I found this website really weird, with no "About us", so I searched some more.
"Elliot Shefler" (some publications put his name in quotes) is a co-founder, but he does not want to appear in photos and online profiles himself. He is Turkish-Jewish and spent most of his life working in ad-tech and online gambling. He claims his algorithms were developed by an agency with links to the Israeli military (this is repurposed military/PSYOP technology?). His whereabouts are unknown, circling between Germany, London, and LA.
In 2018 the price was 29$, now its 49$. Elliot claims $5.1 million revenue for 2018. Most customers are men, most customers want to initiate sex with a target. Nobody follows up to complain if it wasn't successful, since they are very much part of the conspiracy to manipulate. Elliot plans to share information with bigger advertisers: "A woman who wants a target to propose to her, would be in great proximity to a person that is in the market for an engagement ring".
This service is illegal in Europe, due to data protection and anti-tracking laws. The site has about 10 employees and one British company who works the contracts with bigger companies.
> “The value is in retention, not in the acquisition,” he said.
> He related a story about one insurance company he was commissioned work on, where he would target the insurance agents at the company to “brainwash and manipulate” them and change the perception of the company itself with the goal of retaining those agents.
> “We planned a similar campaign with a big pharmaceutical company that was targeting doctors (not patients—doctors) with articles about the benefits of a certain medicine.”
> ... if he feels the same targeting tools he leverages for The Spinner could be vulnerable to possible misuse, his response was matter-of-fact:
> “I would prefer using the word “effective” instead of ‘vulnerable.’ The answer is: highly effective.”
For those who find this horrifying, the [typically unstated] assumption is that it works. I'm pretty skeptical of this. Think about it: what do you imagine the effect size is of seeing 10 articles like "4 Secrets to Losing Weight and Feeling GREAT While You Do It!" in your Facebook feed? I'd bet it's essentially 0. If seeing these kinds of articles is all it took to improve our body composition, then we'd all be absolutely shredded.
I'm not trying to argue that advertising doesn't work. Clearly it does. But there's a huge difference between being exposed to tens of thousands of Coca-Cola ads over a lifetime, and being exposed to 10 spam articles over the course of a month.
I'm also not trying to argue that this isn't creepy. Clearly it is. But the real 'target' of this scheme is the person buying the ads. I doubt this has any real effect on the person who sees them.
(do note that this research suffers a bit from p-hacking).
There is a good chance that you were already targeted before, since online manipulation is used by the big militaries. Think back about 2 years, reading about SJW, politics, neo-nazis, antifa, BLM, manspreading, immigrants, the deep state, etc. Good chance at least some of your perception about these subjects was molded by just a few individuals. For instance, remember that Russian girl throwing bleach on "manspreaders" in the metro? You may have had a strong reaction to that, and it would be the desired effect of Russian troll-factory.
Specifically, on the effect of manipulating the Facebook feed to control behavior, Facebook did some controversial research themselves, where they used sentiment analysis to make a feed more or less positive. People who were fed negative feeds, started using negative words in their own status update: https://www.forbes.com/sites/gregorymcneal/2014/06/28/facebo...
> The marketing study suggested companies should "[c]oncentrate media during prime vulnerability moments, aligning with content involving tips and tricks, instant beauty rescues, dressing for the success, getting organized for the week and empowering stories... Concentrate media during her most beautiful moments, aligning with content involving weekend guides, weekend style, beauty tips for social activities and positive stories." The Facebook study, combined with last year's marketing study suggests that marketers may not need to wait until Mondays or Thursdays to have an emotional impact, instead social media companies may be able to manipulate timelines and news feeds to create emotionally fueled marketing opportunities.
Long term priming, as opposed to short term with gaps of a second or so, was one of the prime victims of the replication crisis and seems to actually not exist.
Priming is one of the psychology topics worst afflicted by p-hacking. Almost every prominent priming study has gone down in flames during the replication crisis. Consistent, repeated propaganda has real effects, priming doesn't.
It might have a low chance of success on one particular person ... but target ten or a hundred thousand, and there will be some statistically significant shift. Advertising isn't a sniper rifle. It's a cluster bomb.
You have to remember the majority of people are both not tech savvy and don't pay attention to things like advertising trends.
My mother for example is heavily affected by the ads she sees on Facebook and other places. All it takes is one or two articles and I've had to talk to her a few times about being careful about the sites she visits and what she reads online.
So this service? This would be remarkably effective on people like her. This service isn't for people like us who are a bit more aware of how advertising works. It's for the majority of people.
I mean, you can show people ads about "Are you an immigrant? Claim your government-sponsored house. We will help you to qualify even if you don't meet the criteria" and now you conceived the idea that the government is giving away free houses to immigrants and there's even a way to cheat the system and get a house even if you do not qualify.
As far as I remember they essentially divided people into categories through data gathered through facebook and targeted them with ads like this.
I guess if you can manage to put the cookie to identify your target you can run all kind of manipulative campaigns because you can change the perception of the reality.
You don't have to be honest and straightforward and speak directly to the target. Simply re-shape his/her reality.
