
Mark Zuckerberg and his empire of oily rags - laurex
https://craphound.com/news/2018/07/02/mark-zuckerberg-and-his-empire-of-oily-rags/
======
oblio
> That’s because dossiers on billions of people hold the power to wreak almost
> unimaginable harm, and yet, each dossier brings in just a few dollars a
> year. For commercial surveillance to be cost effective, it has to socialize
> all the risks associated with mass surveillance and privatize all the gains.

> There’s an old-fashioned word for this: corruption. In corrupt systems, a
> few bad actors cost everyone else billions in order to bring in millions –
> the savings a factory can realize from dumping pollution in the water supply
> are much smaller than the costs we all bear from being poisoned by effluent.
> But the costs are widely diffused while the gains are tightly concentrated,
> so the beneficiaries of corruption can always outspend their victims to stay
> clear.

Spot on. Google's in exactly the same boat, it's just that they provide a few
services which are legitimately useful (Search, Gmail), so they're targeted
less right now.

How we will get out of this, I have no idea...

~~~
crispyambulance

        > How we will get out of this, I have no idea...
    

I don't know. It was a faustian bargain we all made. It was fun for a while,
but now it is getting increasingly ugly.

How does one get out of a Faustian Bargain, anyway?

~~~
smt88
A Faustian bargain implies that we knew the price. Facebook actively misled
(and continues to mislead) us about what we were giving up to use its service.

I always get downvoted for FB criticism, perhaps by their employees, but I
have evidence for what I just said: Zuck's many, many, many public apologies.

~~~
ryandrake
I don’t think people really can feign ignorance. What did we think was going
on? FB built this huge free product out of the goodness of their hearts? Did
nobody stop to think about how Zuck became a billionaire and pays all these
employees?

~~~
marcosdumay
It was evidently to show you ads. Showing ads is lightly problematic, but not
inheretly evil.

The privacy concerns were pretty much hidden from the public the entire time.

~~~
zipwitch
"Showing ads" is a phrase that covers a wide range of activity. Personally, I
don't see anything wrong (and a lot of good) with a polite "hey, this thing
exists" message. But once ads start trying to grab your attention, subvert
your reasoning (often to your own personal detriment)... that's Evil. It's
smeared out into billions of tiny bits, but that doesn't really make it any
better.

Polite advertising combined with targeting is also potentially very
problematic. Passive targeting (people who are interested in X do Y so I will
advertise X near Y) seems fine, but it in this day and age it intersects with
tracking... which brings us back around the circle.

------
micimize
While I am also concerned about the growing depth of surveillance, there
hasn't been any _real_ evidence that Cambridge Analytica's methods were
effective
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica#Assessment...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica#Assessment_of_impact)).
That they were mostly ineffective seems to me the more reasonable null
hypothesis. Why assume these shady micro-targeting campaigns are such a big
deal in the face of the huge, multidimensional propaganda wars that are
political campaigns?

Without the presumption that the micro-targeting is super effective, nothing
looks like it's on fire.

~~~
coryfklein
The article specifically claims that Cambridge Analytica's techniques _didn't_
sway opinion, merely that they allowed them to locate specific voters. The
wikipedia section you linked says much the same:

> Research discussed by Brendan Nyhan of Dartmouth College showed that it is
> extremely hard to alter voters' preferences, because many likely voters are
> already committed partisans; as a result, it is easier to simply mobilize
> partisan voters.

~~~
ninkendo
Yup, you don't need to change peoples' minds to affect election outcomes, you
just need to encourage the right people to vote. Send messages about hot-
button issues to people who are already likely to be enraged by them, and
you'll get more of them turning out to the polls.

A friend of mine volunteered on the Clinton campaign in the months before the
election. The strategy wasn't to knock on random doors and convince people to
vote for Hillary, it was to find people who are already likely to lean left
(but maybe aren't likely voters), and remind them of the upcoming election and
where to vote, etc. Online ads take the same approach, just subconsciously.

~~~
frabbit
So is there any evidence for that hypothesis? Namely that Cambridge
Analytica's campaigns resulted in a higher turn out of Trump voters?

