יום רביעי, 28 בפברואר 2018

The Facebook's business model and the electoral process


Rubén Weinsteiner

Facebook's business model is such a problem for the electoral process because what they have done is essentially incentivize the more polarizing and extreme communications. You don’t know if someone is calling in a neighbor to watch an ad on TV, but Facebook knows if you’re sharing it.


It makes sense if you're selling, you know, swimsuits. If you're Facebook, you should absolutely want to serve up better swimsuit ads. But when it comes to politics, it makes less sense because if you have a super fired-up community that's going to love your content even if it's nutty or racist or untrue, then the platform shouldn't give that stuff an advantage.

Despite this grumbling, the idea that Washington might write new regulations to rein in the tech industry has so far amounted to a lot of heated words. Democratic Sens. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Mark Warner of Virginia have, alongside Arizona Republican John McCain, pushed a bill that would force the social media platforms to disclose who’s paying for political ads, one response to the past year's revelations about Russian interference. But that measure has failed to gain momentum.

Elsewhere in Congress, there’s been high-level idea-floating about the need for government to act as a check on the tech industry — Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and former Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) have been among those engaging in that discussion. But there’s been little appetite for turning that rhetoric into concrete legislative proposals.

Rubén Weinsteiner

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