Dear Felix Stalder,
On Wed, Jul 18, 2018, 3:43 AM Felix Stalder wrote:
> [Throughout the day, I was wondering whether a new service offered by a
> company called "The Spinner" was real or satire. Their pitch is the
> following:
>
> > The Spinner* is a service that enables you to control articles
> > presented to your wife on the websites she usually visits, in order
> > to influence her on a subconscious level to initiate sex.
>
> https://www.thespinner.net
>
> This hits so many button about how toxic online ad-tech, and start-up
> tech culture more generally, has become, that I was leaning towards
> seeing this as satire,
I thought it is likely to be a satire, looked at the spinner webpage,
didn't leave any information, but a spinner image maliciously replaced my
phone's screen saver. Not sure what other controls could be optained by
code, if malicious, just when someone merely clicks on a URL.
Sivasubramanian M
but then it was revealed that Labour Party
> campaign also ran a campaign targeting an individual, the party leader
> Jeremy Corbin (and his closest associates) trying to warp his perception
> of what the party itself was doing. The whole story is below, and most
> likely not satire. Felix]
>
>
> Facebook ad micro-targeting can manipulate individual politicians
> Anonymous Labour Party official to Tom Baldwin
>
>
> https://theoutline.com/post/5411/facebook-ad-micro-targeting-can-manipulate-individual-politicians
>
> Caroline Haskins
> Jul—16—2018 11:42AM EST
>
>
> At least one political party is avoiding negotiating by using
> micro-targeted Facebook ads focused on just the politician and their
> inner circle, and the same tool could be used to manipulate people with
> major influence on public opinion. During the 2017 U.K. general
> elections, Jeremy Corbyn, the incumbent 69-year-old leader of the Labour
> Party, wanted to invest heavily in digital ads encouraging voter
> registration. Labour Party campaign chiefs thought it was a waste of
> money and so decided to trick the incumbent leader of their own party.
>
> They spent £5,000 on voter registration Facebook ads that met Corbyn’s
> demands, but here’s the catch: only Corbyn and his associates could see
> them. According to a forthcoming book from Tom Baldwin, a former Labour
> communications director, they were individually-targeted, hyper-specific
> ads made possible through Facebook’s advertising tools, reports The
> Times and The Independent. “If it was there for them [Corbyn and his
> associates], they thought it must be there for everyone,” an unnamed
> Labour Party official said to Baldwin. “It wasn’t. That’s how targeted
> ads can work.”
>
> Using Facebook’s Custom Audience advertising tool, businesses and
> campaigns can “sniper target” people by individually submitting
> information that matches Facebook profiles — like names, email
> addresses, phone numbers, date of birth, and gender. The tool cannot
> target down to a literal individual and requires at least a couple dozen
> people for a campaign to run.
>
> Since a number of political situations have unfolded in the last couple
> of years that, in retrospect, were heavily influenced by Facebook, the
> company started a political ad archive and significantly raised the bar
> on what it will approve as a political ad. But it put these measures in
> place only a few weeks ago, and it’s limited to ads targeting areas in
> the U.S., meaning that we don’t currently have a side-by-side comparison
> of what ads Corbyn and his inner circle were served as opposed to the
> general public. The book, Ctrl Alt Delete: How Politics and the Media
> Crashed Our Democracy, purports to provide specific examples of what
> Corbyn would have seen.
>
>
> On one hand, this is a strange story about how a baby boomer politician
> and his closest political buddies did not know what ads were being
> served on behalf of their own campaign. (Granted, the structure of the
> U.K. government means that party elections have astronomically low
> financial stakes. £4.3 million was spent across all U.K. political
> parties for the 2017 election; compare that to the $10 billion
> advertising price tag for the 2016 U.S. presidential election.) But more
> importantly, it illustrates how Facebook’s “sniper targeting”
> advertising tools can be used to infiltrate the thoughts of major public
> figures and their closest allies, and in a successful scenario,
> manipulate their thinking. As of May, Facebook has new thresholds for
> political ads, which broadly includes anything related to a candidate,
> election, vote, legislative issue. But anything that doesn’t fit into
> that definition of “political” will remain relatively unregulated.
> Clearly, this
