Facebook suspends account of Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Chris Wylie, the whistleblower who has alleged the knowingly improper use of Facebook data by Cambridge Analytica, says The Social Network™ has suspended his account. Wylie took to Twitter with the following missive. Suspended by @facebook. For blowing the whistle. On something they have known privately for 2 years. pic. …
You could say the Washington Post was "strangely quiet" about the story too, possibly because it was a joint exclusive by the New York Times and The Observer. It's the lead story on the BBC's "Tech" news page with the carefully-punctuated headline "data firm accused of 'misleading' MPs" and referencing Observer reporting.
Not all news organisations simply cut and paste their rivals' stories into the headlines when they have no new reporting of their own to contribute.
Being as BBC News are acting as pro govt mouthpiece (in usual non impartial following the govt line in vast majority of their coverage, (the Corbyn Soviet poster thing on newsnight recently was a cracking example) with small bit of anti coverage just to try and deflect bias accusations they tend to have pro govt view spin) on news then alleged links of CA to influencing brexit vote will not be high on their news agenda.
Being as BBC News are acting as pro govt mouthpiece (in usual non impartial following the govt line in vast majority of their coverage, (the Corbyn Soviet poster thing on newsnight recently was a cracking example) with small bit of anti coverage just to try and deflect bias accusations they tend to have pro govt view spin) on news then alleged links of CA to influencing brexit vote will not be high on their news agenda.
If you only consumed the BBC you wouldn't even have known anything about the Agent Cob scandal until almost two weeks after it broke. The idea that the BBC are somehow not left leaning is ludicrous - its basically Guardian TV, according to themselves!
Seriously, if you're so far to the left that you think the BBC is rightwing, then you need to seek urgent help.
This exchange provides nearly canonical example of the demonstration that the BBC is in fact rather unbiased: someone posts something implying they are right-wing / government lackeys, followed by someone else posting something claiming that they are rather left-wing / Guardian lackeys. When both those things happen (which they fairly regularly do) you know they are doing rather well at being unbiased.
(And, of course, the reason they are being 'strangely quiet' about it is that they are not publishing stuff for which they don't have good evidence, where they don't count 'some newspaper published it' as being good evidence, as that newspaper, if it has good evidence (which it probably does), protect its sources thus leaving anyone reporting based on their report exposed. But it's easier to just accuse them of being government mouthpieces, of course.)
And Twitter isn't a court of law, or even a kangaroo court legislative inquiry. There's no way anything gets "proved" in 140 characters or less. No news promulgated by tweet should be trusted: it's an inherently insufficient information platform, only good for raving about the latest fashion or Presidential press releases (and, apparently, declarations of trade wars). All that said, my pessimistic side tells me that the leaker is right, Facebook is up to its ears in this and could be afraid of what a wider inquiry might show. But no need to worry, the press will never threaten a big player like FB and government is already in its pocket.
I'd missed the "Agent Cob" appellation per se, which Google page one finds mains on a particular web site. It refers to a sequence of allegations that The Right Honourable Jeremy Corbyn MP is openly socialist and under the control of Soviet Russia and its elected president Vlad Draculin, and in fact this has been repeatedly aired by the BBC in reviews of newspaper and website journalism, broadcast evidently to advertise what a load of bollocks they all are. Especially the Sunday ones for some reason, it is make-shit-up day. Which this is.
I'm slightly curious where the term "Cob" comes from; it may be the spider monsters from "The Hobbit" films. I don't really want to know, it probably would just make me wish all the more for the apocalypse to arrive at last.
If this weekend was the first time that you heard this story about Cambridge Analytica then I urge you to read Carole Cadwalladr's coverage of it over about a year:
Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) CEO Mark Zuckerberg sold 245,400 shares of the company’s stock in a transaction that occurred on Friday, February 16th. The shares were sold at an average price of $178.16, for a total value of $43,720,464.00. The sale was disclosed in a filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is available at this hyperlink. Mark Zuckerberg also recently made many more trades...
source: https://ledgergazette.com/2018/03/15/mark-zuckerberg-sells-245400-shares-of-facebook-inc-fb-stock.html
so the Beeb have spoken up a little now and are reporting on the story. In part.