------
kilo_bravo_3
>It’s as though Mark Zuckerberg woke up one morning and realized that the oily
rags he’d been accumulating in his garage could be refined for an extremely
low-grade, low-value crude oil. No one would pay very much for this oil, but
there were a lot of oily rags, and provided no one asked him to pay for the
inevitable horrific fires that would result from filling the world’s garages
with oily rags, he could turn a tidy profit.

Given the number of trackers that my ad-blocker blocked while reading this,
isn't this article, Locusmag.com, and Cory Doctorow himself sprinkling just a
little more oil on the pile of rags?

Don't forget to smash that share button!

~~~
kbenson
> Cory Doctorow himself sprinkling just a little more oil on the pile of rags?

I just looked, and this is mirrored on his blog[1], and it appears to have
very little or no tracking set up. Feel free to read it there.

[https://craphound.com/news/2018/07/02/mark-zuckerberg-and-
hi...](https://craphound.com/news/2018/07/02/mark-zuckerberg-and-his-empire-
of-oily-rags/)

~~~
sctb
Thanks, we've updated the link from [http://locusmag.com/2018/07/cory-
doctorow-zucks-empire-of-oi...](http://locusmag.com/2018/07/cory-doctorow-
zucks-empire-of-oily-rags/).

~~~
polynomial
Is it still mirrored? It appears to be only a 3 paragraph excerpt.

------
ggdG
FTA: > absolute bastards like Turkey’s Erdogan and Hungary’s Orban.

I wonder what Viktor Orbán has done according to Doctorow to be put in the
same ballpark as Erdogan.

From [https://turkeypurge.com/](https://turkeypurge.com/) :

Turkey’s post-coup crackdown: 151,967 dismissed / 140,452 detained / 79,774
arrested / 3,003 schools, dormitories and universities shut down / 5,822
academics lost jobs / 4,463 judges, prosecutors dismissed / 189 media outlets
shut down / 319 journalists arrested

since July 15, 2016 / as of June 25, 2018

~~~
pjc50
This kind of thing: [https://www.independent.co.uk/news/long_reads/democracy-
is-o...](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/long_reads/democracy-is-on-the-
brink-in-hungary-so-why-is-no-one-talking-about-it-a7883876.html)

It's not quite so advanced in violence as Turkey, but it's definitely along
the same path.

~~~
ggdG
I read nothing in that article that hints at any government violence in
Hungary, so I don't get why you even bring this up.

Sure, there's lots of innuendo about how the EU is trying to teach a lesson
about democracy and human rights to a reluctant Hungary.

The thing is, if we have to choose among Orbán and Jüncker the leader with the
most democratic legitimacy, then Orbán wins hands down.

Hardly anyone in the EU voted for Jüncker, except for a few Luxemburgers.
Hardly anyone knew what the program of his party, the EPP, was at the time of
the election.

Orbán on the other hand enjoys a huge amount of support from the Hungarians.
You may disagree with his viewpoints, but that doesn't make his leadership any
less democratic.

He is careful not to follow the example of Western Europe with its disastrous
policies of mass immigration and - as a result - islamisation. This viewpoint
is shared with all governments in Eastern Europe and - at last - a growing
number of people in Western Europe.

He tries to raise awareness about the Soros-funded no-borders NGOs, which are
an attempt from outside the country to make the Hungarian press and
politicians talk and behave a certain way. The article in the Independent
tries to paint this as anti-Semitism, but in another article they admit that
even Israel disagrees with this viewpoint:
[https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/george-
soros...](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/george-soros-israel-
hungary-posters-defence-anti-immigrant-campaign-vilify-
businessman-a7836316.html)

The only reason the unelected leaders of the EU put pressure on Orbán is
because he poses a threat to their power. Of course they use words like "human
rights" and "democracy" to cover their real motivations. Look at the non-
reaction of the EU when the Spanish Rajoy government locked up Catalonian
political prisoners (by the way, do you know of any polical prisoners in
Hungary?). Why didn't they defend democracy and human rights at that time? The
reason is that the current EU leaders see the Catalonian independence movement
as a threat to their power.

~~~
soundwave106
When comparing Hungary to Turkey, the "awareness of Soros" thing actually is a
caution point to me.

