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Did Facebook's ad platform give Donald Trump an unfair advantage in the 2016 election? That's a quest
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| February 26 · Issue #91 · View online |
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Did Facebook’s ad platform give Donald Trump an unfair advantage in the 2016 election? That’s a question I tried to answer last October, when I looked at how the dynamics of the ad platform can promote more polarizing ads. It came up again over the weekend, as more people digested Antonio García Martínez’s op-ed in Wired, which examines the same issue. Here’s how he put it: During the run-up to the election, the Trump and Clinton campaigns bid ruthlessly for the same online real estate in front of the same swing-state voters. But because Trump used provocative content to stoke social media buzz, and he was better able to drive likes, comments, and shares than Clinton, his bids received a boost from Facebook’s click model, effectively winning him more media for less money. In essence, Clinton was paying Manhattan prices for the square footage on your smartphone’s screen, while Trump was paying Detroit prices. Facebook users in swing states who felt Trump had taken over their news feeds may not have been hallucinating. The question is how big that discrepancy really is. I have some new information to share here, but first we need to review how CPMs work on Facebook. From my October story: To place an ad on Facebook, a political campaign has to win an automated auction. At any given time, millions of advertisers are competing to place ads in front of Facebook’s 2 billion-plus daily users. Advertisers can price their ads by the number of people who see it, the number of people who click on a link, or the number of people who engage with the ad, such as by watching a video or installing an app. Facebook averages out the cost of these various ads into a figure it calls an “eCPM” — the effective cost per 1,000 impressions. The CPM is a standard measurement in the advertising industry. But Facebook’s ads differ from traditional ads in an important way: the company offers advertisers a monetary incentive to create more engaging ads. As users begin to click, share, and engage with an ad, Facebook begins showing it to more people. That lowers the eCPM, often allowing advertisers to reach a larger audience for the same amount of money. In some cases, Facebook’s automated systems will choose to display ads that had lower bids, if it believes the content of the ad will draw more engagement from users. The monetary goal of this system is to keep users scrolling through the News Feed, maximizing the number of ads that they encounter. In my piece, I wrote about a senior Facebook employee who said Trump’s CPM was substantially lower than Clinton’s, according to communications I reviewed. At the time, I couldn’t find a second source for something else the employee said, which was that Trump’s effective CPM averaged $0.06, compared with $1.06 for Clinton. Then came a tweet over the weekend from Brad Parscale, who led Trump’s digital advertising efforts. Parscale hadn’t responded when I asked him for comment last year, but he was happy to boast to Wired editor Nicholas Thompson: “I bet we were 100x to 200x her. We had CPMs that were pennies in some cases. This is why @realDonaldTrump was a perfect candidate for FaceBook.” (No, I don’t know why he capitalized the B in Facebook. #EditTweets) So how much did the Clinton campaign pay? Here it gets a bit tricky. Last fall, a member of the Clinton campaign team told me that their CPMs averaged $10 to $30, which they described as typical for a targeted Facebook campaign. But that figure represented the cost only of paid impressions. As described above, ads that perform well can reach larger audiences as they receive likes, comments, and shares — so-called “organic reach.” That lowers the overall cost of the ad. When Parscale says “we had CPMs that were pennies in some cases,” he almost certainly took organic reach into account. (It’s very hard to place an ad for anything on Facebook for literal pennies.) Unfortunately, the person I spoke with at the Clinton campaign no longer had access to organic reach data. Still, they said, it was unlikely that organic reach would have lowered a $10 paid CPM to a $1 organic one, as my Facebook source had suggested. Facebook’s official word to me on the subject last year was that no candidate had a clear advantage in CPMs: A Facebook spokesperson said ad costs fluctuated for both candidates during the campaign, and that at different times each candidate had the advantage. The spokesperson argued that Facebook’s ad platform usually limits the spread of polarizing messages — messages that reflect the views of a minority of the population — by making them more expensive to distribute. This occurs naturally, because News Feed algorithms resist sharing items that are likely to drive people away. Andrew Bosworth, who ran Facebook’s ad platform during the 2016 election, tweeted today that the platform is now less susceptible to being gamed than it once was. But there’s mounting evidence that during the campaign, polarizing messages did resonate broadly. And for Donald Trump, they resonated quite cheaply. |
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5 Things Barack Obama Said in His Weirdly Off-the-Record MIT Speech
Obama had a few mild things to say about social networking and democracy on Friday: Obama described social media platforms as a “hugely powerful potential force for good,” but then immediately hedged. “What’s also true is that our social media platforms are just a tool,” he said. “ISIS can use that tool. Neo-Nazis can use that tool. I do think the large platforms—Google and Facebook being the most obvious, Twitter and others as well, are part of that ecosystem—have to have a conversation about their business model that recognizes they are a public good as well as a commercial enterprise. They’re not just an invisible platform, they’re shaping our culture in powerful ways.” Much of that shaping is bad, according to Obama. “Essentially we now have entirely different realities that are being created with not just different opinions, but now different facts,” he said. “And this isn’t just by the way Russian inspired bots and fake news. This is Fox News vs. The New York Times editorial page. If you look at these different sources of information, they do not describe the same thing. In some cases, they don’t even talk about the same thing. And so it is very difficult to figure out how democracy works over the long term in those circumstances.”
