[HN Gopher] Something weird is happening on Facebook
___________________________________________________________________
Something weird is happening on Facebook
Author : incomplete
Score : 412 points
Date : 2021-09-27 18:19 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.politicalorphans.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.politicalorphans.com)
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| It doesn't really matter if these posts are intentionally being
| used to gather data, _someone 's_ gathering it.
|
| Cross-reference some of the security question posts like "first
| car" with large data leaks and you're bound to get some matches
| eventually. Scammers in some countries can live for years off of
| one good bank account hit, and many of them make a living just
| reselling the data before it even gets that far.
|
| We need some serious public education about freely sharing
| information on the internet. Like "this is your brain on drugs"
| nationwide PSA campaigns.
| giansegato wrote:
| I don't get it. What do these people would be doing with such
| data? Ok, they know that a certain Facebook account named John
| Doe is likely to be a male, between 40 and 50 years old, voted
| for Trump both in 16 and 20. So what? It's not like you can
| retarget said account through ads. I fail to see the purpose.
| spoonjim wrote:
| The Cambridge Analytica scandal shows exactly what you can do
| with this data.
|
| Targeted advertising lets you run a campaign that never could
| be run before... one where you appear to be something different
| to different people. If you were trying to seize control of
| three different warring groups, you could advertise to A,
| "We'll kill B and C!" , to B, "We'll kill A and C!" and to C,
| "We'll kill A and B!" which you couldn't do in a stump speech
| without people figuring out the ruse.
|
| By building a detailed psychological profile of individuals,
| you can build a model that allows you to tie their responses to
| these questions with the political messages they're susceptible
| to. Cambridge Analytica paid a few hundred thousand people to
| do a quiz where they shared their Facebook likes and answered
| questions about their personality. CA then used that to build a
| model that showed "People who live in Slidell, Louisiana and
| like Dodge Ram trucks will be most receptive to messages about
| illegal immigration and are generally supportive of state
| violence". Then they can run that ad to everyone in Slidell who
| likes Dodge Ram pickups.
| rscoots wrote:
| Why is targeted political messaging inherently immoral
| though?
|
| It seems the crux of the issue here is that people are being
| fooled into supplying data about themselves in a non-
| consentual manner.
|
| The former has been happening in politics forever and imo the
| latter has been every tech companies MO essentially for the
| last decade.
| bink wrote:
| In 2016 it was used to target these specific types of people
| with outrage. Get them riled up against their opponents and
| make them more likely to vote for your candidate or issues and
| more likely to spread your propaganda for you.
|
| AFAIK you absolutely can target (or could target) groups of
| people based on very specific criteria.
| akersten wrote:
| There is _extreme_ value in knowing who your most-prospective
| marks are. If you had a population of 1,000 people, and _had_
| to sell something (read: convince to vote a certain way) to 400
| of them, wouldn 't you like to know the subset of those people
| who are already predisposed to your position and just need a
| little more nudging with a narrowly-tailored meme , instead of
| making a dartboard attempt against all 1,000?
|
| That was the entire value-add of Cambridge Analytica , whose
| Facebook-API data-gathering loophole has now been replaced by
| just engaging suckers via the platform itself and a tiny bit of
| NLP/sentiment analysis.
| obelos wrote:
| I suspect there's also value in avoiding showing some forms
| of persuasive/propagandistic content to those who are
| unlikely to be amenable to it. This allows the content to
| circulate with less suppressive feedback from a target's
| peers.
| AlexAndScripts wrote:
| You can also avoid targeting people who already support
| you. Or, in the case of Cambridge Analytica's brexit
| manipulation, identify those who have never voted before
| (using hundreds of indicators) and introduce them to
| politics... Their first information being propaganda from
| the leave campaign.
| kube-system wrote:
| There's lots of stuff you can do with the data.
|
| The most obvious one: with the security question type stuff,
| you can take over other people's accounts.
|
| But collecting data about people is also useful if you're
| trying to spread an agenda. You can determine what types of
| messages resonate with an audience. You can group those people
| and target them separately -- not through ads, but through
| special interest accounts/groups. You can recruit people to
| amplify your message. You can even get people to act in real
| life, i.e.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency#Ralli...
|
| If you can identity, categorize, and influence the loudest
| voices, you can influence public discussion and opinion.
| x0x0 wrote:
| You can pull the data off of fb.
|
| FB's targeting tools go to some lengths to only allow you to
| target by dems on fb and associated properties. These
| questions, plus profile views, allow you to extract the
| information for external use. Eg selling a list of <fb id,
| first car, birth year, favorite color, pet name, etc> tuples.
| m0d0nne11 wrote:
| Is there some way to delete/filter/downvote click-bait header
| lines on HN like this one?
| throwawaymanbot wrote:
| Zuckerberg should be in an orange jumpsuit.
| tyingq wrote:
| My favorite is questions that appear to be roundabout ways to
| gather your password reset questions.
|
| Like _" Your stripper name is: Your Favorite Color + Name of Your
| First Dog!"_. Never fails to get tons of responses.
| okareaman wrote:
| My FB feed is lousy with these sorts of things. My family &
| friends seem to enjoy answering questions like "What was the
| first concert you attended?" I don't think it's for advertising
| purposes because I have not noticed any improvement in the
| accuracy of targeted ads. I don't think it's for political
| purposes because that is much easier to figure out without these
| oblique questions.
|
| One group who would benefit from detailed life style profiles are
| life insurance companies. More detail is better for setting
| accurate premiums while remaining competitive with other life
| insurance companies.
|
| Edit: I almost forgot to mention a really popular one I've seen a
| lot of lately: "Have you ever had a DUI ? I'll wait." It's
| unbelievable to me that people would answer this question, but it
| definitely something insurance companies would like to know
| because their records don't go that far back into the paper age.
