The Zuckbook Enlists Third Parties to Disseminate Interesting Information: Hey, Why Not?
May 11, 2022
The company formerly known as Facebook is not happy that its new Meta branding is not doing well. According to Protocol, formerly Facebook paid a Republican consulting firm to say mean things about TikTok: “Meta Paid A GOP Consulting Film To Drag TikTok Through The Mud.” Facebook is now the social media platform for grandparents and senior citizens. It has not been a cool thing in years, The cool social media platform is TikTok and it keeps pulling in younger crowds.
Meta decided to take a conservative route by hiring a Republican consulting firm to make the short video platform look bad. The selected firm is Targeted Victory and it was founded by the digital director of Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign. Meta wants Targeted Victory to run a campaign of op-eds and letters to the editor stating that TikTok is dangerous for kids. Targeted Victory employees promoted stories to regional news outlets about harmful TikTok trends that originated on Facebook.
“The emails show how Meta wants the public to see TikTok even as Meta itself tries to re-create some of the magic that led TikTok to become the top app for young people. Mark Zuckerberg has cited TikTok as a hurdle to getting young people back on his platforms. Both Facebook and Instagram have followed TikTok’s lead by pouring money into their own short-form video clones. ‘We believe all platforms, including TikTok, should face a level of scrutiny consistent with their growing success,’ Meta spokesperson Andy Stone told the Post in defense of the campaign.”
These op-eds and letters to the editor criticized TikTok. They were from concerned parents and even a Democratic Party chair. Targeted Victory also highlighted Meta in a good light, such as how the platform assists Black-owned businesses.
Meta refers to when something breaks the fourth wall or is so “out there” that it cannot be real. It is used in place of “stranger than fiction” and “you can’t make this stuff up.” The company formerly known as Facebook is making everything Meta buy making the world a self-referential self-congratulatory echo chamber.
Whitney Grace, May 11, 2022
NSO Group Knock On: Live from Madrid
May 10, 2022
The NSO Group fan Paz Esteban has been gored (metaphorically speaking, of course). “Spain’s Spy Chief Sacked after Pegasus Spyware Revelations” reports that “Paz Esteban reportedly loses job after Catalan independence figures were said to have been targeted.” How about those hedging Latinate structures. The write up alleges:
Paz Esteban reportedly confirmed last week that 18 members of the Catalan independence movement were spied on with judicial approval by Spain’s National Intelligence Centre.
I suppose spying on the Barcelona football team makes sense if one roots for Real Madrid. It is a stretch that 18 individuals who want to do a 180 degree turn away from Madrid’s approach to maintaining law, order, health, peace, prosperity, etc. etc.
The write up notes:
Esteban reportedly confirmed last week to a congressional committee that 18 members of the Catalan independence movement were spied on with judicial approval by Spain’s National Intelligence Centre (CNI), leaving the Catalan regional government demanding answers.
Yep, the action was approved. Life would have been more like a late dinner than a burger from a fantastic American fast food restaurant. That’s the problem. The gobbling of the fries was approved by lawyers.
That’s a crisis. Making the spry 64 year old Ms. Esteban López the beard is unfortunate. My hunch is that some youthful whiz kids found the NSO Group’s Pegasus a fun digital horse to ride. The idea floated upwards for approval and ended up in front of the “judiciary.” That mysterious entity thought letting the kids ride the Pegasus was a perfectly okay idea.
Now a crisis is brewing. The gored Ms. Esteban López may only be one of the first in the intelligence, law enforcement, and judiciary to feel the prick of the digital bull’s horns and the knock from the beastie’s hooves.
Several observations:
- Who else will be implicated in this interesting matter? Who will be tossed aloft only to crash to the albero del ruedo?
- Will a parliamentary inquiry move forward? What will that become? A romp with Don Quixote and Sancho?
- Is a new Spanish inquisition about to begin?
Excitement in the Plaza de Toros de Las Ventas perhaps?
