We should apply healthy caution, but the article is right in that fear is a bad counsellor.
Asking whether AI is safe is like asking whether a knife is safe. It’s about how we handle it, what we use it for, what precautions we take when using it.
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:
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).]
I use it quite regularly in text editors, in particular when authoring something with two-dimensional layout (simple diagrams, folder-like line trees), and occasionally for the CUA Cut & Paste shortcuts (e.g. in terminal emulators).
There’s also a number of applications where it has a useful binding, such as marking a task as (un)complete in Outlook, or (un)flagging an email.
The article states “Insert (now gone) and Delete (still with us)”. Since the Delete symbol pictured is long gone, it seems reasonable to conclude that the author meant the keys here, not the symbols.
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