| A lot of people answer something like "No, but I should have."
| void_mint wrote:
| > My FB feed is lousy with these sorts of things. My family &
| friends seem to enjoy answering questions like "What was the
| first concert you attended?" I don't think it's for advertising
| purposes because I have not noticed any improvement in the
| accuracy of targeted ads. I don't think it's for political
| purposes because that is much easier to figure out without
| these oblique questions.
|
| Hyper dystopian take: Gathering data to be able to create real-
| seeming narratives for fictional profiles to push political
| agendas.
| htrp wrote:
| > "What was the first concert you attended?"
|
| That's literally a security question for a bank password reset.
| okareaman wrote:
| That's not a good example, which is why I added the DUI
| question. I've noticed most of my friends have stopped
| answering security type questions as they've been warned.
| matsemann wrote:
| I've long wished for an opportunity to filter my feed, so that
| I only see what people post themselves. But I guess fb force
| these things down my throat because no one actually posts
| anything anymore, except big life events like weddings or
| announcing a child. So people would realize fb is dead when it
| comes to keeping in touch with friends and family.
| aembleton wrote:
| Train the algorithm! Just exit Facebook as soon as you
| encounter one of these.
| okareaman wrote:
| Facebook is dead as far as I'm concerned because I tested it.
| I quit all groups and unliked all pages. My feed just became
| ads and posts from friends. I have a couple of friends who
| like to post, but the vast majority don't post anything. It's
| a ghost town.
| silexia wrote:
| I shit down my Facebook recently after my interactions with
| it became unhealthy.
| emerged wrote:
| It's a pretty weird place these days. There are a few
| friends who get like 7 trillion likes if they post that
| their baby farted, but many many other friend posts have
| literally 0 or very few likes.
|
| At some point I stopped commenting or Liking any post which
| already has more than ~10 Likes or comments. In some sense
| it feels really strange to me that people bother to engage
| with content where their engagement is essentially
| invisible within the crowd.
| pytlicek wrote:
| Something weird is happening on Facebook for a long time :/
| Buvaz wrote:
| Its just me..collecting data to work out what will get my mom of
| her phone.
| whyenot wrote:
| It's becoming increasingly clear that social media needs to be
| more strictly regulated. How to do that in a free society is a
| difficult question. OTOH, if we take too long to figure this out,
| it may be too late. In fact, it may already be too late.
| jensensbutton wrote:
| What regulation would help here?
| pkamb wrote:
| > Yes, a question-post invites more engagement than a simple
| comment, but there's something else at work here.
|
| Is there?
|
| I've noticed wannabe influencers on Instagram including questions
| and polls with every one of their Stories. They're doing it to
| "juice the algorithm" by getting responses. That in turn
| theoretically gets them featured on the Explore Page or whatever.
| YouTubers do the same things, ending each video with a CTA
| question you should answer in the comments.
|
| The Facebook question pages that boomers answer seem to just be
| doing the same thing, attracting comments and interactions and
| thus boosting the page.
|
| The bigger question I have is why Facebook thinks _I_ would be
| interested in seeing in my timeline that my 68 year old aunt has
| answered "Freddy Mercury" to some question about the best
| musical act they've seen live.
| PerkinWarwick wrote:
| Is it possible to set up Facebook to only give you people you
| know or people you follow on your feed? I'd consider an account
| if that were true, with the appropriate personal filters on of
| course given the spying the company does.
|
| It's a totally sleazy company, but it actually provides a
| valuable service at the same time.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| I'm curious if the data harvested from this is skewed to older
| people, and more "naive" people. Most of my techie friends have
| uninstalled FB (like me), or rarely interact with it. And my
| smarter friends just don't interact with that kind of clickbait-y
| post.
|
| I wonder if marketing folks will even notice. Like Google
| Analytics, which is disproportionately blocked by smarter and
| more technical people. Marketers cheerfully ignore that, though.
| Will they even know that they're missing our data?
|
| Is the Venn diagram of FB enthusiastic data-donaters and people
| who don't block GA just a circle? If so, are public policies and
| corporate marketing strategies going to be designed to cater to
| them and not us?
| brap wrote:
| Speaking of weird things happening on Facebook... I see a lot of
| official artist pages (usually artists who have been pretty
| successful a few years ago but no longer are, mostly rappers for
| some reason) that post A LOT of random "memes" (mostly just stuff
| stolen from Reddit) that are completely unrelated to their work,
| usually with very clickbaity captions (tag a friend etc). When
| you go on their page it doesn't show up. Most comments seem to be
| from 2nd world countries (like my own). What's that about?
| md_ wrote:
| I'm confused. The premise of this post seems to be that this is
| some malicious attempt to deduce basic geographic data on
| Facebook users. But doesn't Facebook let you target ads based on
| such data already?
|
| Why would I not just pay Facebook directly for such targeting?
| deckar01 wrote:
| I believe the goal is to build a model that correlates public
| attributes that FB provides with hidden attributes learned from
| these probes. When the attacker is ready to target users
| matching specific hidden attributes, they can reverse the
| correlation into ranges of public attributes that FB will
| accept for targeting ad campaigns.
| mikey_p wrote:
| The implication is that comments on public posts could be
| scraped by a third party to build an off-FB psychographic
| profile, similar to how Cambridge Analytica tried to generate
| profiles for users by querying data through a third party
| Facebook app.
| bob229 wrote:
| Who gives a hoot. Only an absolute moron use social media
| cpr wrote:
| I stopped reading when the article repeated the thoroughly tired
| and debunked talking points about Russians stealing DNC server
| materials...
| jessaustin wrote:
| I was torn on this one. I do agree with you, in that, if we
| can't trust them on stuff that was obvious in June of 2017, how
| can we trust the "facts" we can't check? However, this is at
| least an _interesting_ hypothesis. The particulars are probably
| wrong, but all sorts of different parties might try
| "campaigns" like this for all sorts of different reasons.