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Untrue-Tube: Monetizing Misery and Disinformation
Jonathan Albright, a data journalist and research director at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, used the API to find the “next up” recommended video for 9,000 uploads that contained the words “crisis actor” in the title. “Themes include rape game jokes, shock reality social experiments, celebrity pedophilia, ‘false flag’ rants, and terror-related conspiracy theories dating back to the Oklahoma City attack in 1995,” he writes: Every time there’s a mass shooting or terror event, due to the subsequent backlash, this YouTube conspiracy genre grows in size and economic value. The search and recommendation algorithms will naturally ensure these videos are connected and thus have more reach. In other words, due to the increasing depth of the content offerings and ongoing optimization of Youtube’s algorithms, it’s getting harder to counter these types of campaigns with real, factual information.
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The algorithm I worked on at Google recommended Alex Jones' videos more than 15,000,000,000 times, to some of the most vulnerable people in the nation.
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6:21 PM - 24 Feb 2018
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Facebook and Google Struggle to Squelch ‘Crisis Actor’ Posts
Missed this on Friday: the Times talked to a Facebook executive about its crisis-actor problem: Mary deBree, head of content policy at Facebook, said the company had not been perfect at staving off certain content and most likely would not be in the future. “False information is like any other challenge where humans are involved: It evolves, much like a rumor or urban legend would. It also masks itself as legitimate speech,” she said. “Our job is to do better at keeping this bad content off Facebook without undermining the reason people come here — to see things happening in the world around them and have a conversation about them.”
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Hoax attempts against Miami Herald augur broader information wars
Tim Johnson writes about Parkland hoaxes on social media targeting journalists, including one in which someone created a fake Miami Herald story suggesting that a Miami-Dade middle school was about to experience its own mass shooting: Screenshots of that fake story were passed along on Twitter and Snapchat, two social media platforms, said Monique O. Madan, a Herald reporter whose byline appeared on the fake story. “It looks super real. They use the same font that we use. It has our masthead. It has my byline. If I weren’t a journalist, I wouldn’t think twice about it,” Madan said. Worried parents and teachers grew alarmed, thinking it was a real Herald story. Dozens called or messaged Madan. “My phone just would not stop ringing,” she said.
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Facebook pulls VR shooter from conservative political conference
On Friday we included a tweet about Facebook showing off a shooter game at CPAC; Facebook apologized later in the day. Here’s Hugo Barra, who runs Oculus: There is a standard set of experiences included in the Oculus demos we feature at public events. A few of the action games can include violence. In light of the recent events in Florida and out of respect for the victims and their families, we have removed them from this demo. We regret that we failed to do so in the first place.
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Social Capital’s Chamath Palihapitiya Wants To Fix Capitalism
Two months after roiling his former employers with comments about Facebook’s negative effects on the world, Chamath is not backing down: “I didn’t want to backtrack. Because the point is true. I think we’re all slaves to this shit,” he says.
