Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/02/11/facebook-dictatorship.html
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Let’s face it. Facebook is a terrible place to go for political discourse. The platform is just not set up to support it and honestly the company should give up on that avenue and focus on the consumerism that makes it real money.
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That’s a funny choice of words because every page or ad is paying to reach X number of users. So a page with millions of likes purports to have a wide fan base and there are others marketing to those supposed fans. It’s in FB’s best interest to have millions of users and thousands and millions of likes on various pages, photos, ads, etc. Esp because then the ‘little (non-gendered) guy’ - the person with just a good product or article has to pay more money to get in front of that line in order to get people to see their product. It’s convoluted but, as far as making money goes, it works. That said, I am not saying this is a good thing. In fact, it’s a terrible thing. Especially cause I am one of those little guys with my little corner of the world who has to work against this sort of tide all the time.
From a different perspective: a mediocre artist buys thousands of clicks and likes from a click farm. They pay various news media outlets for articles about themselves. The click farm populate these articles with likes, sharing them, and taking advantage of the more likes = more shares = more views algorithms. Is their work good? Let’s assume the next person has some real talent but either doesn’t want to spend the money on fake likes or doesn’t have the money to buy fake likes. So they are left in the dust and have to spend all the more money on real ads. This is the case for every product.
One problem here is that political discourse, your political views, political candidates, etc, are just another product to promote, advertise, manipulate. It’s an unfortunate by product of the consumer driven dialogue.
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This isn’t much different from the dictator winning the election with 99.7% of the votes - except elections have consequences.
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Fsck Zuck…
An unclear headline: I initially thought the opposition leader was suing Facebook because facebook alleged he colluded with the dictator.
So. Facebook is evil. Who knew?
It’s been shown that the price for these kinds of things keeps going down. This is not a road to profitability. Every year fewer dollars are made through click farms from top to bottom.
We can neither buy nor sell nor profit from politics. The idea that private companies can make money by brokering political commodities is stretching some metaphor way too far to be believable.
Creating divisive audiences that refuse to communicate with one another is the opposite of what social media and targeted advertising are designed to do. We want people talking about their pets, what restaurants they go to, what shoes they like, what athletes are trending, etc. So we can sell their data to companies that offer pet supplies, food magazines, etc. Selling political data to candidates every 4 years when that information is not even that important to candidates (because polls are bullshit) is not a good sole function for a profitable business.
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