| (Although GOP might not be my first suspect for dastardly
| clever schemes...)
|
| The most likely possibility seems that we have algorithms
| fooling algorithms with no humans in the loop. Sure, there
| might not be enough "real" (i.e. a real human purchasing a real
| product) revenue sloshing around here to make the whole effort
| worthwhile. However, there might be a poorly configured
| dashboard somewhere that makes it _appear_ as if that 's the
| case... Meanwhile FB laughs all the way to the bank.
| twic wrote:
| First comment:
|
| > Generally speaking, people should become more and more wary of
| memes.
|
| I suppose memes which explicitly attack other memes had to emerge
| at some point.
| pjdemers wrote:
| How many people choosing random answer would it take to muddy the
| data to the point it is useless?
| greenyoda wrote:
| > "Sure, that first post won't accurately predict your birth
| year..."
|
| Actually it would have, in 2019. 66 + 1953 = 2019, subtract your
| age, and you get your year of birth.
| Johnny555 wrote:
| I've been wondering what those posts are about, I keep seeing
| them in my feed, and they're always answered by the same 60+ year
| old relatives.
| ogn3rd wrote:
| Many of those questions are used as 2FA as well.
| Johnny555 wrote:
| Those I understand, but I'm wondering about the "What's your
| perfect fall day" or "How old were you when you got your
| first job" questions that don't seem like they'd yield
| answers to security questions.
| mikey_p wrote:
| It's not about security questions, the implication that the
| author doesn't make explicit is that "how old were you when
| you got your first job" probably says more about your
| economic well being and possibly your political leanings.
| rubicon33 wrote:
| Those are thrown in there to make the general asking of
| these types of questions considered normal.
| edoceo wrote:
| Magician calls that mis-direction.
| MikeTheGreat wrote:
| "What's your perfect fall day" does not strike me as a good
| security question
|
| "How old were you when you got your first job" actually
| does seem like a good security question for many people.
| You're unlikely to forget it, after a while not many other
| people will know it, and it's a single number (whole
| number, most likely) so it's easy for a computer to parse
| (and hard for you to mess up by leaving out / adding too
| much detail).
|
| Depending on what you respond to on social media, and
| depending on if you've got any accounts that use this as a
| security question, you might want to go back and force the
| account to use a new question ;)
| NineStarPoint wrote:
| The main issue I see with the "age of first job" question
| is that there aren't actually statistically that many
| likely answers to the question, especially if you have
| basic information on a person. Compare to make and model
| of first car, which has a lot of possible options and
| only slightly correlates to life situation.
| edoceo wrote:
| Make and Model of cars are used on credit verification in
| USA - like historical address, it's likely linked to some
| previous credit activity.
| mikey_p wrote:
| The author implies, but doesn't make explicit that they
| think things like "age when you got your first job" are
| more about inferring socioeconomic indicators about the
| individual than fishing for password clues.
|
| And honestly I bet age of first job probably is a decent
| indicator of certain economic factors.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| According to the article, anything related to your age or
| where you live is a pretty good indicator of what your
| voting preferences are. The article cites "90% accuracy" if
| your answers can be used to reasonably guess those facts.
|
| Additionally, if your profile is public (the default still,
| I believe) is made available when you comment, I'd guess
| there'd be follow-up scraping going on to collect more
| details that are then used in conjunction with whatever
| your response was.
| mooxie wrote:
| Well the article notes that some amount of user demographic
| info is revealed simply by interacting with the post,
| regardless of the information provided by the respondent.
|
| Secondly, this is almost like the email phishing paradox:
| to an educated user it seems like the number of people who
| respond with relevant information would be extremely low,
| but if the attempt costs you basically nothing and you get
| something useful 1% of the time, you're still winning.
|
| "My perfect fall day is my memory of Aunt June when we
| lived in Connecticut in the 70s, before she passed away."
| In itself something like that doesn't seem useful, but
| there's a good amount of information in there if someone
| can correlate it with other details about your life.
| tomcam wrote:
| 60 year-old here. Thanks, broseph!
| CosmicShadow wrote:
| Was just talking about this the other night with my wife and how
| we should just start our own group sharing these baiting
| questions to see how quickly and largely we can grow it.
| ___luigi wrote:
| Social platforms amplifies all of our human qualities, and our
| interaction habits. Since old ages, people were striving to seek
| attention and show their work [1] [2]. After reading this book
| [3] indistractable, I started to reflect on how our educational
| systems are not designed to prepare students to live in this
| digital age, yesterday it's FB, today it's TikTk and tomorrow
| there will be something else. FB is just one Pawn in this game.
|
| I know that siding with FB is one of these topics that are very
| controversial in HN, but I am not finding excuses for the
| practices of these companies, my point is that our kids will live
| in a different age than the one we lived in, educational systems
| should keep up with these challenges and find innovative way to
| prepare people to efficiently manage that.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu%27allaqat [2]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_of_ancient_Rome [3]:
| https://www.nirandfar.com/indistractable/
| jsnell wrote:
| With those comment counts, something dodgy is obviously
| happening.
|
| The interesting question here is whether Facebook is somehow
| accidentally amplifying it. Certainly it is not in Facebook's
| interest to allow this kind of data harvesting. If it hurts you
| to think that Facebook somehow isn't maximally evil, at least
| consider that this is data that could be only Facebook's.
| Allowing somebody else to harvest it is money straight out of
| Facebook's pocket.
|
| So, given FB should not be complicit, what mistake could they be
| making to allow the system to be haunted? The obvious guess is
| that they have a feedback loop in the ranking algorithm. It
| values comments very highly as a signal of good engagement, but
| they weren't prepared for "content" that is this good at
| eliciting low effort comments and have wide appeal
| demographically. As long as one of these reaches a critical mass,
| it'll be shown to tens or hundreds of millions of people just by
| any engagement feeding even more engagement.
|
| Is there anything less obvious?