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How the Florida School Shooting Turned Into a Gun-Control Movement
The Journal examines how powerful social media — particularly Twitter — have been for the Parkland student activists: The students at Stoneman Douglas aren’t like those who witnessed previous mass shootings at schools such as Columbine High School in 1999 or Virginia Tech in 2007. They’re digital natives, at one with the language and power of smartphones and social media. That is one reason why the movement they started, dubbed #NeverAgain, has become a nationwide phenomenon in barely a few days, and shows signs of becoming the kind of campaign success that a company or politician can only dream of.
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Russian spies hacked the Olympics and tried to make it look like North Korea did it, U.S. officials say
There’s no real social-media connection here, but this is a worthwhile read if, like me, you spend a lot of time wondering how Russian disinformation campaigns are going to play out in the midterms this year. (Also, when was the last time you read about a legitimate false-flag operation?!) Russian military spies hacked several hundred computers used by authorities at the 2018 Winter Olympic Games in South Korea, according to U.S. intelligence. They did so while trying to make it appear as though the intrusion was conducted by North Korea, what is known as a “false-flag” operation, said two U.S. officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter. Officials in PyeongChang acknowledged that the Games were hit by a cyberattack during the Feb. 9 Opening Ceremonies but had refused to confirm whether Russia was responsible. That evening there were disruptions to the Internet, broadcast systems and the Olympics website. Many attendees were unable to print their tickets for the ceremony, resulting in empty seats.
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Facebook settles lawsuit over 2012 IPO for $35 million
Facebook had a difficult IPO, and traded below its initial offering price for the year that followed. Investors sued, saying the company had not disclosed enough of the ways that its business might fail. If investors had just held onto their stock — or bought more of it! — they would have been better off in the long run. But now they’re getting $35 million to go away. |
Twitter Allowed Cryptocurrency Scammers To Hijack Verified Accounts To Take People’s Money
Twitter tells verified users that changing their Twitter handle will cause them to lose their verification badge, for obvious reasons. But Twitter being Twitter, this feature doesn’t actually work, and some crypto scammers have exploited this bug to loot a bunch of saps: Adding to the confusion, the FAKE Tron account has perfectly copied the REAL Tron’s pinned tweet, which warns users to look out for imposter accounts. The result is an online scam inception of sorts — where the FAKE account is warning users to watch out for fake accounts.
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Twitter’s Has Written Down Most of Its $70M SoundCloud Investment
When Twitter invested in Soundcloud, which was in decline even then, everyone I knew shook their heads in disbelief. Now all of those people can feel very smug: Twitter had been in on-and-off talks to acquire SoundCloud for years, but instead ended up investing $70 million into the music service as part of a $100 million round of funding back in June of 2016. However, SoundCloud ran out of money in early 2017 and wasn’t able to raise any additional financing.
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Facebook's Mandatory Anti-Malware Scan Is Invasive and Lacks Transparency
I didn’t even realize Facebook had a mandatory malware scan, but apparently it’s buggy: The internet is full of Facebook users frustrated with how the company handles malware threats. For nearly four years, people have complained about Facebook’s anti-malware scan on forums, Twitter, Reddit, and on personal blogs. The problems appear to have gotten worse recently. While the service used to be optional, Facebook now requires it if it flags your device for malware. And according to screenshots reviewed by WIRED from people recently prompted to run the scan, Facebook also no longer allows every user to select what type of device they’re on, which ostensibly would have prevented what happened to Charity.
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Logan Paul Attempts to Fistfight His Way Back to Relevance
The future of YouTube could simply be top creators punching each other in the face, Taylor Lorenz reports: Brothers from two of YouTube’s biggest dynasties announced this weekend that they will be squaring off in an IRL boxing match set to take place this summer. Logan Paul, the embattled YouTube star with more than 16 million subscribers whose entire channel was recently demonetised over bad behavior, confirmed that he will be boxing KSI, a British gaming YouTuber with over 17 million subscribers.
