Has anyone come up with a way of tracking what gets shared where? Perhaps with a hidden pixel or some other mechanism to track requests? Or is that impossible because Facebook is a walled garden?
I'm thinking that since there is no check against Facebook's sharing algorithm going haywire (in effect censoring certain things for monetary gain) that that creates an incentive to not be fair. The public nature of the internet used to be our proof of fairness, for example with Twitter or YouTube.
It occurred to me that the same 3 people that like my posts are probably the only ones seeing them, since I'm one of the only ones who likes theirs back. We're collectively hellbanned, and I can't think of a stronger incentive to quit using Facebook.
The last monitoring attempt that I heard of used a browser plugin to scrape the user's posts. The point was to monitor political parties and their ad targeting before the upcoming elections in Germany.
Generally, Facebook needs to view contents of posts that is able to access third party websites a severe bug. It is an unwelcome data leak at least and a true attack vector at worst. So, tracking by linking to a third party tracking pixel should be impossible.
This article started off well but began to lose me around the time he said:
"Computer scientists have an aphorism that describes how algorithms relentlessly hunt for patterns: they talk about torturing the data until it confesses."
This is the first time I have seen this formulation of the nature of data. Data is almost always regarded as an input, or a resource, or a substrate, not a being of any kind.
The article generally seems to be less about its title and more about Facebook's business on the whole, and it's an interesting read.
I feel like both the velocity of these articles about "The Facebook corporation" and people's awareness of their shady practices are increasing overall.
I guess I wonder will it manage to effect any change in people's online behavior and wholesale submission to this corporation's whims and agenda? I would like to believe yes but my anecdotal observations of people and their smart phones suggests to me there's no basis for believing that.
These phone companies are terrible. All they want to do is make money off of their customers. I stopped using phones to communicate a couple of months ago. My real friends still send me telegrams.
These telegraph companies are terrible. All they want to do is make money ...
This is a trope and not useful for solving problems of culture, psychology, or addiction. It is the same as saying "when you ban guns, only criminals will have guns" or "everyone has a choice, so choose not to do drugs". These are vapid recitations and cannot address complex issues.
This is absolutely not the same as your gun ban argument. It is also not the same as your "choose not to use" argument. How do people think they can give away all of their information, to someone who trades in information, and somehow act surprised when that entity leverages this information?
I'm unable to believe that anyone running a product with over a billion active users has anything less than altruistic intentions. Who is to say any of us have free will? Who is to say any of us deserve free will after all the wars we've caused and damage to the environment? If your going to get theological don't bother, you are out of date.
Those sorts of things only appeal to people who know what they mean, which is a ver very small part of facebook. Does my mother or grandmother care about a social network being federated or open source? No , not even close. Only technical people care about this stuff and it adds no value for the average user.
Also, in my experience, no distributed competition for any service X lived up to a centralized, commercially run X in the past. Decentralization has in the past always added a layer of complexity that makes things appear slow, breaks things randomly and generally ends up in the user's way in one way or another.
Myspace was a blip on the radar compared to Facebook. It was founded a year before Facebook, and its star started fading within 6mo of Facebook starting to spread like wildfire across college campuses. It was inevitable that the Myspace audience, which trended slightly younger, would abandon the platform wholesale as soon as Facebook threw open the doors to the public.
I'm thinking that since there is no check against Facebook's sharing algorithm going haywire (in effect censoring certain things for monetary gain) that that creates an incentive to not be fair. The public nature of the internet used to be our proof of fairness, for example with Twitter or YouTube.
It occurred to me that the same 3 people that like my posts are probably the only ones seeing them, since I'm one of the only ones who likes theirs back. We're collectively hellbanned, and I can't think of a stronger incentive to quit using Facebook.