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| It's absolutely in Facebook's interest to allow this kind of
| viral garbage. It feels like engagement, gives people a way to
| engage socially in seemingly harmless questions. (I'm not at
| all convinced these are some dastardly data gathering scheme -
| many of the viral questions don't have meaningful answers.)
|
| It would be so, so simple to stop these. Just de-prioritize
| posts with too many replies, or replies from people you don't
| know, or.. anything. The virality of these things sticks out
| like a sore thumb. Facebook is choosing to not stop them.
|
| Then again as we learned recently Facebook is choosing not to
| stop all sorts of things on their platform.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28512121
| jaywalk wrote:
| It has been this way for years, so it's definitely no accident.
| Posts that elicit more comments absolutely end up getting
| ranked higher by The Algorithm(tm).
| flatline wrote:
| They recently started showing friends' response comments first,
| so you can easily see those of your friends out of the 116,000
| replies. The rise of these in my feed seemed to correspond with
| this feature.
|
| Disclaimer, am infrequent FB user and this may have been around
| for longer than I realize.
| kodah wrote:
| > The interesting question here is whether Facebook is somehow
| accidentally amplifying it.
|
| > Certainly it is not in Facebook's interest to allow this kind
| of data harvesting
|
| Mark Zuckerberg has been quoted through leaked documents to be
| a strong purveyor of "engagement" at nearly all costs. I don't
| think giving Facebook the term "accidental" is appropriate
| anymore. Their desire for engagement trumps the health of their
| network. I'll dig through my favorited submissions for the WSJ
| article.
|
| Edit: That was easy: https://archive.md/GQFLq
|
| People are rarely motivated by evil, but they are motivated by
| opportunity to which an outcome can be perceived as pure evil
| by the people it affects most.
| taurath wrote:
| Engagement is a really dirty word to me nowadays - the
| attention economy comes with all sorts of really bad side
| effects. We've turned almost all conversations into an ad in
| order to sell more ads. It's you vs 100 people with a
| doctorate in psychology at any given time.
| termau wrote:
| Agreed. I've actively taken steps to combat it, only use my
| phone in black and white mode, and removed all apps. Stick
| to my PC for general browsing and my phone use as gone down
| to 30 minutes a day (mostly calls, messages with the wife,
| and email).
| captainmuon wrote:
| I always thought that FB is somewhat complicit (not out of
| evilness necessarily).
|
| I see a lot of "viral" posts - some like those mentioned in the
| article, but also a ton of odd woodworking, cooking, and "resin
| art" videos. The videos are quite repetitive and not really
| interesting so I wonder if they are maybe hidden ads, but they
| are not marked as such, and it is not clear what they are
| selling. (Well maybe they are trying to sell resin, which is
| really expensive.)
|
| Anyway, it seems like they are different kinds of posts on FB.
| Some stay close to their point of origin, and only rarely get
| shown to other people who have not liked a page or are friends
| themselves. And other posts which, if somebody commented on or
| interacted in any way with them, get shown to their friends and
| friends-of-friends.
|
| After running a charitable cause / political FB page for a
| while, I'm convinced that internally there are actually
| different categories of posts - ones that are shown to
| followers, and ones that are allowed to float or go viral. I
| really wonder what the mechanism is to get into the floating
| category. It doesn't seem to be based on quality, nor on money
| spent. Maybe it is some interaction metric that somebody
| learned to game?
| xg15 wrote:
| > _I see a lot of "viral" posts - some like those mentioned
| in the article, but also a ton of odd woodworking, cooking,
| and "resin art" videos. The videos are quite repetitive and
| not really interesting so I wonder if they are maybe hidden
| ads, but they are not marked as such, and it is not clear
| what they are selling._
|
| As someone who got caught up in some of those videos when I
| was in complete "mindlessly browse facebook" mode, my guess
| would be they are optimized for "engagement", nothing more,
| nothing less. They are just interesting enough that you want
| to know how the end result looks while harmless enough to
| appeal to a maximally broad audience.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| How are the people making the videos making money though,
| or why are they doing it if not?
| machinerychorus wrote:
| It's still possible to share things just for the sake of
| sharing
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Have you seen these videos? I agree they look like they
| have been "optimized for engagement"... I guess someone
| could be doing that just for fun, that's your theory?
| taurath wrote:
| Engagement is just second order advertising, because it makes
| people spend more time on the ad platform.
| NineStarPoint wrote:
| A quick point I'd make is that it may not be a mistake (from
| facebooks perspective) to allow others to exploit a given
| system as long as they're gaining enough value from it to
| outweigh that. If whatever is being exploited doubles how much
| they can charge for ads, they might accept some of their data
| being stolen until they could find a way to have their cake and
| eat it too.
| cratermoon wrote:
| > The interesting question here is whether Facebook is somehow
| accidentally amplifying it.
|
| Someone somewhere found a way to exploit what FB's engagement
| metrics do. Is it 'accidental' that FB amplifies things if
| their system is designed to do exactly what it does when gamed?
| jensensbutton wrote:
| Isn't the obvious answer to stop scraping (or, at least try)?
| The author states that the value here is collecting data (not
| money from ads or something) and Facebook's APIs don't allow
| for the kind of analysis they'd need to build profiles. Article
| specifically talks about using Python to scrape profiles
| (presumably using a logged in account).
| Gollapalli wrote:
| Cambridge Analytica style targeted political messaging, and
| retailoring of political formulae to personality/moral-
| foundations/IQ profiles, in order to create coalitions is the
| future of political messaging and activism. In many ways, now
| that the gameboard has changed so drastically, it's unavoidable.
