-driving cars in Tempe, Pittsburgh, San Francisco and Toronto" (NYT).

2. "Facebook FB shares were suffering their worst day in more than five years as the social network came under fire for improperly managing user information when it revealed that a company with ties to the 2016 Trump campaign improperly kept data on an estimated 51.3 million Facebook users for years when it had been required to destroy the data. Facebook claims to have more than 2 billion active users" (MarketWatch).

3. ???

"Can we just say it? Facebook is evil. Its entire raison d'etre is the balkanization of communities and nations in pursuit of financial profit."

"It monetizes and sells the most intimate details of private human relationships. It conflates human friendship and sincerely political beliefs with unrestrained consumerism and campaigns of disinformation. Facebook revels in the glories of unrepentant and unrestrained narcissism. It captures us and seduces us and then uses us for its own very specific ends. It elevates the id and destroys the super-ego. It gives mendacious trolls the powers to usurp our democratic freedoms. Isn't it time for us to stand up as thinking, self aware citizens and just say no?"

That's the top-rated comment — with 2,200+ likes — at the NYT article "How Trump Consultants Exploited the Facebook Data of Millions."

This is my third post on the Facebook story. The other 2 posts are directly below this one, so try to aim you comment at the most apt post. I'm resisting the overheated fear of Facebook (even though I broke my own Facebook habit a month ago).

Let's look closely at the basis of this fear. The commenter says that the "the balkanization of communities" is a terrible thing to do — or is it just terrible if you make money doing it? You wouldn't say a car company is evil because its entire raison d'etre is the mobility of individuals in pursuit of financial profit. What's wrong with making a profit delivering something good?

So let's assume that the commenter thinks "the balkanization of communities" is evil. But why isn't it good to break up insular groups and give individuals new power to find others who think like them and share their goals? Why do you want people to stay put where they are, speaking within a preexisting set? Because the preexisting set of people is a "community" and the new set formed by new connections is  insincere or not really human or based in character flaws like narcissism? It's the counterpart to "fake news" — "fake community"?

But that assumption could be wrong, and it's good or neutral for people to be able to form new communities through very efficient on-line speech, but it's bad for a company to facilitate this process for profit. But why would that be? Do you need humanity in the mechanism of forming new communities for those new communities to be genuinely human? If your answer is yes, please observe that we are only talking here because Google gives us Blogger. And I have had people I know in my real-world community tell me they think the comments community I have here is evil.

"The information that Facebook holds on its users (at least 98 data points per user) is deeply revealing – including of their tastes, preferences, habits, sexuality, politics, hopes and fears."

"For political campaigners, this is the purest gold dust, because it enables messages to be precisely calibrated, and for this to be done at a scale that was unimaginable in the pre-internet era. In a breathtaking piece of corporate casuistry, Facebook claims that this data harvest was not really a data breach at all, because the researcher who opened the floodgates did so 'in a legitimate way and through the proper channels.' The problem, they say, was that the individual in question didn’t abide by the company’s rules because he passed the information on to third parties. A senior Facebook executive told MPs that while the non-breach might have garnered lots of data, 'it is not data that we have provided.'"

What a narrow, legalistic argument Facebook is making for itself! That's not going to work. We didn't give it to X. We gave it to Y who gave it to X. It's a laundering argument.

Facebook must have a substantive argument that they're choosing to hold in reserve: It's good to use this data to facilitate communication, especially on topics of great public concern.

The quote is from "The Observer view on how Facebook’s destructive ethos imperils democracy/Our revelations about the harvesting of users’ data show that Mark Zuckerberg’s all-powerful company has little sense of responsibility," an editorial in The Guardian that follows on a long piece of investigative journalism linked in the previous post. The editors express fear of the monsters of Silicon Valley, "where the mantra of 'creative destruction' has the status of religious dogma."

[Mark Zuckerberg] has been obliged to follow in the footsteps of the hero of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein – gradually forced to come to terms with the implications of the monster that he and his employees have created....

Shortly after Facebook became a public company, its founder famously exhorted his employees to “move fast and break things”. It was, of course, a hacker’s trope and, as such, touchingly innocent. What perhaps never occurred to Zuckerberg is that liberal democracy might be one of the things they break.

Can anyone explain why there is so much fear of targeted political advertising? If it's as dangerous as they act like they think then people are so weak-minded that democracy should be broken and we might as well let the machines take over.

Millions of us took that Facebook quiz myPersonality, that scored you on Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism and gave access to our Facebook profiles.

"Suddenly, there was a way of measuring personality traits across the population and correlating scores against Facebook 'likes' across millions of people.'... They had a lot of approaches from the security services,” a member of the [Cambridge University’s Psychometrics Centre] told me. 'There was one called You Are What You Like and it was demonstrated to the intelligence services. And it showed these odd patterns; that, for example, people who liked "I hate Israel" on Facebook also tended to like Nike shoes and KitKats. There are agencies that fund research on behalf of the intelligence services. And they were all over this research. That one was nicknamed Operation KitKat.' The defence and military establishment were the first to see the potential of the research... But when, in 2013, the first major paper was published, others saw this potential too, including [Christopher] Wylie. He had finished his degree and had started his PhD in fashion forecasting, and was thinking about the [UK] Lib Dems.... 'And I began looking at consumer and demographic data to see what united Lib Dem voters, because apart from bits of Wales and the Shetlands it’s weird, disparate regions. And what I found is there were no strong correlations. There was no signal in the data. And then I came across a paper about how personality traits could be a precursor to political behaviour, and it suddenly made sense. Liberalism is correlated with high openness and low conscientiousness, and when you think of Lib Dems they’re absent-minded professors and hippies. They’re the early adopters… they’re highly open to new ideas. And it just clicked all of a sudden.'"

From "The Cambridge Analytica Files/‘I made Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare tool’: meet the data war whistleblower/For more than a year we’ve been investigating Cambridge Analytica and its links to the Brexit Leave campaign in the UK and Team Trump in the US presidential election. Now, 28-year-old Christopher Wylie goes on the record to discuss his role in hijacking the profiles of millions of Facebook users in order to target the US electorate" (by Carole Cadwalladr in The Guardian).

Obviously from that title, there's a lot more to that article that the candy that jumped out at me. I invite you to think about this nefarious predation on the sweet gathering place that is Facebook.

There's also this about Wylie meeting Rebekah Mercer:

“She loved me. She was like, ‘Oh we need more of your type on our side!’”

Your type?

“The gays. She loved the gays. So did Steve [Bannon]. He saw us as early adopters. He figured, if you can get the gays on board, everyone else will follow. It’s why he was so into the whole Milo [Yiannopoulos] thing.”

I'm not sure if I ever took the myPersonality quiz, but I did once take a quiz based on those 5 personality traits that purported to tell you which U.S. President you're most like. Meade took it too. Both of us were most like Barack Obama, even though we had different results on 4 of the 5 qualities. I called bullshit on the test. But maybe things like this really are valuable and politicians could target their communications more squarely at people who would be receptive to them. Is that more frightening that the terribly crude sorting of people by political party? I've been favoring things that break up the old partisan boundaries, perhaps because I'm "above average on openness."

IN THE COMMENTS: Kevin says:

You don't need an accurate result to get people to hand over their data. In fact, the two results most likely for you to repost and ensnare others are probably the one that gives you smug satisfaction and the one you cannot believe could be true.

But only 40% of those who took the myPersonality test gave access to their Facebook profiles, so inspiring trust that this was a serious scholarly endeavor (connected to Cambridge University) was a crucial step in getting to the data. I don't think Facebook opens up the profiles routinely.