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Mark Zuckerberg: "Cambridge Analytica" (2017)

124 points mfiguiere 1 hour ago 36 comments

dudefeliciano 43 minutes ago | parent

> This document is from In re Facebook, Inc. Securities Litigation (2026).

rkrueger11 13 minutes ago | parent

Yeah, I’d argue it shouldn’t have the (2017) added to it’s title, given that notation is supposed to be used when posting something which was published in the past, not something that simply occurred in the past.

pbalau 31 minutes ago | parent

Zuk asked how the thing worked. Boz answered.

Might be a challenge to some, but one can find out things if they pay enough attention to data.

moritzwarhier 28 minutes ago | parent

> Might be a challenge to some, but one can find out things if they pay enough attention to dat

Your first sentence is purely descriptive.

In your second sentence, I'm either "challenged" or blatantly too stupid to understand what you are trying to say.

Are you letting yourself being riled up by random X comments or is there some unknown part of the discussion I've never heard about?

whatever1 30 minutes ago | parent

The “Only do evil” company

jjtheblunt 16 minutes ago | parent

counterpoint : animal rescues and shelters benefit greatly in getting adoptable animals before people scrolling, for super low cost to them, but of course because the scrolling people are seeing ads.

hedayet 2 minutes ago | parent

counter-counterpoint: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler_and_vegetarianism

gruez 30 minutes ago | parent

So what's the implication supposed to be? The obvious one is probably something like "facebook was undermining democracy and supporting Trump!", but a more careful reading reveals:

1. they apparently gave advice to both the clinton and trump campaign

2. the trump campaign did targeted marketing better (ie. targeting the base rather than the marginal voter)

3. "I'm skeptical that Cambridge Analytica has any data or expertise that couldn't be replicated readily by someone else"

Of course, you can still argue that facebook undermined democracy, by providing the marketing tools that allowed the trump campaign to effectively reach voters, but at what point can you blame a tool for the outcome of an election? Some say the mamdani effectively used tiktok to rally voters, so does that mean we should be up and arms about the mamdani campaign? How far back can we go? The invention of the printing press led to all sorts of partisan newspapers, was that anti-democratic?

futuraperdita 25 minutes ago | parent

Agree with this. Regardless of the politics involved, this exchange seems pretty mundane in the grand scheme of corporate emails. Taking Bosworth at face value here, it sounds like both camps got the same advice, one acted on it in full, the other didn't, the party that did saw better results, and on top of that had a better ads/targeting strategy that maximized platform ROI. If we removed the political parties from this and made them two companies, I'm not sure HN would have much of an issue with its content.

someothherguyy 24 minutes ago | parent

FA and CA lied to users, and sent data from all the friends of users who filled out a form to CA

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...

If that was the advice, it seems pretty terrible.

gruez 8 minutes ago | parent

>FA and CA lied to users

Where's the lie?

>If that was the advice, it seems pretty terrible.

If you read either my comment or the email, you'd know what the advice was.

TZubiri 23 minutes ago | parent

I think it would be an inmensely naive and unnuanced take to look at this email and think that the truth is finally being revealed about CA.

What's going on is that this is a very early email, and it's being brought up during discovery on a current legal proceeding (and it's not necessarily the first time it's made public).

It's also clear to anyone that knows about the case that this isn't an accurate explanation of what Cambridge Analytica was doing and why it was causing concern. There's no mention of Facebook Apps unrelated to politics being used to collect user data, and there's no mention of the data being collected not only of the users that install these apps, but also their friends (which would lead to the revision of the Graph API and the implementation of minimum demographic controls).

So to me it reads like a document that Meta puts forward to prove that Zuckerberg:

- Had no idea at the time of what was going on

- Was making efforts to understand what was going on

I haven't checked which party used this document as an exhibit in an argument, although this might be available information, but I'd wager a guess that it will or has been used by Meta.

So if you are looking at this document as "the truth uncovered", I'd suggest to look for more nuance instead of easy answers.

gruez 4 minutes ago | parent

>I think it would be an inmensely naive and unnuanced take to look at this email and think that the truth is finally being revealed about CA.

What was revealed that we didn't already know?

>I'd suggest to look for more nuance instead of easy answers.

Shouldn't you be looking for said answers and presenting them, instead of chastising me for not having the answers?

zug_zug 21 minutes ago | parent

Hopefully it’s apparent to you now at least, that providing names and political affiliations to the current administration is dangerous.

za_creature 15 minutes ago | parent

Lok tar ogar!

… or swobu

said the french

goodluckchuck 14 minutes ago | parent

Voters tell their names and affiliations when registering to vote. Registration rolls are readily available public data.

ares623 11 minutes ago | parent

> so does that mean we should be up and arms about the mamdani campaign?

No, we should be up and arms about TikTok.

gruez 9 minutes ago | parent

And what else? Cable news? Talk radio? Printing press?

ares623 4 minutes ago | parent

Uhh, until recently, didn't those three undergo exactly the same kind of scrutiny and have had the regulations we are talking about here put in place for them?

Of course, all that existing regulation is being undone, thanks in part to TikTok, Facebook, etc.

Exoristos 2 minutes ago | parent

[delayed]

goshx 26 minutes ago | parent

IMHO, that was the beginning of the deep troubles we are in right now, and cause of the political polarization. The brainwash was very effective, not only in the US, but also in Brazil.

TZubiri 21 minutes ago | parent

I'm not sure what the claim or charge would be. While I wouldn't feel comfortable participating in political campaigns for democracies of other countries, and I would feel defensive about attempts to influence elections in my country, in the end these 'attacks' rely on actual citizens to vote, so the citizen still holds the power and makes the final decision, so I don't think it's an issue of critical severity, and I don't think it's illegitimate to try to persuade citizens of another country to vote in such matter at a constitutional level (excluding specific laws), even if I personally would feel icky about it.