|
| This is how politics works now. It's not (just) Russia, or China,
| it's every political activism group or lobby that wants to
| achieve anything. Welcome to the new age.
| engineer_22 wrote:
| no different than it used to be, just more sophisticated.
| Gollapalli wrote:
| I think there is a qualitative difference.
|
| Previous means of influencing politics involved NGO's and
| political parties actively working different demographics in
| order to get them to vote in the organization's interest.
| These organizations may loosely be considered managerial
| bureaucracies, whether they are labor unions, or activist
| NGO's, or political parties. Even large scale media campaigns
| conducted via mass psychology are essentially managerial or
| bureaucratic in nature, using mass organizations at a large
| scale.
|
| The new means of manufacturing consent are not in this
| character. Rather than acting directly on mass groups using
| mass organizations, they operate by directly targeting
| individuals and niche groups leveraging algorithms and
| digital means. It's different paradigm: mass vs niche, mass
| media vs targeted media, mass psychology vs individual
| psychological profiling, large bureaucratic organizations vs
| smaller technologically enabled teams, the management of
| people vs the management of algorithms.
|
| It's two different approaches to power, and hence, two
| different elite groups. And when you have two different elite
| groups, you have conflict. It's a new world, a revolution in
| the making.
| jollybean wrote:
| I wonder if it's even worth pondering the various kinds of
| dumpster fires that happen there?
|
| It's like we're caught watching a tornado hit a garbage pile ...
| while the 'exit' sign is clear for all of us to follow if we
| want.
|
| I think the answer to all questions Facebook-related is 'delete'
| / 'exit' / 'log off' and then to go ahead to Spotify and listen
| to some Ahad Jamal from 40 years ago to put it in context.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| Off topic: I hadn't listened to Ahmad Jamal in years until a
| couple months ago, and he was a genius. So much creativity,
| with no sacrifice of lyricism, and an amazing way with silence.
| throwawaywindev wrote:
| Those look like phishing for answers to account security
| questions.
| ergot_vacation wrote:
| "Oh no the Skinner box we built to exploit and manipulate people
| is being used to exploit and manipulate people!"
|
| "But why is that-"
|
| "Because OTHER people are doing it!"
|
| "Oh no!"
| sk2020 wrote:
| That the author is peddling the absurd "Russians hacked muh
| servers" popular myth makes the comment all the more poignant.
|
| Social networks tolerate fake traffic because it increases
| their perceived value. The real crime is the fictive usage and
| engagement metrics they use to set ad pricing.
| Kiro wrote:
| Facebook is not ohnoing anything here. In fact, I wouldn't be
| surprised if their algorithm boosts posts encouraging this kind
| of low-effort engagement.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Yeah. Other parties get data, FB gets cold hard cash. I bet
| they're quite happy with those terms.
| xenihn wrote:
| Not sure if AsianHustleNetwork (AHN) really falls into what's
| being described in this article, but it's one of the more
| insidious FB communities I've run across, in terms of members
| being milked for affiliate revenue.
|
| The content is overall wholesome and useful, but I'm assuming
| most members (both contributers and passive viewers/clickers)
| don't realize that they're lining the owners' pockets with their
| clickthroughs, along with whatever personal data is being
| collected through Facebook.
| madrox wrote:
| This could be more benign than the article makes it out to be.
| Growing a content business in 2021 requires you to understand
| Facebook's algorithms and what will get your post amplified.
| Instagram famously only shows your posts to 10% of your followers
| by default [1]. The trigger points for your post to reach wider
| require certain engagement quotas, and if you're designing your
| post to get more comments then it'll hit them faster. Often
| accounts do these kinds of posts because their profile is about
| selling a single thing (like a book they wrote) or are
| dropshipping and focused on the marketing side. The real thing
| they want to get in front of users is the link in their bio.
|
| I think the real issue here is that it's impossible to tell the
| benign from the malignant. Is that cute mom blog going to start
| hawking ivermectin? What is my comment revealing about me that I
| don't authorize? There's no Better Business Bureau for Facebook
| pages. Maybe there should be.
|
| 1. https://www.thelovelyescapist.com/2018-instagram-algorithm/
| vidanay wrote:
| Facebook...Nuke it from orbit.
| aasasd wrote:
| 1.4 million comments on a single post? Holy crap! I was
| previously wondering on Reddit, what kind of vapid self-
| importance compels people to comment in threads that already have
| over 100-200 comments--when new ones go straight to the bottom
| and no one sees them afterwards. But this is on scale of some
| mental illness, unless I seriously misunderstand something about
| Facebook comments.
| the_arun wrote:
| It is mindblowing to see so many people socially active!
| hoten wrote:
| I wouldn't consider engaging in FB comment threads to be
| social nor active.
| pkamb wrote:
| Don't worry - their comment response to the meme page is
| annoyingly broadcast into the timeline of every one of their
| friends.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| From what I see, people tend to tag their friends in these
| massive threads.
| SPascareli13 wrote:
| Your friends will see your comment in fb, so there is an
| incentive to comment even when there is already millions of
| other comments.
| Jorengarenar wrote:
| >I was previously wondering on Reddit, what kind of vapid self-
| importance compels people to comment in threads that already
| have over 100-200 comments--when new ones go straight to the
| bottom and no one sees them afterwards.
|
| It works in similar way as here. The post have 145 comments
| (right now) and yet I'm adding another one.
| strulovich wrote:
| Facebook shows comments from your friends highlighted in your
| feed.
|
| So if one of your friends comments with the one millionth
| comment, you can end up seeing the post and your friend's
| comment In your feed. So while no one can read all comments -
| your friends are likely to see yours.
| cmg wrote:
| I've seen a lot of this recently, both on the types of posts
| in the article and on the posts of controversial / extremist
| right-wing politicians like MTG.
| HaloZero wrote:
| And then y'all can communicate in thread too. So it's a
| little microcosm.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| My guess: on FB, it steers your post to your friends, so you
| aren't talking to the 1.4M so much as chatting with your
| friends about a meme that 1.4M people are also chatting with
| their friends about.
|
| Just a guess, though. I don't actually FB.
| dbtc wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placing_notes_in_the_Western_W...
| CosmicShadow wrote:
| The same type of people answer these as the people who get an
| email from Amazon or Home Depot about a product they bought with
| a question like "What are the dimensions" and they answer "I
| don't know".
|
| And for all time, everyone else is like WTF did you even answer
| the question if you don't know, it's not like your friend asked
| you in person, and that is the story of 80% of Q&A's on every
| product. *SIDE RANT OVER!