Stephen E Arnold, May 10, 2022
Issues with the Zuckbook Smart Software: Imagine That
May 10, 2022
I was neither surprised by nor interested in “Facebook’s New AI System Has a ‘High Propensity’ for Racism and Bias.” The marketing hype encapsulated in PowerPoint decks and weaponized PDF files on Arxiv paint fantastical pictures of today’s marvel-making machine learning systems. Those who have been around smart software and really stupid software for a number of years understand two things: PR and marketing are easier than delivering high-value, high-utility systems and smart software works best when tailored and tuned to quite specific tasks. Generalized systems are not yet without a few flaws. Addressing these will take time, innovation, and money. Innovation is scarce in many high-technology companies. The time and money factors dictate that “good enough” and “close enough for horseshoes” systems and methods are pushed into products and services. “Good enough” works for search because no one knows what is in the index. Comparative evaluations of search and retrieval is tough when users (addicts) operate within a cloud of unknowing. The “close enough for horseshoes” produces applications which are sort of correct. Perfect for ad matching and suggesting what Facebook pages or Tweets would engage a person interested in tattoos or fad diets.
The cited article explains:
Facebook and its parent company, Meta, recently released a new tool that can be used to quickly develop state-of-the-art AI. But according to the company’s researchers, the system has the same problem as its predecessors: It’s extremely bad at avoiding results that reinforce racist and sexist stereotypes.
My recollection is that the Google has terminated some of its wizards and transformed these professionals into Xooglers in the blink of an eye. Why? Exposing some of the issues that continue to plague smart software.
Those interns, former college professors, and start up engineers rely on techniques used for decades. These are connected together, fed synthetic data, and bolted to an application. The outputs reflect the inherent oddities of the methods; for example, feed the system images spidered from Web sites and the system “learns” what is on the Web sites. Then generalize from the Web site images and produce synthetic data. The who process zooms along and costs less. The outputs, however, have minimal information about that which is not on a Web site; for example, positive images of a family in a township outside of Cape Town.
The write up states:
Meta researchers write that the model “has a high propensity to generate toxic language and reinforce harmful stereotypes, even when provided with a relatively innocuous prompt.” This means it’s easy to get biased and harmful results even when you’re not trying. The system is also vulnerable to “adversarial prompts,” where small, trivial changes in phrasing can be used to evade the system’s safeguards and produce toxic content.
What’s new? These issues surfaced in the automated content processing in the early versions of the Autonomy Neuro Linguistic Programming approach. The fix was to retrain the system and tune the outputs. Few licensees had the appetite to spend the money needed to perform the retraining and reindexing of the processed content when the search results drifted into weirdness.
Since the mid 1990s, have developers solved this problem?
Nope.
Has the email with this information reached the PR professionals and the art history majors with a minor in graphic design who produce PowerPoints? What about the former college professors and a bunch of interns and recent graduates?
Nope.
What’s this mean? Here’s my view:
- Narrow applications of smart software can work and be quite useful; for example, the Preligens system for aircraft identification. Broad applications have to be viewed as demonstrations or works in progress.
- The MBA craziness which wants to create world-dominating methods to control markets must be recognized and managed. I know that running wild for 25 years creates some habits which are going to be difficult to break. But change is needed. Craziness is not a viable business model in my opinion.
- The over-the-top hyperbole must be identified. This means that PowerPoint presentations should carry a warning label: Science fiction inside. The quasi-scientific papers with loads of authors who work at one firm should carry a disclaimer: Results are going to be difficult to verify.
Without some common sense, the flood of semi-functional smart software will increase. Not good. Why? The impact of erroneous outputs will cause more harm than users of the systems expect. Screwing up content filtering for a political rally is one thing; outputting an incorrect medical action is another.
Stephen E Arnold, May 10, 2022
Voyager Labs Exposed: Another NSO Group?
May 10, 2022
I read “Voyager Labs: L’Arma spuntata dell’intelienza artificiale.” I was expecting some high-flying smart software. What the article delivers is some juicy detail about intelware, conferences where quite non-public stories are told, and an alleged tie up between those fine folks at Palantir Technologies and the shadowy Israeli company. One caveat: One has to be able to read Italian or have a way to work around the limitations of online translation systems. (Good luck with finding a free to use system. I just asked my local Pizza Hut delivery person, who speaks and reads Italian like a Roma fan.)
Here are some allegedly spot on factoids from the write up:
- One of the directors of the company has a remarkably unusual career at a US government agency. The individual presided over specialized interrogation activities and allowing a person with a bomb to enter a government facility. There were a handful of deaths.
- The Voyager Labs’ cloud services are allegedly “managed globally by Palantir’s Gotham platform.
- Voyager’s Labs’ content was described at an intelligence conference owned and managed by an American in this way: “usable and previously unattainable information by analyzing and understanding huge amounts of open, deep and obscure Web data.”
