A disturbing report at Talking Points Memo by Julia Angwin, Madeleine Varner and Ariana Tobin picks up on their ProPublica investigation that found Facebook’s ad buying services were being used by anti-semitic groups.
Want to market Nazi memorabilia, or recruit marchers for a far-right rally? Facebook’s self-service ad-buying platform had the right audience for you.
Until this week, when we asked Facebook about it, the world’s largest social network enabled advertisers to direct their pitches to the news feeds of almost 2,300 people who expressed interest in the topics of “Jew hater,” “How to burn jews,” or, “History of ‘why jews ruin the world.’”
To test if these ad categories were real, we paid $30 to target those groups with three “promoted posts” — in which a ProPublica article or post was displayed in their news feeds. Facebook approved all three ads within 15 minutes.
The thing that’s rather unnerving is that this wasn’t a deliberate choice by Facebook — it was all automatic.
...In all likelihood, the ad categories that we spotted were automatically generated because people had listed those anti-Semitic themes on their Facebook profiles as an interest, an employer or a “field of study.” Facebook’s algorithm automatically transforms people’s declared interests into advertising categories.
emphasis added
Facebook took the ad categories down once their attention was called to them, but that they were generated automatically with no human intervention is hardly reassuring. It doesn't exculpate Facebook from responsibility. Read The Whole Thing. (ProPublica link) There’s other troubling things that ProPublica has found in previous investigations of Facebook.
What we’re finding out (the hard way) is that these wonderful information systems built on top of the Internet come with the potential for misuse and have other flaws. That’s pretty much true of any technology, of course — but what we’re also seeing is that the people who have built this and marketed it to us have been pretty damn negligent about watching for it or even thinking about it.
The evidence that Facebook and other social media companies were used against us by Russia to skew our election, that they’ve been attempting more active measures, coupled with this almost accidental exercise in bigotry should be extremely troubling. More and more of our economy is built on this virtual infrastructure, managed by people with a pretty damn casual attitude about possible bad actors and structural weaknesses. (Hey Equifax — we see you.) What it comes down to is money, of course — and the digital economy like so much else these days is big on maximizing shareholder value while cutting as many corners as possible.
Don’t even think about what active Cyberwar could mean. We haven’t had a digital Pearl Harbor yet — that we know of — but the potential is there. (And when you think about the election of Donald Trump in that context...)
We’re building castles not in the air but in the Cloud. What happens when an ill wind starts to blow?