There’s been an article on a site called Dangerous Minds called Facebook: I want my friends back, making the rounds. Ironically (or so it seems to me, you’ll have to decide for yourself) I’m not going to link to it because it is too much an example of this “seedy underbelly” effect I was going on about the other day (see my comment on this article if you enjoy listening to me rant). You can certainly find the article yourself easily enough if you haven’t seen it already.
What that article is about is how Facebook has started intentionally throttling how much traffic people get as a result of people “liking” them or stuff they post or whatever. Normal model might be, you see a favorite musician has a Facebook page, you “like” them, their updates start showing up in your whatever the hell they call the list of crap you see when you go to Facebook. Now allegedly something like 15% of the people who “liked” you get a particular update. And what’s up with that turns out to be no secret: if you want everybody to see it you have to pay Facebook to “promote” your content.
So sure that kind of sucks and I can see how you might feel pretty ticked off if being keyed into the social media platforms was a big part of how you enticed people to go to read articles on your website so you can get paid by people who are hoping that a fraction of your visitors are dumb enough to actually believe that they have "won todays contest!" and click on an ad link.
And maybe this article had made me a bit more attentive or maybe it was just a coincidence but shortly after this article made the rounds this happened: I saw a item pop up from a Facebook friend - an individual I have a perfectly ordinary and courteous but not close relationship with. The item was that they had “liked” an individual I do not personally care for much. No need to specify further, my issue is not to call anyone out for having a right to their own opinion. The point is that this item was identified in the usual microscopic footnote as Sponsored. I did what I generally do with this sort of thing: I hid the item. Not something I care to argue about, certainly not in that venue. A day later I was on my Events list and noticed the item had showed up again in a slightly more obviously tagged-as-sponsored sidebar on that page.
What’s going on here is not subtle. The “liked” individual (or some partisan on their behalf) had paid Facebook to push items of this nature into the view of individuals related to the person who had “liked” them. This transaction occurred strictly between Facebook and whoever paid for the promotion. Facebook aggregated my relationship and my acquaintance's opinion and sold them to someone without the two of us being involved in the transaction in any way except as unintentional (and in my case unwilling) consumer and unintentional shill.
I honestly think we need to take a long and hard look at how we feel about this fundamental subversion of the nature of “word of mouth”. We are busily empowering corporations to collect unprecedented and largely invisible amounts of information about us: our social relationships, our personal conditions, our children and families. We are voluntarily telling them what we like and where we go and what we did there. Increasingly mobile devices are recording information about us automatically and if you ever agreed to the terms of service on an App without really reading it chances are you have no idea what sort of tracking and data collection you’ve agreed to.
And this is how they are going to use this data: they are going to sell it to the highest bidder and use it to manipulate how much and exactly what you see of your friends’ and acquaintances’ and relatives’ data in a manner so as to manipulate your economic and political choices. This isn’t science-fiction dystopia material any more, okay? Facebook is doing this right now.
The internet promised to democratize media. Well, I think it is time for intelligent people to wake up and take a look at what a bad bargain we’ve made of it. Orwell’s vision of Big Brother’s ubiquitous television screens is beginning to look positively quaint.