From my point of view, Orban is using Soros as a boogeyman, with huge over-
emphasis on this single personality, far more than Soros's actual impact in
Hungary, to project disagreement with certain attitudes and things going on in
the world. ([https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/once-fringe-
soro...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/once-fringe-soros-
conspiracy-theory-takes-center-stage-in-hungarian-
election/2018/03/17/f0a1d5ae-2601-11e8-a227-fd2b009466bc_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.60d284f46aa3))

In Turkey, many of the statistics you cite are in part because Erdogan also
had a boogeyman: Fethullah Gülen. Many of the statistics you cite for Turkey
were "justified" by Erdogan's accusation that the coup was part of a Gülen
plot. (It is uncertain, of course, that this was actually the case, but it was
certainly a convenient excuse for rounding up all the "adversaries").

Hungary may be nothing like Turkey at this time, but never trust a leader with
an authoritarian streak and a convenient "enemy boogeyman" to demonize
against.

------
mtgx
> For commercial surveillance to be cost effective, it has to socialize all
> the risks associated with mass surveillance and privatize all the gains.

That's the biggest insight of the article. That's exactly what the likes of
Facebook and Google (and telecoms, and data brokers, etc) are doing.

~~~
Jyaif
Can somebody help me understand this sentence? What is "commercial
surveillance"? What are "risks associated with mass surveillance"?

~~~
munificent
_> What is "commercial surveillance"?_

When a for-profit company ("commercial") gathers large, detailed dossiers of
millions of people ("surveillance").

For example, if you use Twitter, go to
[https://twitter.com/settings/your_twitter_data](https://twitter.com/settings/your_twitter_data)
and look at the stuff under "Interests and ads data". That's the tip of the
iceberg.

 _> What are "risks associated with mass surveillance"?_

Like the article says, when a company has access to detailed personal
information about lots and lots of people, many bad things can happen:

* That information can be stolen by hackers and then used for identity theft or social engineering to gain access to private accounts. Think about how to reset your bank password your bank asks you questions like "where did you meet your first significant other?" Then consider how that event is probably _on your Facebook feed_.

* Companies like Cambridge Analytica can buy "ads" that are precisely targeted using that data to persuade certain groups of people to show up or not show up at polls and influence elections in non-Democratic ways.

Etc.

------
crispyambulance
I keep wanting to pull the trigger. Mr Doctorow's article is perhaps the last
straw...

Q: How do I permanently delete my account? A:
[https://www.facebook.com/help/224562897555674](https://www.facebook.com/help/224562897555674)

~~~
32qwef
Don't know how much you use FB but I highly recommend it. When I got rid of
mine, all I lost was status updates from people who weren't really my friends
to begin with. Your close friends will stick by you and your social life will
grow richer, with more face-to-face meetings. Quitting Facebook is great.

~~~
tapoxi
My issue with deleting Facebook is that a lot of services depend on it for
authentication and friend/contact discovery. I wish there were an open
standard for a social graph.

~~~
cptskippy
Apart from developing Facebook integrations for Work, I have never once used
Facebook to sign into a site and do not allow anything to rummage through my
contacts and "discover" things.

So I'm confused as to why this is a necessity. What services do you use that
won't function without your Facebook account?

~~~
hluska
I once had a conversation with a junior developer who told me that he would
rather die than give up Tinder. To this day, I honestly don't think he was
joking...

~~~
paulie_a
I am going to assume a junior developer is younger in age so it isn't that
surprising that getting laid is a high priority.

~~~
hluska
True, and I don't think you can use Tinder without a Facebook account. :)

------
zizek23
The tech community have become bad actors, and a lot of apologism and hand-
waving happens here.

At the moment they are just trading on the reputation of early pioneers who at
least professed some ethics and commitment to public good to pretend they are
part of the same group.

They continue to posture on public discussions while implementing dark
patterns and surveillance as a matter of course in their workplace. This is
the fact, the tech community led by SV have sold out and they know it. Their
main priority is pretending its not happening or diminishing the consequences.