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| The emails Amazon sends (or used to send) to randomly selected
| prior purchasers of a product when there's a new unanswered
| question have a subject line along the lines of "David is
| asking you if xxx, can you help him?"
|
| They're deliberately made to look like personal appeals to the
| individual specifically, and I don't blame people for not
| understanding that it's disgusting growth/engagement hacking.
| bondarchuk wrote:
| > _This multi-billion dollar industry has to be getting revenue
| somewhere else._
|
| Wait, how do they know this is a multi-billion dollar industry in
| the first place?
| Lammy wrote:
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/693438/affiliate-marketi...
| badkitty99 wrote:
| The 90's called and wants their chainmail back
| th0ma5 wrote:
| Probably mapping spread vectors.
| uptownfunk wrote:
| does that mean trying to understand how "virality" spreads?
| arbuge wrote:
| Just a note for those of you who were confused like I was upon
| reading this article: the author seems to be using the term
| "affiliate networks" in an unusual way - they're calling Facebook
| pages with some kind of commercial relationship between them
| "nodes" in an "affiliate network".
|
| The commonly accepted usage is:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affiliate_network
| cratermoon wrote:
| I think the author's description is a completely accurate
| description of affiliate networks. The fact the the commercial
| relationship results in "likes" or "influence" for the
| affiliates rather than direct monetary compensation from the
| merchants is just the nature of social media.
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| 7 Tacos is a lot. Don't let someone you care about eat 7 Tacos,
| that's just enabling.
| bovermyer wrote:
| The real question is, how do we discourage interaction with these
| bait posts on a scale that matters?
| bluGill wrote:
| Block all the originators of them. I've been doing that for a
| week or so now, and facebook is slowly getting better. (first I
| left all groups myself - facebook is a terrible way to keep up
| with you hobbies as there is no good way to see everything).
| Facebook is becoming more and more pictures of real events in
| my friend's life - actually social media, and less and less
| politics, memes, and pictures that were funny the first time 10
| years ago...
| dqv wrote:
| Well you can take the approach that one TikToker's mom took:
| comment on the post and say it's datamining.
| Nition wrote:
| I once saw an official Facebook blog post about some change
| to the T&C, with 80,000+ comments on it, most of them one of
| those meaningless copy-pastes about how they don't consent to
| Facebook using their data. More comments were appearing every
| second.
|
| Every 20th post or so, someone would be saying something like
| "Stop it you idiots, this stupid copy-paste doesn't do
| anything, you can't declare your rights like this." Then a
| bunch more copy-paste comments would appear before the next
| person telling the idiots to stop.
| wutbrodo wrote:
| Would the segment of users who respond to content-free posts
| like these have much of a reaction to a comment saying that?
|
| I don't mean that as a snarky dismissal, but a sincere
| question. I know that plenty of people, especially among
| digital-natives, have instant negative reactions to being
| reminded of data collection. But the type of user answering
| "what was your first car" or "what do you call your
| grandchildren" do not strike me as having much overlap with
| the groups that are cynical about social media platforms.
| dqv wrote:
| I don't really think it's a legitimate or scalable way to
| inform people. On a smaller scale it could help people in
| the local social network to be aware of what those posts
| are doing.
|
| Another thing to do is to tell people "they're trying to
| use this information to get into your bank account". That
| will make them stop really fast. But as far as scalability
| goes, I don't think there's a way.
| Kiro wrote:
| It's a really interesting question. What makes people so eager
| to respond? I keep seeing friends and family (especially
| family, older generation) answering these obvious spam
| questions all the time.
| jcims wrote:
| Some other interesting questions they should pose:
|
| - What's your mother's maiden name?
|
| - What street were you born on?
|
| - What was your first car?
|
| - What's your childhood's best friend's name?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Oh, I've absolutely seen these come up.
|
| "Tag your mother if you love her", "tag your childhood best
| friend", etc.
| ctvo wrote:
| "Being an American is a privilege few have. Let's share our
| American issued social security numbers!" <Over photo of a bald
| eagle>
| mywittyname wrote:
| My understanding is that a portion of the SSN is based on the
| ZIP of your birthplace. I'm sure some clever person could
| come up with a way to use birth location + a checksum that
| would reveal an SSN without actually typing it out.
|
| I'm thinking something like, "Add up all the individual
| numbers of your SSN and figure out what Founding Father you
| are!" Use some statistics to ensure that lots of people get
| good ones.
| jrwr wrote:
| Used too, But anyone under the age of 20 will have a random
| SSN [1]
|
| 1: https://www.ssa.gov/kc/SSAFactSheet--IssuingSSNs.pdf
| robocat wrote:
| I presume there are a lot of non-Americans with SSNs: I have
| one from working in the US on a working visa.
| madrox wrote:
| These do get shared, but usually in meme form where you turn
| your birthday into your "Werewolf name" and are encouraged to
| share in the comments. Because you're sharing in an altered,
| amusing form, you don't stop to consider someone can reverse
| your birthday from it.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| My birthday is literally already on my Facebook "about" page
| though, and shown to all my friends whenever it comes around,
| so they can post on my timeline.