Specifically, note how they are loudly mentioning that CA may have had something to do with Trumps election, but there's not a whisper of how they may have affected the Brexit referendum.
Yes, bollocks. Young people don't understand the transactions they are participating in with Facebook &co (they might understand them better than old people, but they don't understand them well): they are just much less risk-averse than older people and are, in the standard way young people have always done, making bad decisions as a result. 'A moment of convenience, a lifetime of regret' and all that.
"Young folk have no such qualms, understand the transactions they participate in and are more familiar with the privacy controls of the services they use."
This is clever, platitudinal patronising.
What he means is that anyone under 25 has not yet experienced enough unnerving consequences of sharing their data and so are still in that naive state where their complacency can be exploited.
Of course, if he actually said that then he would draw attention to the true thinking and insult and offend his market, both and all at the same time. So instead it is put in these terms that appeals to the same under 25 year old's vanity and sense of superiority.
"FB see CA as customers, and Wylie as a threat to that"
exactly - all of the news discussion on the 'cambridge' guys using the data seems to be in line with FB's rules at the time, *AND* when you consider how 'big slurp' (aka google) has been directly involved with the former president, you just have to say "this is the 21st century" and recognize that election people are gonna collect data using whatever means they have available.
The solution: don't make your data available, if you can manage it. None of what they do is "illegal". It is probably "immoral" and when the laws change they'll be forced to STOP [we hope]. but I still get calls on my phone from "press 1 to talk to a human" robocalls, even though my numbers are on the national do not call list, and robo-calls of a commercial nature are ILLEGAL, and they're obviously doing it ANYWAY.
and politicians exempt THEMSELVES from the rules, because POLITICAL robocalls are NOT illegal, and political calls can DISRESPECT the do-not-call list. yeah, figures, huh?
Many people under 25 should have experienced IT savvy parents eavesdropping on their social media, hacking their accounts, controlling their internet access and censoring their web browsing. And if you can't trust your parents...
This presents an interesting conundrum.
If Facebook don't fix this and Facebook has been used to stop a party getting elected (e.g. the democrats) then what will the other side do when they eventually get into power?
This could be the start of the downfall of Facebook because you can't have one company having that much power with regards to elections and public opinion.
" you can't have one company having that much power with regards to elections and public opinion."
Except, traditionally, we generally do. William Randolph Hurst's newspaper empire was so powerful that he could make nations go to war with one another. Rupert Murdoch owns so much of the British press that his support has been required to win an election here for the last 25 years (and through Fox News, he has largely controlled the Republican nomination process in the USA from 2000-2015).
I do think FB is headed for regulation sooner rather than later, though.
If Facebook don't fix this and Facebook has been used to stop a party getting elected (e.g. the democrats) then what will the other side do when they eventually get into power?
It's a free market. Both Republicans, AND Democrats (and the Russians) are free to spend their money with Facebook in order to target the electorate.
Or not.
No one is forcing them to do it. Or not to do it.
"Waaa waaa waaaa it's not fair. The Republicans used to Facebook to unfairly swing the election"...
Translation: "The Republican party decided to focus considerable human and financial resources into taking their message to the electorate via the online medium, using Facebook in particular."
It's as simple as that. I don't see how it's any different to a TV campaign, I really don't. We may not like it very much, but either side using it as a platform is a non-event as far as I'm concerned. Of *course* they are going to use it. You'd be an idiot not to!