Now there may be other potential issues that would elevate the matter, if disinformation is used, or if personal information about citizens is obtained illegitimately, then they could constitute crimes in their own right. Whether the crime is aggravated by its intent to subvert the democratic institution would be a legitimate question, but without the accessory crimes, I don't think political campaigns from non citizen actors are themselves illegal, just icky.

TheOtherHobbes 6 minutes ago | parent

>Now there may be other potential issues that would elevate the matter, if disinformation is used, or if personal information about citizens is obtained illegitimately, then they could constitute crimes in their own right.

Both of those happened. And are still happening.

This is algorithmic behaviour modification using sophisticated psychological priming that most people - including people who consider themselves educated and rational - have no defences against.

It very much was, and is, an issue of critical severity. CA and Nix specifically sold themselves as election fixers, but most people using FB would have been completely unware they were being influenced.

arewethereyeta 13 minutes ago | parent

Brainwash on what subjects?

thih9 17 minutes ago | parent

> [This document is from In re Facebook, Inc. Securities Litigation (2026).]

It looks like we only have access to this now? If yes, this would be development and I’d remove the “2017” from the title.

layer8 15 minutes ago | parent

Content:

  From: Mark Zuckerberg
  Sent: Monday, January 30, 2017 8:10:16 AM
  Subject: Cambridge Analytica
I'm seeing more articles like this one come out claiming the Trump's campaign used FB and analytics in very precise ways that go beyond what others have done before:

https://motherboard.vice.com/read/big-data-cambridge-analyti...

I can't tell how much of this is just a dramatic telling the best practices of marketing today seen through the lens of survivorship bias, or how much of what they're done is truly novel and interesting work, at least in the field of politics.

Can someone explain to me what they actually did from an analytics and ads perspective, and how advanced it actually was?

  From: Andrew Bosworth
  Sent: Monday, January 30, 2017 9:58:03 AM
  Subject: Re: Cambridge Analytica
My general understanding is the Trump campaign actually took all the advice we gave unlike Hillary. They used all our tools. That *is* surprisingly novel as most advertisers have a "way of doing things" and are slow to adapt but speaks more of our platform than CA. A few examples:

- They ran tens of thousands of creatives and iterated quickly to find what was working, further sub segmenting audiences (using custom audiences) based on response.

- They used different formats early but found video was most effective so were using that primarily by the end (90+%)

- They were primarily fundraising on Facebook, which means rallying the base instead of trying to win over marginal voters. That was an effective strategy that lead to very low CPMs and makes iterating to find market fiit for your message much easier. The rumor is that they turned tens of millions spent on FB into hundreds of millions for the campaign, which they spent elsewhere.

I've heard separately that their entire electoral strategy was to rally the base rather than send a broadly appealing message. Few marketers are interested in doing that so it stands to reason they would have unusual results.

Net net, my guess is that CA did have to do some interesting work to quickly take results from campaigns and spin them into the next, and the campaign had to do some interesting work to generate so much creative, but I'm skeptical that Cambridge Analytica has any data or expertise that couldn't be replicated readily by someone else. I'm suspect we will find that the majority of the advantage was using our platform to the fullest.

boz

[This document is from In re Facebook, Inc. Securities Litigation (2026).]

dehrmann 9 minutes ago | parent

When I interviewed at Facebook in 2019, one interviewer was on an integrity team. I'm not sure if it was his take or what the org settled on, but it's that Cambridge Analytica wasn't Facebook's fault (users willingly granted access), but it was their problem. Not surprising some of the same techniques got used by others.

Tycho 5 minutes ago | parent

There was that leaked video of a Cambridge Analytica exec bragging that they came up with the handcuffs in the Crooked Hillary meme. Except that was hardly a big thing. The phrase Crooked Hillary was arguably “linguistic killshot” by Trump; CA’s little riff on it was insignificant - and that was them trying to sell their services with their most impressive feats.

firasd 4 minutes ago | parent

This was a fake scandal. "Democrats seem to like Harry Potter" is not some genius psychographic ad targeting strategy. The Cambridge Analytica people were selling snake oil

That said they did buy user data from a quiz app which is not really how you were supposed to use the Facebook Platform so that still wasn't really FB's fault I think

So the real issue was just people trying to blame the 2016 election (adverse to their interests if they were anti-Trump) on Zuck.

Heck to this day Ben Shapiro is one of the biggest podcasts and Tucker's show is even bigger than him so the right wing is a real force in American politics and not just propped up by FB's old newsfeed algo

devonsolomon 2 minutes ago | parent

Cambridge Analytica developed a database for The Trump campaign that classified 3.5 million Black Americans as “Deterrence”, used as audiences in FB advertising intended to discourage voting.

We know Cambridge Analytica weren’t afraid to subvert the core principle of democracy like that because we have documents from their campaigns in Trinidad and Tobago to do the same thing, presenting not voting as an act of youth rebellion with the aim of reducing turnout among young Black Trinidadians.

(Discouraging black people from voting seems to be a theme)

Sure, as Mark says, anyone with the voter data and capital could likely create that audience and run those ads, but anyone with integrity wouldn’t. The story is not about unbelievable sophistication, it’s about using the tools Facebook provided to subvert democracy.

Mark is right that they’re nothing special. But that doesn’t dismiss them, the fact that they’re nothing special is the scary part.

brcmthrowaway 2 minutes ago | parent

The amount of media furore over this at the time, really made me think CA was doing something illegal. Was that just Gawker/Buzzfeed journalism?