| gavin_gee wrote:
| isnt this already known as social engineering data collection for
| hackers for use in later attacks?
| mikey_p wrote:
| That's not what the article is about. It points out that
| passwords for random folks aren't really worth much, and are
| probably out there on the dark web for purchase anyway, but the
| idea that psychographic profiles could be build by a third
| party that is scraping these comments off public posts.
| captainmuon wrote:
| I think this is just a conspiracy theory. What's happening is
| that capitalism sets ridiculous incentives, so people are
| compelled to set up all these blogs and create these memes to
| maybe get fractions of cents per interaction. The real scandal is
| not that the Russians or the Chinese are attacking democracy this
| way, it is that we are waisting so much productivity on this
| (both users, and people working on such campaigns).
|
| PS: If the described tactic really works, I gotta try it out in
| order to take over the world.
| tarkin2 wrote:
| So, there's a network of popular accounts that are posting
| questions and harvesting the comments to psychologically analyse
| Facebook users and later politically target them and their social
| networks with disinformation that's tailored to their
| psychological grouping? That's what I gleamed.
| yabones wrote:
| My speculation: The exact same thing that happens with reddit
| accounts used for astroturfing... People will 'build up' a
| profile over the course of several months, reposting popular
| posts from months/years ago, etc. They're actually quite easy to
| spot, an account with high posting points and low comment points
| is usually one of these. Then, when it's nice and ripe, they will
| sell it to a troll farm which uses it to push a particular
| agenda. We saw this happen quite a bit in 2015-2016, and again
| starting in early 2020 (though it never really stopped).
|
| But, in this case, the product is the 'network' rather than
| individual accounts. Something that appears this 'organic' and
| 'homegrown' is a very valuable tool for a widespread disinfo
| campaign.
|
| Or, it could simply be the magician gang that makes viral posts
| of gross food. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/creators-
| countertop-spaghetti...
| [deleted]
| bink wrote:
| I've never understood this logic. Very few subs limit posts by
| karma and those that do certainly don't require the insane
| amounts of karma that these bots are farming.
|
| I know I don't go back through someone's post history before
| voting on their comments and I don't really care about their
| aggregate karma values.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| It just takes one person to do that though and say "you made
| a new account for this you troll?" before everyone gets it.
| josefx wrote:
| That would work if the moderators of various subs weren't
| part of it, quite a few subs will hand out temp. bans when
| you "accuse someone of shilling". Even if the account was
| created the day a story went public, didn't post anything
| until weeks later when the story hit reddit and never
| backed up its attempts to discredit one side of the
| conflict.
|
| Some fun oriented subs will however happily ban spam bots
| that just automate imgur reposts if you point one out early
| enough.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Before the advent of the current crop of social media, online
| forums would post your post count and sign up dates. Posts
| from someone that has a brand new account and low post count
| were HIGHLY scrutinized. In some cases, needing mod approval
| before becoming visible.
|
| My assumption is troll farms are buying accounts with karma
| to try and do an end around such a system. It wouldn't be
| hard on reddit/hn/or other vote based social media locations
| to pay extra scrutiny, even automated, against brand new
| accounts. By using established accounts, it makes astroturf
| detection harder to do. Now every account is potentially an
| astroturfer.
| yabones wrote:
| Indeed, there's more to it than that. I haven't gone in-
| depth, so this is my very pedestrian understanding...
|
| The very secretive spam filter has cut-outs for 'high value'
| accounts - this isn't really documented formally, but it's
| pretty obvious that posting limits are essentially
| nonexistant for 1M+ users, either by design or because
| they're well known to the mods...
|
| The value of the high-karma accounts is that they're much
| more likely to be accepted for moderator applications. Get
| enough mods on a default sub, and you basically control the
| universe. That's very difficult, so the much easier way is to
| create legit-looking fringe subreddits with names like
| "newstoday" or "politicallyuncensorednews". Get enough of
| your smurf accounts to upvote those, and you can get to
| rising for /all. Get enough real bites and you might even get
| it to the front page.
|
| I haven't really looked into this stuff for a few years,
| because it's frankly depressing. So my understanding will be
| a little off what the most recent networks are doing.
| spoonjim wrote:
| Is there a difference in your post's reach on Reddit if you
| have 1,000 karma vs. 1,000,000?
| oconnor663 wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised if some of their shadowban logic was
| more lenient on accounts that had a lot of karma, to avoid
| high-profile embarrassing mistakes? Just a guess.
| lpcvoid wrote:
| I don't see how banning a high karma account would be
| embarrassing? I didn't even know that people cared about
| karma on Reddit.
| oconnor663 wrote:
| Just that high karma accounts are marginally likelier to
| be subreddit mods or whatever? Again just a baseless
| guess on my part.
| Lammy wrote:
| Luckily for Reddit it can only be highly embarrassing if
| people actually notice and raise a stink, which
| shadowbanning is designed to avoid. The shadowbanned user
| may just naturally get sick of the lack of interaction and
| leave the site, like this top /r/worldnews moderator with
| 14mil Karma who has been shadowbanned since July last year:
| https://old.reddit.com/user/maxwellhill
| mywittyname wrote:
| It would be interesting if their shadow-ban logic
| actually gave users upvotes at random for posts.
| Nition wrote:
| Questions like this one from the article are also very common
| on /r/AskReddit:
|
| > Without naming the state you are from, what is it famous for?
|
| Hard to tell if that's intentional data gathering or just
| someone innocently copying a common data-gathering question
| format from Facebook though.
| 0x4d464d48 wrote:
| Fuck zodiac signs.
|
| Tell me what kind of car you plan to buy next!
| platz wrote:
| A hovercraft
| akersten wrote:
| That kind of thing is a gold mine for data harvesting.