- Allegations about the use of Voyager Labs’ system to influence an Italian election.
- Voyager Labs identifies for licensees people with red, orange, and green icons. Green is good; red is bad; orange is in the middle?
Interesting stuff. But the zinger is the assertion that Voyager Labs’ smart software can output either dumb or aberrant results. The whiz kids at Gartner Group concluded in 2017 that Voyager Labs was a “cool vendor.” That’s good to know. Gartner likes intelware that sort of works. Cool.
Interesting profile and there are more than 100 footnotes. I assume that the founder of Voyager Labs, the conference organizer, and assorted clients were not will to participate in an interview. This is an understandable position, particularly when an Israeli outfit could be the next in the NSO Group spotlight.
Stephen E Arnold, May 10, 2022
Let Us Let Google Think for Us? Yeah, Why Not?
May 10, 2022
What wonderful news… for the Google.
TechRadar reports that “Google Docs Will Now Practically Do Your Writing for You.” What an effective way to nudge language and information a certain direction. Docs’ “Smart Compose” feature already offers autocomplete suggestions as one types but, citing a recent Google blog post, writer Joel Khalili explains how its AI is poised to make even more “helpful” recommendations:
“The company is adding a number of new ‘assistive writing features’ to the word processing software, including synonym and sentence structure suggestions. The service will also flag up any ‘inappropriate’ language, as well as instances in which the writer would be better served by using the active rather than passive voice. … The arrival of further recommendation features for Docs is another step in the campaign to make the company’s product suite more intelligent. ‘Suggestions will appear as you type and help guide you when there are opportunities to avoid repeated or unnecessary words, helping diversify your writing and ensuring you’re using the most effective word for the situation,’ Google explained. ‘We hope this will help elevate your writing style and make more dynamic, clear, inclusive, and concise documents.’ When the tools are active, suggestions will be underlined in purple. Selecting the underline will bring up a small pop up that prompts the user to accept or decline the change. These suggestions will be switched on by default, but can be deactivated under the Tools menu at the top of the page.”
At least users who prefer to choose their own words have the option to turn suggestions off. The write-up states these new AI intrusions are being rolled out to all premium business customers now, a process that should be complete by the end of April. Alas, they are not available to Workspace Essentials, Business Starter, nor Enterprise Essentials users.
Cynthia Murrell, May 10, 2022
Some Real News People Are Never Happy
May 10, 2022
The European Publishers Council has joined the fight against Googley ad practices. Reuters reveals, “Google’s Advertising Tech Targeted in European Publishers’ Complaint.” Reporter Foo Yun Chee suggests the move could strengthen the current EU antitrust investigation into the company, but we have seen how Google tends to shrug off European efforts to constrain it. We are not sure this is the straw to break the behemoth’s back. Nevertheless, the write-up tells us:
“The European Commission opened an investigation in June into whether Google favors its own online display advertising technology services to the detriment of rivals, advertisers and online publishers. read more The publishers’ trade body, whose members include Axel Springer (SPRGn.S), News UK, Conde Nast, Bonnier News and Editorial Prensa Iberica, took its grievance to the European Commission, alleging Google has an adtech stranglehold over press publishers. ‘It is high time for the European Commission to impose measures on Google that actually change, not just challenge, its behavior,’ EPC Chairman Christian Van Thillo said in a statement. ‘Google has achieved end-to-end control of the ad tech value chain, boasting market shares as high as 90-100% in segments of the ad tech chain,’ he said.”
Indeed, which is why it is difficult to imagine consequences strong enough to make the company change its rapacious practices. Naturally Google denies any wrongdoing, gesturing at the billions of dollars it pays out to publishers each year. We appreciate the effort at redirection, but the real issue is whether publishers and other advertisers would be making more if Google played fair.
Cynthia Murrell, May 10, 2022
Using a VPN in India?
May 10, 2022
I read “VPN Providers Are Ordered to Store User Data for 5 or More Years in India.” The land of Khichdi is a fair piece from rural Kentucky. On the other hand, the VPN providers and crypto exchange platforms can be as near as one’s mobile phone or laptop. So what?
The write up points out:
The Indian government has published a directive that will force VPN providers and crypto exchange platforms to store user data for at least five years, even when customers have since terminated their relationship with the companies in question. Decision makers at businesses who don’t comply with the new ruling could face up to one year in prison, with it going into effect in late June 2022.
