• Russian operatives used Facebook ads to exploit America’s racial and religious divisions
    24 replies, posted
[quote]The batch of more than 3,000 Russian-bought ads that Facebook is preparing to turn over to Congress shows a deep understanding of social divides in American society, with some ads promoting African American rights groups, including Black Lives Matter, and others suggesting that these same groups pose a rising political threat, say people familiar with the covert influence campaign. The Russian campaign — taking advantage of Facebook’s ability to send contrary messages to different groups of users based on their political and demographic characteristics — also sought to sow discord among religious groups. Other ads highlighted support for Democrat Hillary Clinton among Muslim women. These targeted messages, along with others that have surfaced in recent days, highlight the sophistication of an influence campaign slickly crafted to mimic and infiltrate U.S. political discourse while also seeking to heighten tensions between groups already wary of one another. The nature and detail of these ads have troubled investigators at Facebook, on Capitol Hill and at the Justice Department, say people familiar with the advertisements, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share matters still under investigation. ...[/quote] [url]https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/russian-operatives-used-facebook-ads-to-exploit-divisions-over-black-political-activism-and-muslims/2017/09/25/4a011242-a21b-11e7-ade1-76d061d56efa_story.html[/url]
If true, that's pretty scary.
Classic Russian/Soviet whataboutism. [url]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism[/url]
[QUOTE=Dave_Parker;52728138]The way you can specifically target groups of people on Facebook is scary, as is the number of people who use it as their main news source.. The only solution I see would be to no longer allow political ads of any kind on Facebook, but that's just ads. They would just create/buy groups at that point and start posting there.[/QUOTE] That's difficult because I feel like almost anything can become political at this point.
[QUOTE=Dave_Parker;52728138]The way you can specifically target groups of people on Facebook is scary, as is the number of people who use it as their main news source.. The only solution I see would be to no longer allow political ads of any kind on Facebook, but that's just ads. They would just create/buy groups at that point and start posting there.[/QUOTE] its why US should lock down hard on track-me style advertisements. make targeting way more broader
[QUOTE=Dave_Parker;52728138]The way you can specifically target groups of people on Facebook is scary, as is the number of people who use it as their main news source.. The only solution I see would be to no longer allow political ads of any kind on Facebook, but that's just ads. They would just create/buy groups at that point and start posting there.[/QUOTE] We're finally seeing the danger of Big Data in real life, and this is far from the last time this kind of thing will happen. Hell, this might not have even been the first.
Anything not behind a paywall?
[QUOTE=Lambeth;52728143]That's difficult because I feel like almost anything can become political at this point.[/QUOTE] Probably because you already treat everything as needing to be political.
The worst thing is they are getting away with it
[QUOTE=EcksDee;52728304]Anything not behind a paywall?[/QUOTE] Just requires you to disable ad-blocker.
[QUOTE=code_gs;52728709]Just requires you to disable ad-blocker.[/QUOTE] Cant seem to get it to work [img]https://i.imgur.com/D9jJLlu.png[/img]
[QUOTE=Wii60;52728215]its why US should lock down hard on track-me style advertisements. make targeting way more broader[/QUOTE] That will [i]never[/i] happen and you know it. Targeted information is [i]faaaaar[/i] too valuable. Like, that shit is the entire reason why Facebook exists. [editline]29th September 2017[/editline] Guys, turn on Ad Block and turn off cookies for Washington Post. Then you won't see any of that. Also clear your cookies for their site after you do that if you haven't. I never see that screen and I have an adblocker on and cookies off for WP.
[QUOTE=27X;52728392]Probably because you already treat everything as needing to be political.[/QUOTE] I didn't politicize the environment. Or trolling.
[QUOTE=ForgottenKane;52728848]That will [i]never[/i] happen and you know it. Targeted information is [i]faaaaar[/i] too valuable. Like, that shit is the entire reason why Facebook exists. [editline]29th September 2017[/editline] Guys, turn on Ad Block and turn off cookies for Washington Post. Then you won't see any of that. Also clear your cookies for their site after you do that if you haven't. I never see that screen and I have an adblocker on and cookies off for WP.[/QUOTE] Maybe if the criminal investigation decides Russia has interfered in our election, we can just ban Russian from running ads on US websites.