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Reddit, Tumblr will fight for net neutrality with protests this week
Thanks, Reddit and Tumblr: Online platforms haven’t given up on net neutrality just yet. Along with organizations Fight for the Future, Demand Progress, and Free Press Action Fund, companies including Reddit, Tumblr, Etsy, and Medium are participating in a day of online and offline protests on February 27th. The protest — called Operation: #OneMoreVote — will call upon businesses, web users, and more to “flood lawmakers with phone calls and emails from constituents.”
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Media buyers: Snapchat is focused on enabling commerce in ads
Snap is really interested in in-app commerce, Digiday reports: Snapchat is working on developing new commerce units to bolster its e-commerce offering, according to two media buyers who spoke to Digiday. It is unclear what the units are, although one buyer said he heard from his Snapchat rep that the unit is in beta. Another buyer said it would live as a transaction experience within the Stories feature on Snapchat, with a seamless swipe up to subscribe or buy.
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Feedless is an iOS content blocker that takes the media out of social media
I wrote about a new content blocker from Ryan Orbuch, a 21-year-old developer who says we’re going to see a new wave of technology aimed at helping wean us from our feeds: On one hand, there’s something potentially comical about asking people to pay for the privilege of not looking at tweets. On the other, Orbuch predicted that a new wave of technology would emerge to help people manage their relationships with apps. “This is just the very beginning,” Orbuch says. “There’s going to be a lot in this space. I don’t know if there’s going to be a business in it, but people are going to try things.”
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Sandy Hook parents: Online platforms are caving to hoaxers
Veronique and Lenny Pozner, whose son Noah was killed at Sandy Hook, call on social media platforms to shut down the trolls peddling conspiracy theories:
The “hoax” narrative reached a fever pitch after Sandy Hook in 2012. As despicable as it was, nobody stopped them, and consequently, it spread like aggressive cancer. In 2012, the hoaxers were limited to the fringe, but today they are practically commonplace.
This is disturbing when you consider that inflammatory personalities like Alex Jones of Infowars, who make a tidy living peddling conspiracy nonsense and anti-government propaganda, have the ear of President Trump and those around him. This week, Donald Trump Jr. “liked” two tweets pushing conspiracy theories about a Parkland high school shooting survivor and his former FBI agent father.
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There is no easy fix for Facebook’s reliability problem
Frederic Filloux lays out the many challenges Facebook faces in fixing the News Feed, then undercuts his own argument by saying that the company won’t get rid of Trending Topics because “that’s where the advertising money is.” What?! For both YouTube (the world’s main provider of videos) and Facebook (the dominant vector of fake news), solving this problem would actually be easy: kill Trending Topics, which has a terrible track record. But neither tech giant will do that, because that’s where the advertising money is.
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Protect the News From Google and Facebook
David Chavern, CEO of a trade association representing 2,000 newspapers, says publishers should be granted an exemption from antitrust rules that prevent them from negotiating collectively against Facebook and Google: U.S. antitrust laws, designed to promote fair competition and prevent consolidation, actually make it harder for traditional news outlets to compete with Silicon Valley giants. Under current law, for instance, news publishers cannot get together and agree to withhold their product unless they receive a return on their investment. Let’s start by changing that simple inequity. News publishers should be able to use their collective leverage in negotiations with big tech.
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The South Asian Men Sliding Into Your DMs in Hopes of ‘Fraandship’
Hussein Kesvani writes about the phenomenon of ‘fraanship,’ in which South Asian men reach out to complete strangers to make friends. (Kesvani’s experience with one of these random Twitter accounts is delightful; a woman he interviews has a less positive experience.) Either way, fraandships refer to the kind of guys who randomly add people living in the West on Facebook with an accompanying message begging you to accept their request. They slide into your DMs on Twitter or add you to a giant group chat (usually featuring celebrities, brands and/or other verified people). They send adoring emails to your work account and tag you in all of their posts, regardless of their content. Fraandship requests have become such a joke in South Asian internet culture that there are Reddit threads about it and Facebook groups dedicated to “fraandship” culture. To this day, the 2011 Bollywood film Mujhse Fraaandship Karoge — “a film about two Indian teenagers who catfish each other on Facebook and end up falling in love with the others’ fake social media profile” — remains a cult classic among young Indians and within diaspora communities.
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Questions? Comments? Better CPM data than I have? casey@theverge.com
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