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Breaking up social-media companies is one way to fix them. Shutting their users up is a better one.

Digital Media

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It never should have begun.

Digital Media

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For many of us, for better or for worse, the internet is home. Our communities are here, because many of them could not exist any other way. Superfans, shitposters, amateur experts, wiki nerds, grizzled forum moderators, obsessive sneaker enthusiasts, and hobbyists who spend a substantial amount of their time photographing vintage Furbies in human clothes, for example—the cultural and creative output of these communities is enormous and ever growing.

Digital Media

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A new breed of online retailer doesn’t make or even touch products, but they’ve got a few other tricks for turning nothing into money. --- Given the array of behavioral tricks arrayed against your average Internet user, some of them take the free lion bracelet deal. But for those that don’t, merely by visiting his site, they’ve been tagged in Facebook’s system because Ganon has installed a standard Facebook tracking pixel. That means Ganon can now re-target those people who visited but left without purchasing anything through Facebook. And he spends a lot of time designing and testing ads that will bring them back for the purchase. There’s nothing unusual about this in digital marketing. In fact, it’s a completely common practice. But employed so baldly, it shows the strangeness of our current commerce model. I like lions, so I follow an Instagram account that posts pictures of them, they post an ad, so I go to a webpage, and now I get ads chasing me all over the Internet advertising a lion bracelet. It’s enough to make you long for the days of going to the mall or buying stuff out of a catalog. Ganon says he creates blogs for his sites, too. So maybe for his lion store, he’d cobble together “fun facts about lions” by looking up the most popular lion content on the site, Buzzsumo. Once you hit that page, he could retarget you. This is one major purpose of “content marketing.” For example, a company could have someone ghostwrite its CTO some blog posts about cloud storage topics that only people deep in the industry could be interested in. Because of that hyperspecificity, anyone who lands on those pages is likely to be a prospective customer. So, even if the prose is unreadable, it doesn’t really matter beause by the time you’re staring at the words, the content has served its purpose already. Just by arriving on the page while logged into Facebook, you’ve placed yourself in a custom audience that can be targeted on the Facebook back end. This is a basic capability of the system: it works for any demographic, from Chief Executive Officers to white supremacists to lion lovers.

Digital Media

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On its 15th anniversary, a look at how the site has changed social life by keeping weak connections on life support forever

Digital Media

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Big tech companies now trade at one of the smallest premiums in history.

Digital Media

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Of all the videos posted to YouTube, there is one that the platform recommends more than any other right now, according to a Pew Research study published Wednesday. That video is called “Bath Song | +More Nursery Rhymes & Kids Songs - Cocomelon (ABCkidTV).” YouTube recommended it more than 650 times among the 696,468 suggestions that Pew tracked, substantially more than the second-place finisher: the video for Maroon 5’s “Girls Like You” featuring Cardi B. The new study took 174,117 random walks through the YouTube universe. It used software to generate the hundreds of thousands of suggestions by selecting a random video to start and then automatically picking from among the top five videos that were recommended afterward. A recommended video was selected four times in sequence for each YouTube journey. It’s a fascinating, if not complete, methodology for exploring one of the world’s most important algorithmic systems, and one that’s remained largely opaque to researchers, let alone its users. Kids’ videos dominated the 10-most-recommended posts. “Bath Song” was joined by “Learn Colors with Spiderman 3D w Trucks Cars Surprise Toys Play Doh for Children,” “Wheels on the Bus | +More Nursery Rhymes & Kids Songs - Cocomelon (ABCkidTV),” and “Learn Shapes with Police Truck - Rectangle Tyres Assemby - Cartoon Animation for Children.” All are keyword-salad video titles that, apparently, make sense to the algorithm, if not to parents. Zoomed in close, the recommendations look strange. Why should the algorithm favor these particular videos out of all the kid content on YouTube?

Digital Media

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Mark Zuckerberg moved fast and broke shit, lots of shit. He broke journalism, by radically deflating the value of the digital advertising on which the livelihood of media now depends; he broke the reading habits of his users, the lab rats in his grand experiment, by constantly manipulating them and feeding them an endless stream of dreck to jack up their “engagement” with his site; and in a way, he broke American democracy, by sitting on his hands as a foreign adversary exploited his platform and by creating the world’s most efficient vehicle for spreading political lies and agitprop. Now, with the announcement that he’s largely stripping the News Feed of news, he’s breaking his own site, too. This radical overhaul of Facebook is a concession of defeat. At some point in Facebook’s rise—its march past the 2-billion-user mark—the realization dawned: Facebook is now the most powerful publisher in the business, the mother of all media gatekeepers. Initially, that realization dawned on everybody except apparently Facebook itself, perhaps a willed state of ignorance. The company described its product as a mere “tool,” and protested that it played no role in organizing the news that it broadcasts, as if it weren’t imposing its values on the News Feed, as if is weren’t providing a sense of hierarchy to the mass of posts it splays. That description, which trumpeted Facebook’s passivity and neutrality, could never really sustain close scrutiny. And after the election of Donald Trump, Facebook has received no end of that.

Digital Media