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Category: Social media

Facebook is a company built around a misanthropic premise

Facebook is a company built around a misanthropic premise

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Last August, John Lanchester wrote: [Mark Zuckerberg] is very well aware of how people’s minds work and in particular of the social dynamics of popularity and status. The initial launch of Facebook was limited to people with a Harvard email address; the intention was to make access to the site seem exclusive and aspirational. (And also to control site traffic so that the servers never went down. Psychology and computer science, hand in hand.) Then it was extended to other…

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The secret police enforcing Silicon Valley’s code of secrecy

The secret police enforcing Silicon Valley’s code of secrecy

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Olivia Solon reports: One day last year, John Evans (not his real name) received a message from his manager at Facebook telling him he was in line for a promotion. When they met the following day, she led him down a hallway praising his performance. However, when she opened the door to a meeting room, he came face to face with members of Facebook’s secretive “rat-catching” team, led by the company’s head of investigations, Sonya Ahuja. The interrogation was a…

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Cambridge Analytica: Whistleblower, Christopher Wylie, reveals data grab of 50 million Facebook profiles

Cambridge Analytica: Whistleblower, Christopher Wylie, reveals data grab of 50 million Facebook profiles

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  The New York Times reports: As the upstart voter-profiling company Cambridge Analytica prepared to wade into the 2014 American midterm elections, it had a problem. The firm had secured a $15 million investment from Robert Mercer, the wealthy Republican donor, and wooed his political adviser, Stephen K. Bannon, with the promise of tools that could identify the personalities of American voters and influence their behavior. But it did not have the data to make its new products work. So…

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YouTube, the great radicalizer

YouTube, the great radicalizer

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Zeynep Tufekci writes: YouTube has recently come under fire for recommending videos promoting the conspiracy theory that the outspoken survivors of the school shooting in Parkland, Fla., are “crisis actors” masquerading as victims. Jonathan Albright, a researcher at Columbia, recently “seeded” a YouTube account with a search for “crisis actor” and found that following the “up next” recommendations led to a network of some 9,000 videos promoting that and related conspiracy theories, including the claim that the 2012 school shooting…

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How to learn more about the news by spending less time following the news

How to learn more about the news by spending less time following the news

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Farhad Manjoo writes: I first got news of the school shooting in Parkland, Fla., via an alert on my watch. Even though I had turned off news notifications months ago, the biggest news still somehow finds a way to slip through. But for much of the next 24 hours after that alert, I heard almost nothing about the shooting. There was a lot I was glad to miss. For instance, I didn’t see the false claims — possibly amplified by…

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Facebook provided the perfect advertising platform for Trump

Facebook provided the perfect advertising platform for Trump

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Alexis C. Madrigal writes: Here is the central tenet of Facebook’s business: If lots of people click on, comment on, or share an ad, Facebook charges that advertiser less money to reach people. The platform is a brawl for user attention, and Facebook sees a more engaging ad as a better ad, which should be shown to more users. This has been true for years. No one inside or outside Facebook has ever hidden this fact. All the dynamics of…

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How Trump conquered Facebook — without Russian ads

How Trump conquered Facebook — without Russian ads

Antonio García Martínez writes: It’s not every day that a former work colleague gets retweeted by the president of the United States. Last Friday, Rob Goldman, a vice president inside Facebook’s Ads team, rather ill-advisedly published a series of tweets that seemed to confirm the Trump administration’s allegations regarding the recent indictments of 13 Russian nationals by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. To wit, the tweets said that the online advertising campaign led by the shadowy Internet Research Agency was meant…

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Facebook poses an increasing threat to journalism

Facebook poses an increasing threat to journalism

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Mathew Ingram writes: Author and journalism professor Dan Gillmor recently described a future in which “we will be living in the ecosystem of a company that has repeatedly demonstrated its untrustworthiness, an enterprise that would become the primary newsstand for journalism and would be free to pick the winners via special deals with media people and tweaks of its opaque algorithms. If this is the future, we are truly screwed.” In addition to the economic threat it represents to media…

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