Yes, just another law. What makes this interesting is that VPN, according to some enthusiastic promotional material, preserves one’s online privacy. That sounds like a great idea to many people.
What happens if those VPN records are reviewed prior to their deletion by the VPN providers who insist that the users’ data are not preserved? I also like the VPN vendors who suggest that logs are not preserved.
If India’s directive yields some bad actor identification and incarceration, what other countries will use India’s approach as a springboard. The abuse of some online capabilities has been friction free in some places. Russia appears to have some doubts about VPNs. China? Yep, China too.
Perhaps the days of laissez-faire will end with a reprimand from Yama?
Stephen E Arnold, May 10, 2022
Do Marketers See You As Special? Nope.
May 9, 2022
I read “Forget Personalisation, It’s Impossible and It Doesn’t Work.” My hunch is that the idea that a zippy modern system would “know” a user, assemble an appropriate info-filter, and display what that individual required has lost traction. I remember Pointcast and Desktop Data which suggested a user could get the information he/she/it/them needed each day. My recollection is that individual information needs in business changed. Fiddling with the filters was a hassle. As a result, the services were novel at first and then became a hassle. Maybe automation via processes tuned to figure out what the user needed would make such services more useful. If memory serves, the increasing costs of making these systems work within budget and developer constraints were not very good. The most recent example is my explanation of how a Google alert is about half right or half wrong when it flags an item I am supposed to need. See this “Cheerleading” article.
The Forget Personalisation write up calls individuation “the worst idea in the marketing industry.” The statement is not exactly a vote of confidence, is it? The article states:
There’s just one little problem with personalisation: it doesn’t make any sense.
I thought marketing types were optimists. I am wrong again.
The article includes some factoids about the accuracy of third party data. These are infobits which allows marketers and investigators to pinpoint behaviors and even identify people. Here’s what the article reports as actual factual:
Spoiler alert: it’s not. Most third-party data is, to put it politely, garbage. In an academic study from MIT and Melbourne Business School, researchers decided to test the accuracy of third-party marketing data. So, how accurate is gender targeting? It’s accurate 42.3% of the time. How accurate is age targeting? It’s accurate between 4% and 44% of the time. And those are the numbers for the leading global data brokers.
I assume that this is a news flash because informed individuals from investigative reporters at the Wall Street Journal to law enforcement administrators assume that data gathered from clicks, apps, and other high value inputs are “accurate.” Well, sometimes yes, but in my experience 50 to 75 percent accuracy is darned good. Lower scores are common. The 95 percent accuracy is doable under certain circumstances.
What’s the fix? Once again marketers have the answer. Keep in mind that many marketers majored in business administration or art history. Just sayin’. Note this solutions from the cited article:
Marketers would be much better off investing in ‘performance branding’; in other words, one-size-fits-most creative that speaks to the common category needs of all potential buyers, all the time. This is a much simpler approach that also happens to be supported by the evidence. Reach is, and has always been, the greatest predictor of marketing success.
I think this means TikTok. What do you think?
And the future? Impersonalization. And how does Marketing Week know this? Here’s the source of the insight:
Gartner predicts 80% of marketers will abandon personalisation by 2025.
Yep, Gartner. Wow. Solid indeed.
Net net: Those marketing types are on the beam. What else does not work in marketing? Smart ad matching to a user query?
Stephen E Arnold, May 9, 2022
Facebook: Getting Softer, More Lovable?
May 9, 2022
Is the Zuckbook going soft? Sure, the company allegedly dorked around with Facebook pages in Australia. Sure, a former employee revealed the high school science club thought framework? Sure, the Zuck is getting heat for his semi-exciting vision of ZuckZoom and ZuckGraphics.
The article with the clicky title “Meta’s Challenge to OpenAI—Give Away a Massive Language Model. At 175 Billion Parameters, It’s As Powerful As OpenAI’s GPT-3, and It’s Open to All Researchers” shows that El Zucko is into freebies. The idea is that Zuck’s smart software is not going to allow the Google to dominate in this super-hyped sector. Think of it as the battle of the high school science clubs.
The ZuckVerse anyone who sells gets special treatment. Meta will charge about 48 percent commission.
