Cory Doctorow: Zuck's Empire of Oily Rags
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July 3, 2018 at 07:32AM
via My Reading List: Unread http://locusmag.com/2018/07/cory-doctorow-zucks-empire-of-oily-rags
«Facebook isn't a mind-control ray. It's a tool for finding people who possess uncommon, hard-to-locate traits, whether that's "person thinking of buying a new refrigerator," "person with the same rare disease as you," or "person who might participate in a genocidal pogrom," and then pitching them on a nice side-by-side or some tiki torches, while showing them social proof of the desirability of their course of action, in the form of other people (or bots) that are doing the same thing, so they feel like they're part of a crowd.
Even if mind-control rays remain science fiction, Facebook and other commercial surveillance platforms are still worrisome, and not just because they allow people with extreme views to find each other. Gathering huge dossiers on everyone in the world is scary in and of itself […]»