Labour HQ used Facebook ads to deceive Jeremy Corbyn during election campaign (opens in new tab)

Advertising's purpose is to infect your mind and trick it into thinking what the ad-buyer wants. In the past it wasn't as big of a deal, advertisers are less likely to use direct lies or manipulations if the audience is big: they can get backlash, some tricks have the opposite effect on some people, etc. Now that they can target individuals every trick in the book is fair game.

Now, if you talk to someone about these problems, they'll usually say something like "oh well it might affect other people, but ads don't affect me." Or "why would they care that much about me?" Guess what, if a politician can be be targeted and manipulated, a disgruntled coworker can target you, your ex can target you.

If a corporation microtargets an ad at me to let me know they have a product they believe I will like, that's a little creepy, but it might even be helpful. Maybe I'm in the market for a new backpack; maybe a company I've had a positive experience with before has just released a new model I might like. If they target an ad at me about their new backpack, and I buy it, that's arguably helpful for both of us...and at a minimum it's not deceptive. They're not trying to mislead me into thinking they have a backpack I might want, they're trying to ensure that I know the true fact that they have a backpack I might want. (False advertising is a legit issue, but it's also already illegal, already pretty well regulated, and not what we're talking about here.)

Similarly, an individual using ads to try and get hired is again trying to convey a specific message to a specific person using an unusual medium. The message, in this case, being "I'm cool, you should hire me", which is the same message every job applicant sends when they email their CV in. The message is fine, and the medium is merely novel; no big deal.

What we're talking about in this case is outright deception. Labour staff (allegedly) microtargeted ads to present a false perception; this is more like Uber's Greyball program than it is standard adtech. And, notably, the message wouldn't have been fine if delivered in some other medium. If Labour HQ had prepared a falsified spreadsheet of ad buys, and emailed that to Corbyn, that would be just as bad.

This is really a chain of command problem rather than specifically an advertisement problem.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advertising_Standards_Author...

I think that regulation forcing advertising platforms to be more transparent about who is buying adverts will help.

This time the goal was to discredit someone.

You can determine/define a minimum group size, and regulation that prohibits finer-grained targeting.

This is something that happens in many other fields, for example to prevent insurance policies from becoming individualized cost-spreading (with front-loading) plus profit-margin.

(Or, should be happening. And this is one of the battles around regulation. When people see their costs skyrocketing, they should ask themselves whether that is the "cost of regulation", or rather the cost of its absence.)

It can become quite difficult to micromanage through regulation. Sometimes, that's necessary, e.g. with pollutants whose individual effects vary dramatically.

But sometimes, it's possible to observe boundaries beyond which negative effects become quite pronounced with escalating proclivity. You draw the line there, or a bit on the safe side, and say, "Thou shall not pass."

If people get the choice, as opposed to being dictated to, I think that they are going to find that in most domains, they don't want to be micro-targeted. And maybe, we will come up with laws and regulations to stop it -- or substantially hinder it, at least.

It can even feed into a healthy society. How will you ever learn of, and possibly experience, anything new and "out of your comfort zone", if you are constantly being algorithmically channeled back into it?

What I’m saying is that the narrative of a manifesto or even what a political party stands for is corrupted by being “all things to all people” in their messaging.

The endgame of this notion is politicians promising each constituent exactly what they want to hear and concealing what they don't.

In pre-Internet days, it was difficult to get someone's views in their own words, especially in real-time. All information was filtered through various sources before being passed onto the consumer. Now, it's straightforward to check their website, or their twitter, or their youtube.

This, of course, is not perfect and requires a root-of-trust involving Google and DNS, but I'd certainly take that tradeoff versus Guy On The Street asserting things.

Subversion and deception are everywhere online now and we live in a perpetual psy-ops nightmare.

By which I mean leaving facebook is a start, but there's a lot more to protecting yourself against false information.

Blairites have little career under any leader until memories have faded and there's another tipping point like Black Monday that brought them in in the first place. Brexit looks like it could easily cause one of those, going on current negotiations, so perhaps they won't be waiting too long.

That he met with Hamas is no different to his meetings with Adams and others of Sinn Fein years before. Both seem consistent with seeking peace. I could easily classify it as naive and unlikely to achieve much outside of government.

Then again, considering both Major era Tories and Blair era Labour including Mo Mowlam met Sinn Fein regularly and that ultimately led to the Good Friday Agreement, who knows if those meetings helped any.

No peace will come to Palestine without all parties reaching agreement and some resolution of Israel's illegal occupation and settlements. That has to start with someone meeting Hamas and Israel - though I doubt he could make a difference. I'm not sure I call the stop the war coalition a tiny fringe audience though.

Blunkett was far out on the loony left with Derek Hatton's Militant Liverpool. That Blunkett managed to reinvent himself as a right-wing Tory the moment he got a ministry perhaps shows that he didn't mellow through the years as go so far left as to reappear on the right. He's remained well to the right since leaving politics. I don't see anything disingenuous about the comparison or that his views are somewhat different now to then.

They chose to "refuse to run the more extreme ads" that were well within the bounds of moderate Labour policy of relatively recent years. With a manifesto that resonated pretty well with voters on most issues as it turned out yet didn't include several of Corbyn's actual well known fringe views such as unliatera disarmament as that went against agreed party policy. The manifesto is what counts.

Thus he's being treated as some dangerous extremist whose views can't even be let out in public during an election campaign. Views that, as put forward in the manifesto, are not actually that extreme. It's miles away from Foot's longest suicide note manifesto for example.

I think the hacking thing always had a bit more of a Robin Hood complex coupled with it. The lone renegades taking on powers and organizations much larger than themselves for entertainment, or acquiring status that they weren't otherwise bestowed.

This is powers using it to manipulate other powers, where the price is paid by the people 'Robin Hoods' were never originally out to exploit.

The idea that you can buy elections through advertising is a typical position of the left (and these days, by extension, of journalists). Recall the huge fuss Obama and the Democrats kicked up when campaign spending limits were removed by the Supreme Court? Obama was even talking about a constitutional amendment. Then Hillary outspent Trump 2:1 on advertising and still lost. They disproved their own thesis.

The genesis of these articles - the media’s quest to explain how it failed to manipulate our Presiential election in favor of their chosen candidate - is also based on a false premise. Russian Facebook ads didn’t get Trump elected. The choice by Democrats to run a candidate against him that much of the country disliked did.

Exactly. Targeted advertising is the junk mail that stuffs your mailbox and the spam that stuffs your inbox (or would, without massive technical mitigations). It's not the ads you see in a magazine or while watching TV.