Want a rise? Stalk your boss with ads about developer jobs with salaries way higher than yours. Your boss might start getting the idea of pay rise due to the false reality you prseented.
quote: 'I mean, you can show people ads about "Are you an immigrant? Claim your government-sponsored house. We will help you to qualify even if you don't meet the criteria" and now you conceived the idea that the government is giving away free houses to immigrants'
I think I actually saw an ad similar to that - my takeaway was "damn, these slimy scammers are targeting desperate immigrants", so I guess that means they didn't hit their target?
The inability to quantify targeted advertising's worth at specific levels is probably seen as a benefit by those employed on both sides of the transaction (i.e. marketing side and serving side).
The harvard link touches on how he was using cheap Google Ads for this purpose. It reminds me of a shady "internet background check" company that I had the unfortunate pleasure of working with a few years ago. They were approaching, if not exceeding, this site in total shady tactics. One thing they did that their former-pill-pushing founders came up with which I did think was rather clever is they were able to buy Ad Words for cheap for various permutations of common given names and they used this to bootstrap their business to great effect.
Facebook does not allow you to build a custom audience of 1 person. I believe it has to be a minimum size of 100 or thereabout. Which means when Spinner says your target will get 180 impressions, they have to throw in 99 random non-targets into the targeted audience in order to get the placement. Thus they really aren't marking it up as much as you think.
This is fucked up. At first I thought, of course this exists but no one would really fall for it. Scrolling through the offerings, I felt a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. Psychological warfare on-demand, only $50!
To speak directly to your point, yes, actually, because now people who want to rationalize smoking can do so by being suspicious of a conspiracy to feed them slanted information.
Would a service like this work on people who don't use the popular social networks?
E.g. I get my news + dopamine from the local newspaper (physical paper edition) and HN, respectively. Ofc HN pretty much qualifies as a social network, but it has no targeting. My girlfriend isn't on any social network at all, unless WhatsApp qualifies as one and IMO it doesn't, unless you have a gazillion active group chats (which sounds like hell on earth).
I'm inclined to think that this makes both of us immune to attacks like the ones performed by this company, but I have an uneasy feeling that I'm missing something. Anyone with a better insight in targeting hacks than me able to chip in?
Anywhere you can see retargeted ads online you could be targeted.
WhatsApp group chats were used to spread carefully crafted opposition memes and fake news.
So, while you may be safe against 50$ campaigns, it could be a false sense of security. For 5000$-50000$ I am sure I can get a special message in front of your face: Take out local ads, plant a newspaper story, create a huge story about your controversial 5-million-dollar-revenue website on HackerNews (remember, no such thing as bad publicity, this website will see their customers spike today!)
> He banked on people hate-tweeting it. “I don’t mind what they feel, as long as they think something”, Halib said – which is scarily like something I’ve said in talks I’ve given about coming up with PR ideas that bang.
If you click through to other sites, such as news sites, blogs, web comics, and so on, they may be loading ads from adtech companies, which may be retargeted based on your browser cookies without involving any social media site.
So your overall vulnerability to this targeting has more to do with what your browser does (such as whether it blocks trackers and expires or removes some cookies) and what sites you visit (in terms of where they choose to embed ads from).
They should add an “expose target to qanon and conspiracy theories”-option. There was an article not too long ago about what obsessing over this can do to personal relationships. It was not pretty.
Readit News
"Elliot Shefler" (some publications put his name in quotes) is a co-founder, but he does not want to appear in photos and online profiles himself. He is Turkish-Jewish and spent most of his life working in ad-tech and online gambling. He claims his algorithms were developed by an agency with links to the Israeli military (this is repurposed military/PSYOP technology?). His whereabouts are unknown, circling between Germany, London, and LA.
In 2018 the price was 29$, now its 49$. Elliot claims $5.1 million revenue for 2018. Most customers are men, most customers want to initiate sex with a target. Nobody follows up to complain if it wasn't successful, since they are very much part of the conspiracy to manipulate. Elliot plans to share information with bigger advertisers: "A woman who wants a target to propose to her, would be in great proximity to a person that is in the market for an engagement ring".
This service is illegal in Europe, due to data protection and anti-tracking laws. The site has about 10 employees and one British company who works the contracts with bigger companies.
> “The value is in retention, not in the acquisition,” he said.
> He related a story about one insurance company he was commissioned work on, where he would target the insurance agents at the company to “brainwash and manipulate” them and change the perception of the company itself with the goal of retaining those agents.
> “We planned a similar campaign with a big pharmaceutical company that was targeting doctors (not patients—doctors) with articles about the benefits of a certain medicine.”
> ... if he feels the same targeting tools he leverages for The Spinner could be vulnerable to possible misuse, his response was matter-of-fact:
> “I would prefer using the word “effective” instead of ‘vulnerable.’ The answer is: highly effective.”
Very, very shady.
Aka all of them? I agree this is despicable, but I’m curious how you make this illegal and not all of advertising.
Dead Comment
I'm not trying to argue that advertising doesn't work. Clearly it does. But there's a huge difference between being exposed to tens of thousands of Coca-Cola ads over a lifetime, and being exposed to 10 spam articles over the course of a month.