[QUOTE=Helix Snake;52729071]Maybe if the criminal investigation decides Russia has interfered in our election, we can just ban Russian from running ads on US websites.[/QUOTE] That's what we need to push for. Basically if it's Russian, it needs to be kept out of the United States. If it so much as [i]smells[/i] like it could be Russian, it needs to be kept out. No more of this shit. We let it happen way too easily in the first place, so it's important we make sure it doesn't happen again after we're through cleaning ourselves up.
[QUOTE=ForgottenKane;52728848]That will [i]never[/i] happen and you know it. Targeted information is [i]faaaaar[/i] too valuable. Like, that shit is the entire reason why Facebook exists. [/QUOTE] if you want it to happen support apple they couldnt get into the ad industry so instead they are prioritizing privacy and burning down the ad industry by stopping auto-playing videos/ built in do-not-track into the browser on iphone and mac, etc. Apple also doesnt track everything you do which is why their siri assistant is behind. latest os update: [t]https://i.imgur.com/F9sjgg8.png[/t] Google/MSFT will never do that because their stuff depends on that info. google owns the advertisers too.
Are there third party extensions for Chrome that work the same way? I recall Ghostly being recommended for it, but then it was discovered [I]they[/I] were tracking users :v:
Scriptblockers and disabling scripting as a browser setting prevent WaPo's adblock/subscription detection from even firing off. However, they've recently started doing this thing where a low-res image is loaded first and the higher-res image is dynamically swapped in with scripting. [t]https://i.imgur.com/qS7kbDe.png[/t] Since scripting is blocked, it doesn't get a chance to do that. But you can just right-click and open the image in a new tab and you get [t]https://i.imgur.com/Rfslr9g.png[/t] The WaPo also often annotates and fact-checks speeches and similar and they use a highlighting service that overlays on the actual text of the article. Obviously, this shit is entirely scripting-based, so you'll just see the unannotated original text if you go there with scripting disabled. The downside of using script-blocking extensions is that you need to whitelist the sites you trust and care about and training the filter is a pain. It's very eye-opening on just how broken and unusable most websites are if they can't run a massive packet of scripting on your machine. The WaPo is a standout highlight in that they drop their entire article in raw HTML and only then start to jazz it up with scripting. Any site that runs on Squarespace, for example, is a dead blank void until you unblock scripting from at least three sources. Sites like Tinypic are nearly unusable unless you just disable scriptblocking for the whole domain (and then get all the ads you wanted to crush).
[QUOTE=Dave_Parker;52729594]And maybe you could round up all the Russians and put them in camps. Worked wonders in 1942.[/QUOTE] Or we could just restrict their access in and out the country, monitor their activities and communications if they're allowed in, detain and interrogate persons of interest... you know, basic national security stuff (except intensified, the justification being that the Russians are behaving like belligerent assholes and have been for some time). For that matter, a person like [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natalia_Veselnitskaya]Natalia Veselnitskaya[/url] should not even be allowed to enter our country in the first place, much less conduct business and political advocacy activities here. This isn't hard to grasp. We're fighting a shadow war with these people, and we can't afford to lose it.
Wouldn't restricting ordinary russian people from going outside their country to come to Europe and North America just make things worse in the long run?
[QUOTE=MrJazzy;52730009]Wouldn't restricting ordinary russian people from going outside their country to come to Europe and North America just make things worse in the long run?[/QUOTE] No, and I wish people would stop using this line as an excuse about why we shouldn't do anything against them since relations between us are already bad enough as it is and can't get much worse. It's silly. We already started restricting visa services towards them back in August because of sanctions. [url]https://www.ft.com/content/febf249e-866e-11e7-bf50-e1c239b45787?mhq5j=e6[/url]
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