If there is a backlash it will be well deserved as these people are selling
out the rest of the world for profit, greed and personal gain.

~~~
tmpz22
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends
on his not understanding it.” - Upton Sinclair

"Everybody wants to believe they are a good person, if you try to convince
them otherwise they will attack you and refuse to listen" \- tmpz22

------
forgottenpass
I read the first half of this. I can't decide if I think Doctorow is dancing
around the more important idea that goes unsaid, or if this really is the best
way to present it so people will accept it.

Everyone is a whole lot more susceptible to propaganda than anyone admits.
Doctorow presents this as Klansman getting the message that Trump is their
guy. Mao, Goebbels and any other obvious-baddies are perfect for making the
point. By pretending like it doesn't happen TO YOU, you'll accept that it can
possibly happen to humans (that are not you).

But it happens to everybody, all the time.

The only propaganda we notice is the stuff that is so far from targeting us we
see it's comically incongruity. But propaganda isn't meant for the hard sell.
Propaganda doesn't change your mind. Propaganda gets you to cross the
threshold and do something you were already positioned to do, by giving you
meaning for doing it.

~~~
i_am_nomad
Agreed, and in an earlier comment I intimated that Doctorow doesn’t really
object to propaganda, he just objects to other people’s propaganda. (And his
objection in fact contains some propaganda itself.)

~~~
forgottenpass
I kinda got that impression as I was reading it, but had hoped I was wrong.

There is a line of criticism I see often that goes something like this "$thing
is convincing people $bad_idea." (Sorry for the vague way of presenting this,
but I can't abstract it more clearly.)

I take that criticism and see the natural next step as reducing the amount of
influence that $thing has over people in specific, and in general give them
the tools to evaluate unfounded ideas and manipulation. I find this conclusion
blindingly obvious, and is where I depart from would-be political allies who
conclude with the same obviousness: "lets re-engineer $thing to manipulatively
spread $good_idea."

~~~
dnomad
> I kinda got that impression as I was reading it, but had hoped I was wrong.

Absolutely hilarious that all it took was one anonymous comment to "convince"
you of this despite the fact that you hoped you were wrong. This thread made
me lol so thanks for that.

~~~
forgottenpass
That comment didn't convince me of anything. I didn't push back either.

------
CountSessine
Controversial opinion: 'racists' are citizens too, and are entitled to vote in
elections.

If Cambridge Analytica and the people who employed them were at all effective,
it was because they identified personality traits that some voters have and
spoke to them about things they were concerned about.

What really motivated Trump supporters was a message that there is an epidemic
of illegal immigration which rule-followers view as lawlessness and rule-
breaking. Obviously, in their minds, this is caused by innumerate, one-world
leftists who care nothing about cultural dissolution because they have no
culture and observe no traditions themselves, and love moral hazard as long as
they're not the ones paying.

This is a bit silly, of course, but calling people bastards isn't going to
convince this group to Vote Democrat next time around.

~~~
mpweiher
> 'racists' are citizens too, and are entitled to vote in elections.

(1) Sadly, yes. However, racism shouldn't really have won the election as it
isn't a majority viewpoint.

(2) Even if racists are allowed to vote, there is a limit to the racism that
you can put into public policy, at least with a simple majority.

(3) A democracy is actually allowed, and even required, to defend itself
against certain types of ideas, for example fascism. See
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streitbare_Demokratie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streitbare_Demokratie)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance)

------
i_am_nomad
Doctorow is right, of course, but it’s lamentable that he declares the ugly
rise of Trump as only a feat of media influence, when in fact it’s also a
reaction to it. No one had a problem with the Obama campaign’s heavy use of
social media, a strategy that harvested racial tensions just as much as
Trump’s did.

~~~
32qwef
How did Obama's strategy harvest racial tensions? I genuinely want to know.
Can you link me to something?

~~~
bryanlarsen
Obama harvested votes from people convinced that his election would ease
racial tensions.

~~~
32qwef
You and some other commenters in the replies are making this claim. So yeah,
Obama was black, and some people were excited to vote for him because he was
black. That's not what I'm asking.

Did his Facebook ads specifically take advantage of the fact that he was
black? Did his ad campaign benefit from inflaming racial divisions?

To be fair, advertising from the trump campaign may not have played on racial
tensions either. The thing people are upset about is the russian interference.
The russians bought ads and made posts that clearly stoked tensions, and
Facebook was negligent in preventing this.