I'm also not trying to argue that this isn't creepy. Clearly it is. But the real 'target' of this scheme is the person buying the ads. I doubt this has any real effect on the person who sees them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_(psychology)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repetition_priming
(do note that this research suffers a bit from p-hacking).
There is a good chance that you were already targeted before, since online manipulation is used by the big militaries. Think back about 2 years, reading about SJW, politics, neo-nazis, antifa, BLM, manspreading, immigrants, the deep state, etc. Good chance at least some of your perception about these subjects was molded by just a few individuals. For instance, remember that Russian girl throwing bleach on "manspreaders" in the metro? You may have had a strong reaction to that, and it would be the desired effect of Russian troll-factory.
Specifically, on the effect of manipulating the Facebook feed to control behavior, Facebook did some controversial research themselves, where they used sentiment analysis to make a feed more or less positive. People who were fed negative feeds, started using negative words in their own status update: https://www.forbes.com/sites/gregorymcneal/2014/06/28/facebo...
> The marketing study suggested companies should "[c]oncentrate media during prime vulnerability moments, aligning with content involving tips and tricks, instant beauty rescues, dressing for the success, getting organized for the week and empowering stories... Concentrate media during her most beautiful moments, aligning with content involving weekend guides, weekend style, beauty tips for social activities and positive stories." The Facebook study, combined with last year's marketing study suggests that marketers may not need to wait until Mondays or Thursdays to have an emotional impact, instead social media companies may be able to manipulate timelines and news feeds to create emotionally fueled marketing opportunities.
My mother for example is heavily affected by the ads she sees on Facebook and other places. All it takes is one or two articles and I've had to talk to her a few times about being careful about the sites she visits and what she reads online.
So this service? This would be remarkably effective on people like her. This service isn't for people like us who are a bit more aware of how advertising works. It's for the majority of people.
I mean, you can show people ads about "Are you an immigrant? Claim your government-sponsored house. We will help you to qualify even if you don't meet the criteria" and now you conceived the idea that the government is giving away free houses to immigrants and there's even a way to cheat the system and get a house even if you do not qualify.
As far as I remember they essentially divided people into categories through data gathered through facebook and targeted them with ads like this.
I guess if you can manage to put the cookie to identify your target you can run all kind of manipulative campaigns because you can change the perception of the reality.
You don't have to be honest and straightforward and speak directly to the target. Simply re-shape his/her reality.
Want a rise? Stalk your boss with ads about developer jobs with salaries way higher than yours. Your boss might start getting the idea of pay rise due to the false reality you prseented.
I think I actually saw an ad similar to that - my takeaway was "damn, these slimy scammers are targeting desperate immigrants", so I guess that means they didn't hit their target?
https://blogs.harvard.edu/doc/2019/02/27/spinner/
https://www.prexamples.com/2018/07/frustrated-husbands-can-u...
The less understandable part is that it's charging $50 for 180 impressions such as https://twitter.com/RichLeighPR/status/1037066048485371905 while Facebook sells those directly for a few dollars per 1000, i.e. 100x markup.
Facebook does not allow you to build a custom audience of 1 person. I believe it has to be a minimum size of 100 or thereabout. Which means when Spinner says your target will get 180 impressions, they have to throw in 99 random non-targets into the targeted audience in order to get the placement. Thus they really aren't marking it up as much as you think.
I never understood why. Mods claim it "doesn't add to the topic".
Earlier I had read about someone who tried to spook his roommate by targetting him with heavily-personalized ads. Cannot seem to find it now.
[1]: https://medium.com/@MichaelH_3009/sniper-targeting-on-facebo...
The Ultimate Retaliation: Pranking My Roommate with Targeted Facebook Ads. https://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking...
E.g. I get my news + dopamine from the local newspaper (physical paper edition) and HN, respectively. Ofc HN pretty much qualifies as a social network, but it has no targeting. My girlfriend isn't on any social network at all, unless WhatsApp qualifies as one and IMO it doesn't, unless you have a gazillion active group chats (which sounds like hell on earth).
I'm inclined to think that this makes both of us immune to attacks like the ones performed by this company, but I have an uneasy feeling that I'm missing something. Anyone with a better insight in targeting hacks than me able to chip in?
WhatsApp group chats were used to spread carefully crafted opposition memes and fake news.
So, while you may be safe against 50$ campaigns, it could be a false sense of security. For 5000$-50000$ I am sure I can get a special message in front of your face: Take out local ads, plant a newspaper story, create a huge story about your controversial 5-million-dollar-revenue website on HackerNews (remember, no such thing as bad publicity, this website will see their customers spike today!)
> He banked on people hate-tweeting it. “I don’t mind what they feel, as long as they think something”, Halib said – which is scarily like something I’ve said in talks I’ve given about coming up with PR ideas that bang.
So your overall vulnerability to this targeting has more to do with what your browser does (such as whether it blocks trackers and expires or removes some cookies) and what sites you visit (in terms of where they choose to embed ads from).
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html