Must-Read: Zeynep Tufekci: On Twitter: "Facebook and Google helped them better target fear-mongering videos: "Facebook and Google helped them better target fear-mongering videos showing 'France and Germany overrun by sharia law'—to get the ad money...
...Life under pay-for-play ads and virality-fueling algorithms on platforms.... This isn't about "free speech" at all. No suggestion of jailing or even censoring hate-mongers. It's about money, attention & amplification.
"Mass media also does it." Sure but that's public, counterable & much less effective. That's why all the ad money goes to Google & Facebook. Either Facebook & Google are giant cons at ~half-trillion market caps, or they effectively help hate-mongers victimize the most vulnerable.
"What should be done?" Good question. I'll be first to say it's VERY thorny, but to get somewhere, let's first acknowledge all the obvious. Consequences for not dealing with this will be horrible. Or we can shrug and listen to Tom Lehrer. "Nazi schmazi..."
Look, these advertisers are American, the companies spreading this fear-mongering—Facebook & Google—are American. Business/workforce model. Yeah, gotta sell ads falsely claiming that French students are being "taught to fight for the caliphate." ¯_(ツ)_/¯. It's not just the ads. It's the engagement metrics and the view that connectivity, without corresponding institutions, is an unalloyed good. The problem is structural. It's not about personalities. It's the kind of structures these companies have set up.... FB & Google, moved from alchemy to chemistry.
@JeremyOwens_: Same on TV. Gillespie runs a local ad portraying SW VA as being overrun by MS-13 to push an anti-immigration agenda for his Gov. campaign.
@zeynep: Not just, but certainly many orders of magnitude more. But core problem is that we're the product—not the customer. When I say it's the business model, I don't mean they're greedily counting $$ from white supremacists. I mean it's the structure they set up. It would be an easier problem if the problem was reducible to blatant ill-intent. It is related to intent, but in ways they set things up. 3 replies 10 retweets 28 likes.... This is about monetizing surveillance and attention in a submerged, privatized "public-sphere", not speech. Enough with the 19th century. It's uncomfortable and complex but deliberate misinformation may be speech—but it's often also a form of censorship...."
