Why Facebook is in a hole over data mining [is cuz earns nearly $20 per user per year (in the US and Canada) by monetising their data.]"

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: the keyboard of geoff goodfellow <geoff () iconia com>
> Date: October 8, 2017 at 4:23:17 PM EDT
> To: "E-mail Pamphleteer Dave Farber's Interesting People list" <ip () listbox com>
> Subject: Why Facebook is in a hole over data mining [is cuz earns nearly $20 per user per year (in the US and Canada) 
> by monetising their data.]"
>
> Why Facebook is in a hole over data mining
> It’s Mark Zuckerberg’s business model that allows Facebook to be manipulated by political activists – no wonder he’s 
> in denial about it
> By John Naughton
> Oct 8 2017
> <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/oct/08/facebook-zuckerberg-in-a-hole-data-mining-business-model>
>
> One of my favourite books is The Education of Henry Adams (published in 1918). It’s an extended meditation, written 
> in old age by a scion of one of Boston’s elite families, on how the world had changed in his lifetime, and how his 
> formal education had not prepared him for the events through which he had lived. This education had been grounded in 
> the classics, history and literature, and had rendered him incapable, he said, of dealing with the impact of science 
> and technology.
>
> Re-reading Adams recently left me with the thought that there is now an opening for a similar book, The Education of 
> Mark Zuckerberg. It would have an analogous theme, namely how the hero’s education rendered him incapable of 
> understanding the world into which he was born. For although he was supposed to be majoring in psychology at Harvard, 
> the young Zuckerberg mostly took computer science classes until he started Facebook and dropped out. And it turns out 
> that this half-baked education has left him bewildered and rudderless in a culturally complex and politically 
> polarised world.
>
> What is intriguing about the Facebook founder is his astonishing blend of high intelligence, naivety and hubris. In 
> February, when it finally began to dawn on him that the election of Donald Trump might tell us something significant 
> and disturbing about the state of the US society, he wrote a lengthy epistle to his 86 million disciples.
>
> “Today,” it began, “I want to focus on the most important question of all: are we building the world we all want?” 
> Ponder that for a moment: note the imperial, hubristic “we” and the implicit assumption that it is possible to build 
> a single world that everyone wants. It comes straight out of the Ladybird book of democracy. The epistle continues in 
> the same vein. “Progress now requires humanity coming together, not just as cities or nations, but also as a global 
> community.” And of course Facebook would provide just such a community: after all, it already has more than 2 billion 
> users, which is significantly more people than there are in China.
>
> When it began to dawn on people that the powerful ad-targeting machine that Zuckerberg and his associates had built 
> might also have been used to nudge voters towards Trump and away from Clinton, Zuckerberg’s response was a mixture of 
> denial and incredulity. Then, as the evidence mounted that his machine had indeed been “weaponised” by political 
> actors to send so-called “dark posts” to individual users, he pivoted rapidly from incredulity to scepticism and then 
> – as the evidence became incontrovertible – to technocratic determination to “solve” the problem. In between, he took 
> consolation from the fact that since everyone was now angry with Facebook, the company must be doing something right. 
> “Trump says Facebook is against him,” he wrote. “Liberals say we helped Trump. Both sides are upset about ideas and 
> content they don’t like. That’s what running a platform for all ideas looks like.”
>
> Given the ineptitude of his response to the crisis, Zuckerberg makes Theresa May look like Einstein. And therein lies 
> a puzzle. For we know that the lad isn’t stupid. Why then is he apparently behaving like an idiot? The answer is that 
> he cannot come clean about the root of the problem, because to do so would reveal the unpalatable truth that it’s a 
> product of Facebook’s business model.​..​
>
> [snip]
>
> -- 
> Geoff.Goodfellow () iconia com
> living as The Truth is True
> http://geoff.livejournal.com  
>
> This message was sent to the list address and trashed, but can be found online.



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