Selling in Horizon Worlds will be limited to a few creators located in the US and Canada who must be eighteen years old. The 50% commission is a huge chunk of a creator’s profit, even if the item is an NFT:
“Meta spokesperson Sinead Purcell confirmed the figure to The Post, adding that Horizon Worlds will eventually become available on hardware made by other companies. In those cases, Meta will keep charging its 25% Horizon Worlds fee but the other companies will set their own store transaction fees. Vivek Sharma, Meta’s vice president of Horizon, told The Verge that the commission is ‘a pretty competitive rate in the market.’”
Zuckerberg criticized Google and Apple for taking 30% commission fees to digital creators. He claims that when the Metaverse adds a revenue share the commission rate will be less than 30%.
Zuckerberg claims he wants to support creators and help them make a living wage, but his statements are probably hot air. Talk is cheap, especially for tech giants. Zuckerberg wants to recoup the lost ad revenue through NFTs.
See. Kinder. Gentler. Maybe a Zuckbork?
Stephen E Arnold, May 9, 2022
Online Advertising: The Wild West Digital Saloon Has Some Questionable Characters Dealing Cards
May 9, 2022
I love the illustrations of life in the Wild West. Rough guys are riding next to clueless buffalos and pumping hot lead into the creatures. There are sketches of shoot outs in the streets in front of the curious. I find native Americans leaping off a rocky knob to stab a fur-bedecked beaver trapper fascinating. But I have a special place in my heart for the gamblers and card sharp in the Silver Spur Saloon.
After reading Bored Panda’s “30 Times People Spotted Shady Ads On Facebook Marketplace And Shared Them In This Online Group,” the digital ad dive is hoppin’ 24×7. Yippy Ki-Yay! Among the examples an octopus with offensive hand gestures on each tentacle and something called a cursed rocktopus with rock heads for hands.
Odd but small fish compared to the information in “”Ad Tech Firms Faulted on Gannett’s Error” and the title on the jump “Ad-Tech Firms Under Fire.” Yep, two headlines, just slightly different. What’s the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal doing with this Gannett and under fire thing?
The “real news” is that the octopus-type outfit Gannett output incorrect (whatever that means) data. And — gasp! — advertising tech outfits “failed to connect the dots and alert their clients…”.
I liked this statement because it is so darned suggestive and appears to raise an issue that some ad mavens don’t want to discuss:
Some publishing and ad executives said the situation at Gannett raised concerns about whether the industry is missing other substantial discrepancies or intentional, fraudulent behavior.
Yep, the real bad F word: Fraud.
Mellifluous, isn’t it?
The write up contains what strike me as PR emissions about knowing about the fraudulent behavior and not taking action.
But let’s step back from the specifics of one estimable outfit like Gannett.
Here’s a list of online advertising topics I find enjoyable to contemplate:
- How does smart software match ads; for example, I watch a video about a Russian oligarch’s yacht and I get an ad for Grammarly on YouTube? Are those ad dollars going to result in my buying Grammarly? Nope. Does YouTube care? Nope. Does Grammarly care? Nope, their marketing person wants to hit the numbers. How? Not a question anyone pushes forward is my hunch.
- How does NewsNow.co.uk’s ad system display in line ads to me for a product I bought in the previous week to 10 days? Will that advertiser get me to buy another winter coat even though it is spring in rural Kentucky? Nope. Does the advertiser’s money deliver? Not from what I see.
- Why do queries on ad-supported search engines return ad results unrelated to my query? Are those ads going to cause me to license a smart cyber security system? Nope. In fact, I just wrote a report explaining that many cyber security vendors are like local gyms. These folks sell official proof of good intentions. Will 90 percent of gym members lift a dumbbell more than once or twice? Sure, sure those folks do.
I was asked eight or nine years ago to give a talk in Manhattan about potential online ad fraud. The person doing the inviting wanted me to focus on Google, DoubleClick, and the information I discovered reading the DoubleClick patents and open source information about the company.
I declined. I sure didn’t want anyone in the Mad Ave game getting angry. Even more important I had zero desire to talk about a topic which would generate undue excitement.
Like old fashioned advertising, junkets to Hawaii, gifts, and wild and crazy fees without guarantees have long been associated with Mad Ave. Digital advert5ising is just like the good, old days just accelerated to Internet time and the ethical approach of certain outstanding companies which I shall not name.
Fraud? That ain’t the half of it.
Stephen E Arnold, May 9, 2022
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