The presumption that Cambridge Analytica and its alleged activities caused the Clinton loss is very far from proved and there are good reasons to think it is pretty much rubbish. It seems to be built on the notion that by applying its secret algorithms, CA (or the Trump campaign with their help and guidance) was able to convey a specially targeted tailored message to each likely voter (or perhaps those they were interested in reaching). Is there actual evidence that was done? To take it a bit further, it is then assumed that those messages were effective in persuading people who independently might have favored Clinton to vote instead for Trump or a different candidate, or to not vote. Given the large differences among the candidates this, too, requires considerable evidence that has not yet shown up. Inasmuch as any CA assistance apparently failed to move Ted Cruz much beyond the first cut in the Republican joust for the nomination it is likely such evidence will not appear soon. Even if effective when considered alone, Facebook and targeted advertising do not operate in a vacuum and in practical use their effect is diluted, probably a great deal, by voters' and consumers' other social interactions.
I do not entirely dismiss the possibility that the techniques alluded to are effective. They are in line with research at the University of Chicago, the University of Michigan, and others going back 60 or 70 years. Vance Packard popularized earlier and less sophisticated commercial application of some of the notions as long ago. CA's and similar activities In the commercial arena represent the engineering application of the academic work. In the end they may be shown to be highly effective, but for now a good deal of skepticism is in order.
The asserted power of Facebook and the likes of CA as social manipulation vehicles, like the asserted power of campaign money in politics, probably is being overstated by an order of magnitude or more. A more serious danger may be that we go off in a moral panic and enact legislation that, while palliating our moral outrage, may have little real effect.
Of my circle of friends, in the 35 - 45 years age bracket, the 3 people I know who supported Trump & BREXIT are all avid Facebook users. And these are highly professional individuals all successful in their fields.
The government seems to have finally woken up to the threat of fake-news and is now starting the campaign to ensure users are able to distinguish between verified information and concocted muck, between facts and opinion pieces, and when politicians make promises, between what is feasible and what can only be classified as pie-in-the-sky aspirations.
There yet still hope for the new generation...
The entire anti-brexit movement is run on Facebook. There at least 700 closed FB groups, most apparently with very few members, which will therefore have little impact on the campaign. But besides this, the national organisations run their entire operations through FB groups. I have had most contact with Britain for Europe, which represents the grass roots groups.
Despite telling people essentially what hit the news this weekend, other activists will not take no for an answer when I refuse to join FB (these are people who who not pressurise a vegetarian to eat meat). The solution to every problem is yet another FB page, whilst the websites are hosted on "free" services such as Google and Wix, giving out edit privileges liberally. None of the activists has a clue about information management.
To put it the other way round, it seems that IT-competent people are not willing to volunteer for the campaign. You can see from my comments elsewhere on this site that I am not really an IT person: I am a mathematician in a CS department. But I have taken to calling myself "the only geek in the village", since noone else has any programming skills at all.
If you'd like to help, please contact me at pt@euinbrum.org
> Any political movement at present
Now they're leaving Facebook to escape the censorship, if they aren't banned first. Not just conservatives. All grassroots politics.
Essentially, social media censors are holding everyone to MSM standards of political correctness. Genuine grassroots movements consisting of regular people - not lawyers, journos, and professional activists - cannot meet that test.
What remains? Fake news and astroturf.
That's why the anti-brexit movement is not going anywhere. In the social media world the impact is none. Its nice to talk about but the real world effect is none and anything that thinks social media is going to change things is mistaken and has been lied to by the social media companies.
This is why Donald Trump won, all his opponents where complaining on Facebook and not doing anything out in the real world to have an effect of what was happening.
If you read what I wrote, you will see that I have nothing to do with "social media". What is needed, simply to make the anti-brexit movement work as well as any company (I am not saying that is "well") is some basic IT competence to do its internal management.
As to whether it is going anywhere, when protests happen, politicians slip quietly out of meetings to whisper in the organisers' ears to thank them for not letting the matter rest quietly. For example, when we had a little demo outside the Tory Party Conference in Birmingham in October 2016, people tiptoed out to say "there are people in there trying to stop this madness".
So please offer to help instead of complaining.
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