~~~
bryanlarsen
"campaign benefit from inflaming racial divisions"

That was not the claim. The claim was that he "harvested" racial tensions. And
of course he did.

------
quadyeast
It's ironic that the tool to increase friendship is evil.

~~~
TACIXAT
>tool to increase friendship

Media company with built-in social proof.

------
digi_owl
Maybe i have just not paid attention, but i get the sense that Doctorow has
throttled back his activities since moving to LA...

------
alejohausner
Doctorow assumes that racists got Trump elected, because Trump and his Russian
cronies persuaded them to vote, using targeted advertising.

He is insulting large swathes of reasonable non-racist voters, who chose Trump
as a protest to the status quo. They looked at Hillary, and saw four more
years of kowtowing to corporate interests, and ignoring working class voters.
They saw crappy jobs replacing the jobs they'd had before the recession. They
saw that no bankers went to prison. They saw the Democrats' shoddy treatment
of Sanders, and figured the Dems needed a spanking.

That's why we're stuck with this self-promoting windbag: not because voters
are stupid, but because they made a rational decision, and chose a clown over
a corporate crony.

~~~
Izkata
> They saw the Democrats' shoddy treatment of Sanders

This is one part of the protest voting that's consistently left out, but I
think is more important than people realize.

Trump and Sanders had one thing in common: They didn't pander to corporations,
though for different reasons. Sanders wanted to get that money out of
politics, and Trump had no use for their donations. After Sanders was out of
the running, the mixture of how he was treated and the DNC having chosen the
corporate candidate led quite a few in my circles to vote Trump specifically
in protest.

------
robrenaud
Trump is president because

1) Facebook made easy to find the "latent Klansman" in Wisconsin and
Pennsylvania.

OR

2) There are large swaths of working class white people in the middle of the
country unhappy with how their economic prospects have been trending in the
last 10 years.

~~~
minikites
It's not about their economic prospects:

[https://twitter.com/stevenvmiller/status/1014967443813519360](https://twitter.com/stevenvmiller/status/1014967443813519360)

[https://github.com/svmiller/earr](https://github.com/svmiller/earr)

[https://www.vox.com/identities/2017/12/15/16781222/trump-
rac...](https://www.vox.com/identities/2017/12/15/16781222/trump-racism-
economic-anxiety-study)

[https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2018/04/25/debunking-
ele...](https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2018/04/25/debunking-election-
economic-anxiety-myth/BnrFb0K14C62VrPZgKDR6M/story.html)

[https://www.thenation.com/article/economic-anxiety-didnt-
mak...](https://www.thenation.com/article/economic-anxiety-didnt-make-people-
vote-trump-racism-did/)

~~~
trocadero
>[https://www.thenation.com/article/economic-anxiety-didnt-
mak...](https://www.thenation.com/article/economic-anxiety-didnt-mak..).

>We created a stereotyping scale which measures views like believing people of
color are more violent or lazier than whites, but it was not included in our
final models because it did not predict voting behavior.

Let's just ignore the thing that disproves our premise.

------
jbb67
I don't get this article at all. It talk about brexit, yet we voted for it
despite all the incredible amount of lies being spread about it being a bad
thing.

~~~
usuallymatt
You....you don't think Brexit was a bad thing?????

~~~
malvosenior
Many, many people don't think it's a bad thing. As an American I look at
things like GDPR and the proposed copyright law and completely understand why
a sovereign country wouldn't want to be part of the EU.

You may not agree, but it shouldn't be mindblowing that reasonable people hold
this view.

~~~
lotsofcows
You seem to be under the impression that opting out of it somehow removes us
from it's effects.

As an American you have presumably been affected by eg GDPR and should
therefore recognise this is not true.

Leaving the EU means we have removed ourselves from that decision making
process. We will still be affected by any decisions they make.

------
RobertoG
" [..] given enough surveillance, companies can sell us anything: Brexit,
Trump, ethnic cleansing in Myanmar, and successful election bids for absolute
bastards like Turkey’s Erdogan and Hungary’s Orban."

The same as the author, I have serious problems believing this but it has
become a common place now even in mainstream media.

In a way, I worry more about this, than about the others dangers that we can
read in the article (I agree with those also).

It seems that, now, whenever people vote for somebody or something that they
are not "suppose" to vote, they have been "manipulated" and it's the fault of
Russian bots.

I'm not saying that, like always, there are not forces in play trying to move
things their way, but I find worrisome how easily that narrative is accepted.
It's a kind of mainstream paranoia conspiracy or, maybe, a too convenient
excuse for not finding the real reasons why people feel disgruntled.

