Thread

1. cm2012 · 1790392207 · focus · HN ↗

   Standard PSA: Cambridge Analytica electing Trump is not a true story. Cambridge Analytica absolutely broke Facebook's terms of service with its personality quiz scheme but it did not affect the 2016 election.

   I'm an advertiser who has managed hundreds of millions of dollars for small startups and big corporations, brands, as well as a few small political campaigns.

   Even at the time of the Trump election, the kind of ad targeting that Cambridge Analytica says they were offering through the personality quizzes was absolute garbage. There is a reason why the official response from Boz doesn't even mention the personality quiz stuff, because it was essentially irrelevant to the Trump campaign's performance on paid advertising on Meta. And I would go further to say that, except for his success in fundraising, all of his Meta advertising probably didn't move that many votes.

   Cambridge Analytica, the organization, of course, loves to claim that they're the dark evil viziers behind the Trump campaign and they've advertised themselves as such to dictators all over the world. But that's just like Edward Bernays writing "Propaganda" back in the day, it is a way to sell their services. Trump digital director Brad Parscale said the campaign did not even use Cambridge Analytica’s controversial psychographic targeting.

   Not to mention, the only reason that Cambridge Analytica had that open graph information available is because communities like Hacker News begged again and again for Facebook to open the graph and not have a walled web. After that they cut off that graph access.

   1. doctorpangloss · 1790392783 · focus · HN ↗

      Quizzes had like an 85% engagement rate on Facebook, they were legendarily effective paid eyeballs content. Adtech firm System1 aka OpenMail even merged with an adtech firm that owned a quiz content company, it made like $1m/2wks at small scale. I don't really know what Cambridge Analytica concretely did (to this day I have not seen a single screenshot of any of their creatives or a single concrete report of theirs) but I do know quizzes were really effective. For whatever purposes.

      1. cm2012 · 1790398085 · focus · HN ↗

         Yes they had a high engagement rate (due to how the platforms were structured at the time and how hyper-shareable it was) and you could make some money serving ads on quizzes because they had a high engagement rate. They were absolutely terrible as an ad targeting methodology.

         1. doctorpangloss · 1790431089 · focus · HN ↗

            Have you seen one of their quizzes?

            I don't know if they were making an ad targeting solution. An ad targeting and voter targeting solution are different things.

            All I am saying is I'd reserve your professional judgement until you've actually seen what they were doing.

            1. cm2012 · 1790431171 · focus · HN ↗

               Yes I have seen their quizzes and examples of how they work and and how it's supposed to feed into ad targeting in theory

               1. doctorpangloss · 1790431498 · focus · HN ↗

                  Can you share a link to one?

                  I don't know how you would be able to tell, you've never won an election, how would you know what is important for being elected? It's not something a chatbot knows about either.

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