<story><title>Facebook Decided Which Users Are Interested in Nazis – and Let Ads Target Them</title><url>https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-facebook-nazi-metal-ads-20190221-story.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>RickS</author><text>What&amp;#x27;s the expected fix here?&lt;p&gt;I was unfamiliar with the bands and most of the people in those targeting lists.&lt;p&gt;The way I see it, these are the ways you can handle this:&lt;p&gt;1) Facebook builds this data the hard way. They staff a team of experts on &amp;quot;undesirables&amp;quot;, who research and implement custom blocklists at facebook&amp;#x27;s scale. Insanely cash and time intensive, to say nothing of the &amp;quot;who decides what&amp;#x27;s undesirable&amp;quot; problem.&lt;p&gt;2) Spread cost and effort by amassing a central repository of known baddies, and all the orgs contribute and share access. The government does something like this with hashes of sex trafficking imagery, so that eng teams can filter against a blacklist. I think this topic FAR more nuanced and less binary than &amp;quot;does this picture contain illegal pornography or nah&amp;quot;. Who maintains this list of undesirables? You&amp;#x27;re at &amp;quot;social credit score&amp;quot; in a hurry.&lt;p&gt;3) Algos. You let software extrapolate commonalities from known-bad actors – school shooters, confirmed russian propaganda branches, etc. And let the machine learn their language and flag accordingly. This is going to be coarse and stupid in the way ML always is, and local business owners with names like Heinrich are gonna get their livelihoods smashed accidentally here and there. Not great.&lt;p&gt;4) What Simulacra said – you just turn the whole targeting infra off. Facebook stops making money. This is great, I&amp;#x27;d love to see it as regulation, but it&amp;#x27;s a big stretch, and very lofty when phrased like this.&lt;p&gt;5) Some kind of adtech equivalent of finance&amp;#x27;s KYC (Know Your Customer) regulation. Tie ad buys to confirmable, prosecutable identities, and rather than filtering before launch, aggressively follow up after launch. You run an ad campaign for nazis? Cool, your LLC and its primary stakeholders are permabanned. Facebook has already tried light versions of this, but it was lip service.&lt;p&gt;IMO 4 and 5 are the places to spend effort. I think we nee to start having conversations that do away with the idea that humans are autonomous and impervious to influence, and start having the discussion in a new context: When and how are you allowed to manipulate the minds of citizens at scale, and what kind of paper trail does it leave?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pbreit</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t understand why we don&amp;#x27;t let such platforms adopt a more laissez faire approach to such situations. There&amp;#x27;s an inordinate amount of pressure to curb free speech these days which seems very un-American.</text></comment>
<story><title>Facebook Decided Which Users Are Interested in Nazis – and Let Ads Target Them</title><url>https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-facebook-nazi-metal-ads-20190221-story.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>RickS</author><text>What&amp;#x27;s the expected fix here?&lt;p&gt;I was unfamiliar with the bands and most of the people in those targeting lists.&lt;p&gt;The way I see it, these are the ways you can handle this:&lt;p&gt;1) Facebook builds this data the hard way. They staff a team of experts on &amp;quot;undesirables&amp;quot;, who research and implement custom blocklists at facebook&amp;#x27;s scale. Insanely cash and time intensive, to say nothing of the &amp;quot;who decides what&amp;#x27;s undesirable&amp;quot; problem.&lt;p&gt;2) Spread cost and effort by amassing a central repository of known baddies, and all the orgs contribute and share access. The government does something like this with hashes of sex trafficking imagery, so that eng teams can filter against a blacklist. I think this topic FAR more nuanced and less binary than &amp;quot;does this picture contain illegal pornography or nah&amp;quot;. Who maintains this list of undesirables? You&amp;#x27;re at &amp;quot;social credit score&amp;quot; in a hurry.&lt;p&gt;3) Algos. You let software extrapolate commonalities from known-bad actors – school shooters, confirmed russian propaganda branches, etc. And let the machine learn their language and flag accordingly. This is going to be coarse and stupid in the way ML always is, and local business owners with names like Heinrich are gonna get their livelihoods smashed accidentally here and there. Not great.&lt;p&gt;4) What Simulacra said – you just turn the whole targeting infra off. Facebook stops making money. This is great, I&amp;#x27;d love to see it as regulation, but it&amp;#x27;s a big stretch, and very lofty when phrased like this.&lt;p&gt;5) Some kind of adtech equivalent of finance&amp;#x27;s KYC (Know Your Customer) regulation. Tie ad buys to confirmable, prosecutable identities, and rather than filtering before launch, aggressively follow up after launch. You run an ad campaign for nazis? Cool, your LLC and its primary stakeholders are permabanned. Facebook has already tried light versions of this, but it was lip service.&lt;p&gt;IMO 4 and 5 are the places to spend effort. I think we nee to start having conversations that do away with the idea that humans are autonomous and impervious to influence, and start having the discussion in a new context: When and how are you allowed to manipulate the minds of citizens at scale, and what kind of paper trail does it leave?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pdpi</author><text>I&amp;#x27;d argue the rule should simply be that, the moment money changes hands, you can either tell me who paid you for a service, or you&amp;#x27;re legally liable for performing that service yourself. KYC for ads would then just be a natural consequence of this.</text></comment>