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.
1 comment:
I imagine the purveyors of Dangerous Minds might take umbrage at my characterizing them as such: their website is pretty clean, a banner ad, a couple of sidebars, the usual tools to induce you to promote them on whatever your social taste is.
But. As I opened the page for this article a couple things tip their category: the page tried to open up a pop-up, and I was treated to a sidebar ad advising me that I had “won todays (sic) contest in Minneapolis”. The former is an imposition I consider generally unacceptable - there is never a justification in opening additional browser windows I did not request at a site of this nature. I’m there to consume an article, nothing more. I run pop-up blocking because in experience what comes up in this context is 100% unwanted and sometimes causes minor browsing problems. I do not run ad-blocking ad-ons in my browser because I think advertising revenue is a legitimate model for sponsoring content and I want to support it where it is properly used, but also because I want to see what is going on out there. And what is going on out there is that I did not in fact win today’s contest in Minneapolis, this is fraud. Scoff if you like and it may be a low-level, legally questionable fraud but there is no doubt in my mind: I am being fed a false claim, which has additionally taken advantage of personal information I’d rather not be available to whatever robot is feeding me the ad to falsely personalize it. It’s sleazy, and its bullshit, and I’m tired of it. I’m tired of weird tricks that make you lose weight by taking ten years’ age off your skin by slashing your auto insurance by taking advantage of President Obama’s free money to go back to school by refinancing your house. I’m sick of starting to enter personal information into a form I think is an employment inquiry and realizing I am about to submit an application request for an online degree program because the job-search site I’m on purposely inserted this advertisement into my process precisely in this manner to make that mistake happen. I’m sick of lists of “related articles” that are paid-for link-bait pandering garbage, I’m sick of the constant, constant bait-and-switch.
And it is everywhere. Everyone has made the devil’s bargain: they sign up for ads that they have (or if they have, they exercise) little or no control over the content of, and proceed to declaim all responsibility for the content. Well it’s on your god damned page and you are responsible. A long time ago Google Adsense changed its terms of service to demand that I stick a disclosure on my business to advise people that because I had ads on my page Google reserved the right to get a little bit further up in their business than I could stomach, so I shut the ads off. Well, you know, big deal, it’s not very hard to give up pretty much no money. I gave up on monetizing text under the offered model of the internet anyway: there’s no way to keep the sleaze off.
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