~~~
turnitoff
I mean, it's kind of a half-truth, isn't it? We know that this sort of
manipulation is going on in an organized way: Sybil attacks are pretty common
in politics.

But it's insidious precisely because of this Patomkin-effect: it makes it
unclear how many real supporters the issue has, and it gives an easy cop-out
for people who would be otherwise responsible for their own defeat.

In a way, it becomes a scapegoat that can unite friend and foe.

(Although I think Doctorow is steering clear from the very stupid
interpretation of this effect)

~~~
RobertoG
>>"[..] it's kind of a half-truth, isn't it?"

More like a quarter-truth that allow to forget the other three quarters.

Economic policies dismantle the welfare state in the U.K. but the people vote
Brexit because some adds.

Part of the population in the USA is left economically behind but the reason
Trump is elected is because some Facebook advertisements.

One thousand years of history but part of the Catalan people search
independence from Spain because the 'Russian bots'.

The economy is not working but people is sceptic about the European Union
'because Internet'.

And you heard all that in mainstream media and in the mouths or politics.

It seems to me that happy people don't vote revolutions, never mind the
advertisements. It's when people is angry or scared that they search for
"strong leaders" and "guilty parties".

~~~
vertex-four
Dismantling the welfare state is going to continue to happen well after
Brexit, you know that. It has nothing to do with immigration or our membership
within the EU.

~~~
RobertoG
Sure, but the reason people is angry is not some advertisements. That's only a
scapegoat.

~~~
vertex-four
I don’t think anyone has seriously suggested that people are angry because of
advertisements, but that certain interested parties made use of that anger to
attack something entirely unrelated.

~~~
RobertoG
I agree, but the debate is, (in the society at large) disproportionally, in my
opinion, about the advertisements.

And they are used, I think, like a distraction, instead of looking into the
real issues.

------
wiz21c
FTA :

>>> Facebook isn’t a mind-control ray.

Cory is fine but here, he's wrong. FaceBook _is_ a mind control tool. It is a
mind control because when you send it some information, you know that friends,
facebook employees, facebook algorithm, potentially marketeers, potentially
state agencies, etc. will read read it. So you inflict yourself some degree of
censorship. You basically alter your behaviour. So, in a sense, it is a mind
control machine.

~~~
badbug
He's right and the rest of the article supports this statement. It isn't some
magical sci find weapon to instantly control people. But it is bad and is used
for agenda setting.

"The media doesn't tell you what to think, it tells you what to think about"

~~~
dvlsg
I'm not sure I agree with that. The media quote, I mean. There's plenty of
media companies (on both sides of the political spectrum) that are definitely
trying to tell you what to think. Maybe not all of them, but there are some.

~~~
kbenson
"Tells my what to think" it's a common idiom in English, meaning not just that
you were _told ", but that you were _commanded and followed*. It's basically
synonymous with "controls how I think", and almost always used as a negation.
That is, someone will say "he doesn't tel me what to think" to express that
their thoughts are still their own and independent.

In that context, "The media doesn't tell you what to think, it tells you what
to think about" is meant to be taken as "The media doesn't control how you
think, but it defines the discussion." I think this is just a case where an
author decided for alliteration over clarity. Sometimes that's a useful path,
as alliteration can help phrases stick in the social consciousness. In this
case it's just confusing.

------
ljw1001
Worth a read if for no other reason than that the phrase "surveillance
capitalism" should be as widely known as possible.

------
malvosenior
I think articles like this do a lot more to build support for Trump than
anything Facebook has done.

Is it really that hard to believe that people voted for something you don’t
like because they think you’re wrong and not because they were brainwashed?

~~~
Spearchucker
Is like he said in his conclusion - social media didn't convince people to
become racists. It convinced racists to vote.

