Why Facebook can’t change

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My €0.02-worth on the bigger story behind the Cambridge Analytica shenanigans:

Watching Alexander Nix and his Cambridge Analytica henchmen bragging on Channel 4 News about their impressive repertoire of dirty tricks, the character who came irresistibly to mind was Gordon Liddy. Readers with long memories will recall him as the guy who ran the “White House Plumbers” during the presidency of Richard Nixon. Liddy directed the Watergate burglary in June 1972, detection of which started the long chain of events that eventually led to Nixon’s resignation two years later. For his pains, Liddy spent more than four years in jail, but went on to build a second career as a talk-show host and D-list celebrity. Reflecting on this, one wonders what job opportunities – other than those of pantomime villain and Savile Row mannequin – will now be available to Mr Nix.

The investigations into the company by Carole Cadwalladr, in the Observer, reveal that in every respect save one important one, CA looks like a standard-issue psychological warfare outfit of the kind retained by political parties – and sometimes national security services – since time immemorial. It did, however, have one unique selling proposition, namely its ability to offer “psychographic” services: voter-targeting strategies allegedly derived by analysing the personal data of more than 50 million US users of Facebook.

The story of how those data made the journey from Facebook’s servers to Cambridge Analytica’s is now widely known. But it is also widely misunderstood…

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Why you can’t believe what you see (or hear)

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This morning’s Observer column:

When John F Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on 22 November 1963, he was on his way to deliver a speech to the assembled worthies of the city. A copy of his script for the ill-fated oration was later presented by Lyndon Johnson to Stanley Marcus, head of the department store chain Neiman Marcus, whose daughter was in the expectant audience that day.

The text has long been available on the internet and it makes for poignant reading, not just because of what happened at Dealey Plaza that day, but because large chunks of it look eerily prescient in the age of Trump. JFK was a terrific public speaker who employed superb speechwriters (especially Theodore Sorensen). His speeches were invariably elegant and memorable: he had a great eye for a good phrase, and his delivery was usually faultless. So his audience in Dallas knew that they were in for a treat – until Lee Harvey Oswald terminated the dream.

Last week, 55 years on, we finally got to hear what Kennedy’s audience might have heard…

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Enlightenment, what enlightenment?

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Sam Moyn is not impressed by Steven Pinker’s new book – Enlightenment Now:

In laying out his vision of betterment in Enlightenment Now, Pinker confronts alternative trends and looming threats for progress only in order to brush them off. He does not take seriously the risk of major catastrophes, such as the collapse of a recent era of peace or the outbreak of a global pandemic, which he believes is easy to magnify beyond reason. As for environmental degradation, humanity will surely find a way to counteract this in time. “As the world has gotten richer,” Pinker explains, “nature has begun to rebound”—as if the failure of a few prophecies of ecological disaster to come to pass on schedule means the planet is infinitely resilient. Once he gets around to acknowledging that climate change is an actual problem, Pinker spends much of his time attacking “climate justice warriors” for their anti-capitalist hysteria.

Lots more in that sceptical vein. Worth reading in full.

Facebook’s sudden attack of modesty

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One of the most illuminating things you can do as a researcher is to go into Facebook not as a schmuck (i.e. user) but as an advertiser — just like your average Russian agent. Upon entering, you quickly begin to appreciate the amazing ingenuity and comprehensiveness of the machine that Zuckerberg & Co have constructed. It’s utterly brilliant, with a great user interface and lots of automated advice and help for choosing your targeted audience.

When doing this a while back — a few months after Trump’s election — I noticed that there was a list of case studies of different industries showing how effective a given targeting strategy could be in a particular application. One of those ‘industries’ was “Government and Politics” and among the case studies was a story of how a Facebook campaign had proved instrumental in helping a congressional candidate to win against considerable odds. I meant to grab some screenshots of this uplifting tale, but of course forget to do so. When I went back later, the case study had, well, disappeared.

Luckily, someone else had the presence of mind to grab a screenshot. The Intercept, bless it, has the before-and-after comparison shown in the image above. They are Facebook screenshots from (left) June 2017 and (right) March 2018.

Interesting, ne c’est pas?

In surveillance capitalism, extremism is good for business

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This morning’s Observer column:

Zeynep Tufecki is one of the shrewdest writers on technology around. A while back, when researching an article on why (and how) Donald Trump appealed to those who supported him, she needed some direct quotes from the man himself and so turned to YouTube, which has a useful archive of videos of his campaign rallies. She then noticed something interesting. “YouTube started to recommend and ‘autoplay’ videos for me,” she wrote, “that featured white supremacist rants, Holocaust denials and other disturbing content.”

Since Tufecki was not in the habit of watching far-right fare on YouTube, she wondered if this was an exclusively rightwing phenomenon. So she created another YouTube account and started watching Hillary Clinton’s and Bernie Sanders’s campaign videos, following the accompanying links suggested by YouTube’s “recommender” algorithm. “Before long,” she reported, “I was being directed to videos of a leftish conspiratorial cast, including arguments about the existence of secret government agencies and allegations that the United States government was behind the attacks of 11 September. As with the Trump videos, YouTube was recommending content that was more and more extreme.”

Read on

Why scorning Trump didn’t work

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While thinking about Trump this morning, I came on this astute observation by P.J. O’Rourke. He’s right: Establishment scorn of Trump was as toxic as Hillary Clinton’s reference to his supporters as “deplorables”. This lesson has still to be learned by many ‘Remain’ supporters in the UK.

Stephen Hawking RIP

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I didn’t know Stephen Hawking personally, though I often saw him around and in my early years in Cambridge (late-1960s, long before he was famous) my lab was in the same complex of buildings in Mill Lane as the department where he worked. The buildings had no ramps for wheelchair access at that time, so sometimes I or my fellow-students would help his wife to lift his (non-motorised) wheelchair up the steps into the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP).

At the time, of course, we had no idea of how important he was destined to be. The only clue was when one went into the DAMTP tea-room at 10.30am or 3.30pm (scientific departments have a tradition of gathering for morning coffee and afternoon tea) his wheelchair was always surrounded by a group of devoted graduate students, some of whom acted as his interpreter and wrote the equations on a blackboard when he was giving a lecture. It was clear then that — at least in the rarefied world of cosmologists — he was already a real celebrity.

One of those students was Nathan Myhrvold, who went on to become the Chief Technology Officer of Microsoft and a close colleague of Bill Gates. My hunch is that Nathan was the link that persuaded Gates to endow the Gates Scholars (which is Cambridge’s version of Oxford’s Rhodes Scholars scheme).

For me, the most striking moment in Hawking’s career was when he was elected to the Lucasian Professorship of Mathematics. This was the professorial chair that had once been occupied by Isaac Newton, and it seemed an appropriate recognition of the significance of Hawking’s work.

Indeed, watching Hawking in public and marvelling at his astonishing and (to me) inaccessible brilliance, it was Newton who came to mind, and the statue of him in the chapel of Trinity College, of which Wordsworth wrote in The Prelude:

And from my pillow, looking forth by light
Of moon or favouring stars, I could behold
The Antechapel where the Statue stood
Of Newton, with his prism and his silent face,
The marble index of a Mind for ever
Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.

Quote of the Day

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”This is the president’s vision. My function, really, as an economist is to try to provide the underlying analytics that confirm his intuition. And his intuition is always right in these matters.”

Evidence-based policymaking, courtesy of Peter Navarro, Trump’s Trade Advisor as told to Bloomberg.