| Automatically: for each comment from a certain state, go
| through their commenting history to map opinions on whatever
| you care to search for on a state-by-state level. Way cheaper
| and faster than phone surveys, and also gives a radically
| higher value slice of the population (than those who would
| pick up the phone to answer a survey). And that's probably
| the least nefarious thing someone could do with that data.
| giantrobot wrote:
| Or just look them up on SnoopSnoo, it'll pull in those
| things and give you a decent estimate of their personal
| details.
| cratermoon wrote:
| The generic "without directly revealing PII, provide some
| detail which ML algorithms can use to determine the PII with
| a high degree of accuracy" is pretty clearly a product of
| intentional data gathering. The fact that is might get copied
| and organically spread is just a bonus.
|
| This also goes for "the first letter of your last name plus
| the date of your mother's birthday are your <pop culture
| tag>".
|
| Oh and all the cutesy little image processing tools like
| "what would you look like older/younger/as a different
| gender/if you were a cartoon" are there to train facial
| recognition algorithms.
|
| Yet even supposedly sophisticated people fall for these.
| cinntaile wrote:
| Do you have any actual proof that this is used for data
| mining and not because it's an engaging, fun question?
| decremental wrote:
| I think this misses the point. Even if what he said has
| never happened, your mind should be trained to never
| engage with things like that to begin with. The very
| first thing that should occur to you is "I'm about to
| upload a picture of my face on the internet. That's not a
| good idea. I won't do that." Same with entering personal
| information.
| _jal wrote:
| There are multiple "the point"s.
|
| Yes, teach your kid to be careful with their data.
|
| But also, how many outfits are actually doing this, or is
| this currently a theoretic concern? If people are doing
| this, what are their goals? Are they meeting them?
|
| Are there less obvious examples of the same thing?
|
| I'm sure you can keep going with more points.
| decremental wrote:
| If you just don't ever engage then even if the concern is
| not over a theoretical threat, you'll never have to worry
| either way. This isn't a "citation needed" kind of issue.
| "Do you have a source for it not being a good idea to
| provide personal information to strangers?" Bizarre.
| [deleted]
| handoflixue wrote:
| Why should I care, though?
|
| "What state are you from" seems like pretty innocuous
| information. I'll readily mention that I'm from Seattle
| if it's relevant to the conversation or asked directly,
| and I tend to think of myself as being on the more
| paranoid / pro-privacy side of things.
|
| All the big players already have my address because I
| gave it to them, and a stalker should be able to work
| that information out pretty easily because I post in the
| Seattle sub-reddit and otherwise engage a lot with
| Seattle topics.
| edoceo wrote:
| > seems like pretty innocuous
|
| That's how they get you. It's a trap!
| handoflixue wrote:
| Yeah, but... what actually IS the trap? What bad thing
| happens because of this?
| AlexAndScripts wrote:
| You'll happily mention it, and a human can find it if
| they look through your profile. ML will have a much
| harder time in comparison to going through some comments,
| all in a similar way, on a post where everyone is saying
| something about their state.
| handoflixue wrote:
| Yeah, but... what's bad about that? Why should I be
| opposed to ML knowing I'm from Seattle?
| 1123581321 wrote:
| The most commonly known proof that such tactics are used
| is that Cambridge Analytica used social quizzes and games
| to gather data.
| https://www.politico.eu/article/cambridge-analytica-
| facebook...
| cinntaile wrote:
| I would argue that's quite different from when some
| influencer asks what state you're from without telling
| what state you're from. Quizzes and games give data in a
| much easier format compared to this. It's just a trick to
| engage people and people like to laugh with stereotypes
| so they happily oblige. Analyzing all this unlabeled text
| data to find out what state someone is from seems hardly
| worth the effort, it's not like that's valuable
| information.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| That may be. I'd expect these tactics to evolve, but like
| most people I'll only know for sure if it blows up in a
| big scandal.
| GoodJokes wrote:
| Delete Facebook. By god. How many articles do we need to write to
| communicate the same sentiment.
| spoonjim wrote:
| "Delete Facebook" is like saying "Delete drugs." The whole
| reason Facebook is dangerous is because its draw on the human
| psyche is stronger than that of the average person to resist,
| and that the people who do engage with it can harm the people
| who don't. There needs to be a national social media policy the
| way there is a national drug policy. We need to have the
| conversation about where we want to be as a country from "full
| ban" to "fully legal," just like people recognize that a
| country's drug policy can be somewhere between Singapore's and
| Portugal's.
| boppo wrote:
| >national drug policy
|
| I'm not sure that's less harmful to society than no policy.
| It may be causing more people to use.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| parksy wrote:
| Already done, parents are still on there as it's the best way
| to connect with people they went to school with 50 years ago,
| as far as I can tell Facebook is burning through the younger
| ages and it's going to end up a digital retirement home,
| already well on the way.
| wutbrodo wrote:
| This article is more than just "Facebook is bad". It's
| proposing a specific phenomenon the author thinks it's noticed,
| and digging into what may be behind it.
| macintux wrote:
| My democracy is being destroyed by Facebook. What good did
| dropping it do me?
| jcims wrote:
| I just signed up for an account last year. I unfollowed
| everyone about six months later. Now I pop on every few days
| and either see something I'm tagged in or it says 'you're all
| caught up'. Sometimes it throws an error which is rewarding.
|
| Seems to avoid most of the garbage on Facebook but I can still
| use it to contact people or hit the marketplace.
| TheSockStealer wrote:
| Some of these questions are similar to those questions you would
| see in an identify verification challenges. What is your first
| car, pet name, city you were born in. I am not saying this is the
| "only" answer, but could be one of them.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| The article directly addresses this point and claims that the
| password is worthless, while somehow also claiming that the
| data they can scrape about you after you interact with them is
| where the money is made.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-09-27 23:00 UTC)