~~~
malvosenior
Or, calling people racists convinced them to vote against the people attacking
them.

------
dnomad
> Rather, the sophisticated targeting systems available through Facebook,
> Google, Twitter, and other Big Tech ad platforms made it easy to find the
> racist, xenophobic, fearful, angry people who wanted to believe that
> foreigners were destroying their country while being bankrolled by George
> Soros.

This is where the argument collapses. It's well known that the right-wing have
carefully and diligently constructed their own parallel reality [1]. There are
endless right-wing news sites, blogs, and forums that tirelessly aggregate
these people and pump them full of propaganda [2]. Facebook here is acting, at
best, as a viral multiplier. Even if Facebook were to disappear tomorrow there
are a plethora of sites ready to leap in at a moment's notice. Facebook's
disappearance would not degrade the propaganda effort. Heck, there's always
email.

Cory doesn't have the courage to say it but his real issue must be with the
internet as a whole. Propaganda is the internet's real killer app. You can see
just how nicely this works: propaganda relies completely on repetition and
copying [3]. And what is the one thing the internet does better than anything
else?

It may feel good to blame Facebook but this will ultimately accomplish
nothing. Propagandists will literally build their own social networking sites
if Facebook goes away. The sort of people who obsess over immigration aren't
going to simply log off. They are connected now and there are plenty of people
out there eager to connect with these people and validate their most elaborate
paranoid fantasies. Where there is demand, there will be supply.

[1] [https://www.wgbh.org/news/2017/03/15/politics-
government/maj...](https://www.wgbh.org/news/2017/03/15/politics-
government/major-new-study-shows-political-polarization-mainly-right-wing)

[2] [http://comprop.oii.ox.ac.uk/research/polarization-
partisansh...](http://comprop.oii.ox.ac.uk/research/polarization-partisanship-
and-junk-news/)

[3]
[https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/perspectives/PE10...](https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/perspectives/PE100/PE198/RAND_PE198.pdf)

~~~
nerfhammer
yea he's trying to conflate propaganda with "sophisticated targeting" when
it's really AFAICT people sharing shitposts with each other reinforcing their
beliefs. if you look at, say 4chan or fox news there's no "sophisticated
targeting" going on there at all

------
zerostar07
I wish facebook could be outright extinguished from the internet. Then a lot
of people would realize that those barbarians were a kind of solution.

------
brookhaven_dude
Most people I talk to (even the tech savvy) don't really care about their data
being collected by all these companies. They feel it's a fair trade.

Ironically an extremely tech-UNsavvy young woman I know makes sure to minimize
her usage of these services (never had FB, instagram etc.) and is actually
quite protective of her data.

~~~
beager
I think personal attitudes toward collection of one’s personal data are
orthogonal to the issue here, which is the weaponization of data collected in
the aggregate. This is why I believe that personal boycotts of Facebook and
the like, while responsible on an individual level, represent a slow and
inefficient way of stopping the corruptible dynamics of large-scale data-
collection ad model companies like FB. Regulation and accountability would be
more effective. I know both of those words are four-letter words in the modern
tech world zeitgeist.

------
fortythirteen
(Argues that social media and data tracking is a dangerous combination that
can serve to further alienate us from our humanity)

(Proceeds to inject his political agenda that, while it has many truths, is
written in a way that will completely alienate anyone not far-left)

~~~
tclancy
When did suggesting government oversight of companies that have shown
themselves to be bad actors become a far-left belief? Why does it feel like
these appellations come from people that aren’t so much right or left
politically, but just want to keep their fingers in their ears out of fear?

~~~
malvosenior
Government regulation is definitely a leftist idea and not something typically
associated with the right.

~~~
crooked-v
That's far from "far", though.

~~~
malvosenior
It depends on the type and amount of regulation. I'd definitely classify
Doctorow and this blog post as far-left.

~~~
digi_owl
IMO there is a particular kind of left that one find in and around the tech
world, "Vally left" if you will.

It is a kind of "left" that maybe front some social issues (in particular
gender as of late) but that can't bring themselves to really question the way
things work on a really deep level.

The kind of left that would not know a industrial or service job if it landed
on their head.

Looking over the wikipedia article on him, Doctorow may well be described as a
professional activist.

