The Guardian news story today on Cambridge Analytica and Christopher Wylie is incredible.
I vaguely remember a prediction that Facebook doesn’t exist in the future, did I imagine that? And if not, is this the beginning of the demise?
Winkrainbow,
I think this is just one more nail in social media's 'choices and issues' coffin. Statistically, Facebook has been going downwards in use ever since its algorithms were tweaked at the beginning of this year. It feels like part of the bigger changes we are in that all started with the resistance movement after Trump's election and all of the feminine energies and emergence of a focus that will only increase in time on our families and not our 'social' lives persona online.
Users have noticed for a very long time that the emergence years ago of Pinterest and then Instagram led millions of fb users to keep up their facebook accounts but discontinue new postings so most of the people I know migrated over to those formats. I experimented with the newsfeed algorithms for my own facebook account last year by making as much as possible be controlled by me....deleting searches and storage capabilities on my computer or phone etc and as expected, all of a sudden my newsfeed viewing went very dry.
I have become increasingly unhappy with the tracking and cookies so each news release showing me that facebook was manipulating my newsfeed, bigger players were manipulating facebooks ad and newsfeed with fake news and fake ads, beyond its own awareness long before the last election. Simply noticing that every search I did for a product on my phone with fb completely logged out at the time, was suddenly appearing as an ad on fb felt far too big brother for me and its getting worse every day. And I think all of our dissatisfaction are piling up.
Now the emerging news ...Cambridge Analytica alone... is huge and the manipulation we are all feeling whether we acknowledge it or not by social media is coming more and more apparent. Just knowing that 50 million facebook profiles were 'harvested' and all of their data manipulated is more than just disturbing. Mark Zuckerberg can rationalize the changes facebook has made in an attempt to regain control of their own product through alterations in our newsfeed now with a focus on "friends and family" instead of advertising and news isn't good enough or soon enough. The damage was done and we have Trump as a result of so much of it.
Zuckerberg claimed in response to users being unhappy about the revamp of its prioritizing posts from users "friends and family" over viral contents and posts from large news publishers and its resulting service drop by "roughly 50 million hours every day" since those changes went into effect in 2018 "will be stronger over the long term." but I see all of it as just one more change in our awareness of our their changes affect our overall dissatisfaction.
Read this excellent article with further links and connection within it:
Article on Cambridge Analytica
Hubris will be his downfall like all oligarchs. He created this behemoth but it’s now out of his control and he’s too big of a narcissist to admit it (gee where have I heard that before). Zuck will fall hard.
Hi Michele, thanks for such a good and thorough post. Today I saw that FB took a big market plunge.
C4 just aired an expose here in UK. Tomorrow they will air one where the CA guys explain how they won the election for Trump.
This is potentially huge - UK legal authorities are seeking a warrant to seize CA's servers and data.
Winkrainbow, I watched the expose you linked, and it blew my mind. It is something out of House of Cards, only much larger, slicker, and more blood curdling.
Last year when I first learned of Robert Mercer's company, I got a cold chill of unmitigated evil. How do these people live with themselves? There's no ideological basis for their work other than cold cash for them. Their private lives, their homes, their families, their world are drenched with other people's blood and suffering. We read murder accounts like Truman Copote's In Cold Blood and shutter at the horror of the crimes committed and the pain inflicted. Yet these men in expensive suits brag to prospective clients that they will, for a sum, cause much greater human suffering. We are looking into an abyss that will take ten Robert Muellers to expose.
Here’s the next one focused on the part CA played in Trump winning.
Thanks. So they are getting exposed. No matter what happens to them and the Mercers, the truth is out.
Cambridge Analytica's board of directors just suspended their CEO. They said this is not how our company works. In the last video you sent, the CEO tells exactly a prospective customer how it works. It's like something out of a dystopian sci-fi drama.