For Facebook, ignorance is the business model: Social net is shocked – SHOCKED – that people behave badly No one at Facebook had any idea anyone might use its ad tools to target "Jew haters," said COO Sheryl Sandberg earlier this week. Of course not. Facebook, like its rival Google, thrives on the income of ignorance and contrition. To prevent money laundering, financial institutions must comply with know-your-customer laws. …
Thrives & Thrives... Facebook & Experian in bed together too, wonderful!
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https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n16/john-lanchester/you-are-the-product
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Extracts:
* You Are the Product - No human enterprise, no new technology or utility or service, has ever been adopted so widely so quickly. The speed of uptake far exceeds that of the internet itself, let alone ancient technologies such as TV or cinema.
* Facebook ‘a business with an exceedingly low ratio of invention to success’.
* But that’s not what the man (Zuk) is really like. He was studying for a degree in computer science and – this is the part people tend to forget – psychology.
* The reason Thiel latched onto Facebook with such alacrity was that he saw in it for the first time a business that was Girardian to its core: built on people’s deep need to copy. ‘Facebook first spread by word of mouth, and it’s about word of mouth, so it’s doubly mimetic,’ Thiel said.
* ‘Social media proved to be more important than it looked, because it’s about our natures.’ We are keen to be seen as we want to be seen, and Facebook is the most popular tool humanity has ever had with which to do that.
* The fact is that fraudulent content, and stolen content, are rife on Facebook, and the company doesn’t really mind, because it isn’t in its interest to mind. Much of the video content on the site is stolen from the people who created it. 725 of Facebook’s top one thousand most viewed videos were stolen.
* This is another area where Facebook’s interests contradict society’s. We may collectively have an interest in sustaining creative and imaginative work in many different forms and on many platforms.
* Facebook doesn’t. It has two priorities, as Martínez explains in Chaos Monkeys: growth and monetisation. It simply doesn’t care where the content comes from. It is only now starting to care about the perception that much of the content is fraudulent, because if that perception were to become general, it might affect the amount of trust and therefore the amount of time people give to the site.
* A neutral observer might wonder if Facebook’s attitude to content creators is sustainable. Facebook needs content, obviously, because that’s what the site consists of: content that other people have created. It’s just that it isn’t too keen on anyone apart from Facebook making any money from that content. Over time, that attitude is profoundly destructive to the creative and media industries. Access to an audience – that unprecedented two billion people – is a wonderful thing, but Facebook isn’t in any hurry to help you make money from it. If the content providers all eventually go broke, well, that might not be too much of a problem. There are, for now, lots of willing providers: anyone on Facebook is in a sense working for Facebook, adding value to the company.
* In 2014, the New York Times did the arithmetic and found that humanity was spending 39,757 collective years on the site, every single day. ‘almost fifteen million years of free labour per year’. back when it had a mere 1.23 billion users.
* If I want to reach women between the ages of 25 and 30 in zip code 37206 who like country music and drink bourbon, Facebook can do that. Moreover, Facebook can often get friends of these women to post a ‘sponsored story’ on a targeted consumer’s news feed, so it doesn’t feel like an ad. As Zuckerberg said when he introduced Facebook Ads, ‘Nothing influences people more than a recommendation from a trusted friend. A trusted referral is the Holy Grail...
* Facebook already had a huge amount of information about people and their social networks and their professed likes and dislikes. After waking up to the importance of monetisation, they added to their own data a huge new store of data about offline, real-world behaviour, acquired through partnerships with big companies such as Experian!
* These firms know all there is to know about your name and address, your income and level of education, your relationship status, plus everywhere you’ve ever paid for anything with a card. Facebook could now put your identity together with the unique device identifier on your phone.
They may have very little interest in doing so, but the way various legislatures are beginning to think could mean that they become legally responsible for the content. This is beginning to happen even in the USA.
They'd have to take an interest then, but I think that their current business model would then be dead. There's no practical way for them to police all the content accurately.
For them to be able to have no role in policing content they'd have to be able to pass the buck, give it to the Police to deal with.
It's kind of what they do right now, but it's useless; it's too hard to find out who a user actually is. Hence the annoyance of law enforcement agencies and politicians all over the world.
However, suppose they could give the Police the legal name, address and bank account number of a user who'd uploaded some frightful shit. That'd keep the police happy - a simpler prosecution process - and all this talk of social media companies being held responsible for the content would simply melt away.
