While the data scientists working for CA were reasonable people dealing with the usual bullshit from agency salespeople massively over-selling their work, the sales team (picture in that Channel 4 leaked video) are the worst -- lying about prostitutes on camera is hardly surprising. Because, yeah: that “we can entrap your opponent, we do it all the time” was obviously made-up bullshit to impress a fake gullible prospect. Not sure it makes it “better” but it’s a clearer illustration of who you are dealing with.

Where things get suspicious for outsiders but fairly straightforward: Did Facebook collaborate further? No, but if you look for trouble, it’s easy to make it look bad:

Presidential campaigns are fairly large individual clients for Facebook; they have to ramp up fast; have time-sensitive campaigns to run so, to avoid any blockers and being accused of being unfair and undemocratic, every campaign has points of contact to check that all is smooth. Essentially, salespeople familiar with Facebook more advanced ad targeting options and who can be there to help with idiosyncrasies like having some text on ad images (a big, hard-to-comprehend No-No for a while, a very common mistake for inexperienced campaigns, who are naturally quick to scream censorship when they are blocked).

Several people assumed that because “Facebook” had banned SCL Elections three years prior, ”Facebook” should know better than to let CA, a company with a different name, help the Trump campaign:

- Facebook is a large company and the anti-abuse team for the API has little to do with the Sales team; they are not even based on the same office or the same coast of the US;

- Facebook is growing incredibly fast and no one helping sell was there three years prior -- campaign assistant are very junior;

- the client wasn’t the same: the GOP and the campaign were the official holders of that account; banning them for having consultants from a company with dodgy behaviour wasn’t going to make sense.

But more importantly: none of what the GOP did was against any of Facebook’s rules. They bought all the data they needed from Experian, from press delivery companies, something that was a common request from advertisers then (who wanted to target based on credit rating, newspaper subscriptions). They tested a lot of their ideas and the audiences emerged organically from how people reacted to those. Read any story on how the two campaigns had such a different approach to campaigning online. No secret data was needed to make a difference: one tried, the other coasted.

What did Facebook do after they realised you could run a scandalous campaign using Experian and other third-party data? Block those (For many reasons, being slimy and not allowing people to edit false information was one; having shitty data in the first place was another big one). That was actually the best thing to do, but no one reacted to that actual, effective, meaningful change.

So what was Facebook to do after they had consistently adapted and enforced their policy for ten years on an API that wasn’t perfect, but that had learned faster than anyone else? Explain why they did what they did?

They tried and no one listened, accusing the company of inconsistencies rather than understand that, say, Mark doesn’t personally handle banned apps on the API. After too many people demanding that Facebook use Police power to delete data they didn’t know was still there, I think most of the senior brass checked out: it was a made-up scandal and nothing they could say or do would really help.

That populists get elected and run countries to the ground is real and problematic, but that’s due to mechanisms that are unrelated to Facebook targeting algorithms, at least as far as we can understand them. There’s growing inequality, diverging perspectives between citizens; a few operative have developed real expertise in spewing bullshit, but none of that will be solved if people don’t separate causes and false claims. Telling people to leave Facebook won’t make coordinated abuse organised on Discord servers less painful. Banning political advertising on Facebook won’t prevent Trump from confiscating the news cycle the day before an election by lying on Twitter about immigration, or Johnson in the UK to have a photo op to Google-bomb his way out of scandals. You won’t improve the situation with a sacrificial lamb.

People are still gladly sharing their bank data with unscrupulous credit companies; the NYTimes is too happy to ignore the real scandal there. Whatever Mark said would be a scandal either on the left (if he bans ads, including left-wing one) of the right (if he doesn’t include inflammatory bullshit as “the press”), so… the company stopped talking about it because nothing could be better if they did talk.

Being in that Catch-22 space tells you to move on. Mark did, months ago, thinking about products, integration, platforms. Somehow, Libra came up as a good direction for the company. That’s what Mark has in mind. And I don’t think his brain would be able to make better decisions about the company with more bullshit like “CA is the biggest scandal” at the forefront.