[adamsb6]

I won't rehash the A/B discussion, there's plenty of other people talking about it.

The Cambridge Analytica thing probably didn't have a meaningful impact on the elections. Facebook was dumb to allow partner apps access to so much data and rely on those partners to follow Facebook's policies, but they recognized the mistake and probably overcorrected.

All the other coverage probably serves to reinforce and amplify negative sentiments about Facebook, and a ton of it wasn't deserved. People cite the Rohingya, I remember also a news cycle about Facebook profiting from hate speech.

Those things happened, but Facebook had also built probably the most expensive and effective hate speech filtering operation in the world. That it be 100% effective is not a reasonable goal. With billions of pieces of content even 99.999% effectiveness will result in examples that the press can point to reinforce a narrative about Facebook profiting from hate speech.

I doubt there ever was any profit in serving hate speech. The ad revenue from filter misses would not have been big enough to pay for the filtering operation itself.

[richbell]

> The Cambridge Analytica thing probably didn't have a meaningful impact on the elections.

That's a pretty big claim to make without evidence. At the very least I think we can agree that political parties wouldn't be investing so much money into social media campaigns (analytics, marketing, etc.) if they didn't think it was impactful.

[ahoho]

There is ample evidence that CA had no impact. They were charlatans trying to sell snake oil; IIRC the underlying algorithm was based on a simple factorization of a User x Likes matrix that did not have substantial predictive value.

There is plenty to lay at the feet of Meta, but I've always thought the CA scandal was an overreaction.

[adamsb6]

Their models just weren't that useful:

https://towardsdatascience.com/effect-of-cambridge-analytica...

> Sumpter analyzed the accuracy of Cambridge Analytica’s regression models in his book ‘Outnumbered.’ He used a publicly available dataset created by Michal Kosinski and his colleagues, a psychologist, who created an anonymized database of 20,000 Facebook users. Of the 20,000 Facebook users 19,742 were US-based, and of that amount 4,744 had registered their preferred political party Democratic or Republican, and had also liked over 50 Facebook pages. Sumpter first aimed to test the accuracy of regression models in general, and so created a model which predicted political party allegiance based on Facebook page likes. He concluded that the regression model worked “very well for hardcore Democrats and Republicans” but “does not reveal anything about the 76 percent of users who did not put their political allegiance on Facebook” (Sumpter, pg. 52–53). He also describes how just because the model may have revealed, for instance, that Democrats tend to like Harry Potter, it does not necessarily mean that other Harry Potter fans like Democrats. Therefore, a strategy employed by Democrats to aim to get Harry Potter fans to vote, may not necessarily benefit them.

You'd probably have better spent your money by using party-owned voter databases to create custom audiences based on email addresses. Everything I've seen points to Cambridge Analytica being mainly an operation to grift campaign dollars. From the same article:

> CEO Alexander Nix himself corroborates these results. He claimed in his testimony to members of the British parliament’s ‘Digital, Culture, Media and Sport committee,’. He contended that Kogan’s dataset wasn’t very useful and that made up a tiny part of their overall strategy for the 2016 United States presidential election. How do we resonate this admission, with his presentation at the Concordia summit, in which Nix openly bragged about the ability to wield Facebook data to tune an incredibly powerful instrument that significantly impacts elections? The answer to that came from Nix himself in his testimony, claiming that he has in the past used hyperbole when pitching his company to potential clients. This view is corroborated by Kogan who mentions how “Nix is trying to promote (the personality algorithm) because he has a strong financial incentive to tell a story about how Cambridge Analytica have a secret weapon” (Sumpter, pg. 54).