It means an end to the freetard ad funded business model though.
With the legal and political pressure to "Do somehow about illegal online content" increasing, it is inevitable that at some point the legal environment for social media companies is going to become incompatible with their current business model. It's probably a matter of when, not if.
Given that, the company that can roll with that, change their business model and adapt will be the one to survive. Going non-freetard sounds risky now, but at some point becoming a paid for, ad free, zero analytics and zero tracking business will be the only way to stay in business.
"They may have very little interest in doing so, but the way various legislatures are beginning to think could mean that they become legally responsible for the content."
I think there is agreement across a range of political views that the way internet communications companies are regulated needs updating with legislation based on something like current technology rather than the laws covering telegrams, letters and the post office being extended to email and internet packets.
Whether any legislation produced will improve or worsen the situation is up for grabs. Both straight comms companies, like the beloved cable companies in the US, and the social media giants will be lobbying hard to get things written in their favor. And we all know how well politicians do tech....
Just to be clear, the postal service and banking sector get used for illegal activities all the time, and they are not assumed to have to police things entirely themselves. The PO will ask you not to send drugs or knives in the mail, but won't search each package to ensure they aren't in there.
Adverts != Publicly posted content.
They're paid to show the adverts, and so must be legally liable for those in the same way a newspaper is.
And if they can't afford to vet all adverts they show then they can't afford to be in business.
It's a basic cost of being an advertising agency. Just ask Bell Pottinger.
A "common carrier" is not a publisher. More like a news vendor, but a blind one who can't actually read the headlines.
Facebook should never have been able to claim that status. The moment they started making any differentiation between posts, they blew that cover clean off.
The former knows policing content is critical to its own survival.
The *berg know their survival is built upon letting any income opportunity come in, even the ugliest ones. Their whole business model is built upon that, it's quantity, not quality.
Once caught, they will make up some excuse, and then business as usual.
The only hope is people start to understand online ads don't work.
But they do work.
I spend 60k a year on adwords, 18k for someone to admin it. And it brings in a lot of work.
If people are using googling to search for something then there is a good chance they want to buy it.
Not so much with banner adverts though.
If Facebook is forced to police all contents according to subjective rules and guidelines (they have tried and invariably get it wrong) imagine what will happen when the Police start doing it.
People will be arrested, fined perhaps even imprisoned for making unpopular comments, likes, dislikes and links. The chilling effect writ large.
That will never happen right?
http://www.businessinsider.com/people-arrested-for-facebook-posts-2013-7?IR=T
https://www.peepso.com/people-arrested-social-media-posts/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/may/18/facebook-comments-arrest-prosecution
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/arrests-for-offensive-facebook-and-twitter-posts-soar-in-london-a7064246.html
The list is long my friends.
The only good news is that kids are abandoning Farcebook in droves. They are clearly smarter than their parents.
Seriously. What's worse than government controlling speech? Government in partnerships with megacorporations controlling speech. Unfortunately, it looks like the modern progressives have learned from their pre-WWII predecessors - you keep big business around to do your dirty work and then use them as an ablative shield when people finally figure out that they live in a police state. The dissidents have already politely sorted and presented themselves for reeducation, internment, or execution. The Germans are already halfway there, but of course they have experience.
You don't make the world better with force - Americans keep trying this and it keeps backfiring spectacularly. You make it better by engaging with people who are wrong (like racists) one at a time. You make it better by living as a better person yourself and setting an example for others. Anger and violence - even righteous anger and violence - only beget more anger and violence. Be this guy:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/black-man-daryl-davis-befriends-kkk-documentary-accidental-courtesy_us_585c250de4b0de3a08f495fc
I read somewhere that the court and the lawyers agreed to donate it to a bunch of legal organisations including law schools of prestigious universities. There was concern that this was not a very equitable distribution of the money.
I can't remember where that was posted.
Is this the real reason social media and the search engines seemingly cannot control rampant click fraud? There is simply too much money to be made if it is allowed to continue. There are billions of dollars being pocketed by 'looking the other way' and ignoring the facts. It just doesn't pay to follow the rules anymore when the largest players in the industry allow fraud to happen and continue to do nothing about it. Is it finally time to become good at click fraud ourselves to still be able to compete? What a shame.
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