The 82nd Block: Funding misinformation with our personal data
Yes, if data is oil, we are all private funders
This week…
Ann Friedman, an avid newsletter subscriber and a newsletter writer herself (since 2013), ‘hosted’ the “first annual Inbox Awards,” in her newsletter, in which she shared some of the best newsletters by category, each with a podcast recommendation.
Feel free to click through the link above if you’re looking for new newsletters to subscribe to. My contribution? Check out Garbage Day by Ryan Broderick, which is about web culture. A snippet? Here’s one:
A content creator learns a fun fact about a shark. The content creator either googles the name of the shark and tweets out the first picture they see or they’re sent that photo from someone else. But it’s the wrong photo because an SEO farm run by random man from Wales has inserted the “misinformation” into Google’s search results. The content creator, though, has to mute the Twitter thread they’ve created because it’s gone too viral for anyone to actually follow.
It’s also still doing traffic, so the content creator, when they finally learn that the tweet is incorrect, doesn’t actually delete the tweet. Then dozens of verified experts attempt to debunk the incorrect tweet, except all they’ve done is trick Twitter’s trending algorithms to further promote the tweet because of the attention being driven to the post.
Here's another, about Thinkarete, one of Facebook’s most viral pages:
It’s very good, unlike actual garbage days. Anyway, here’s a curated selection of top stories on my radar, a few personal recommendations, and the chart of the week.
Can big tech ever be reined in?
John Naughton for The Guardian:
When historians look back on this period, one of the things that they will find remarkable is that for a quarter of a century, the governments of western democracies slept peacefully while some of the most powerful (and profitable) corporations in history emerged and grew, without let or hindrance, at exponential speeds.
They will wonder at how a small number of these organisations, which came to be called “tech giants” (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft), acquired, and began to wield, extraordinary powers. They logged and tracked everything we did online – every email, tweet, blog, photograph and social media post we sent, every “like” we registered, every website we visited, every Google search we made, every product we ordered online, every place we visited, which groups we belonged to and who our closest friends were.
And that was just for starters. Two of these companies even invented a new variant of extractive capitalism. Whereas the standard form appropriated and plundered the Earth’s natural resources, this new “surveillance capitalism” appropriated human resources in the shape of comprehensive records of users’ behaviour, which were algorithmically translated into detailed profiles that could be sold to others. And while the activities of extractive capitalism came ultimately to threaten the planet, those of its surveillance counterpart have turned into a threat to our democracy.
A look at the intimate details Amazon knows about us
Chris Kirkham and Jeffrey Dastin for Reuters Foundation News:
As a Virginia lawmaker, Ibraheem Samirah has studied internet privacy issues and debated how to regulate tech firms’ collection of personal data. Still, he was stunned to learn the full details of the information Amazon.com Inc has collected on him.
The e-commerce giant had more than 1,000 contacts from his phone. It had records of exactly which part of the Quran that Samirah, who was raised as a Muslim, had listened to on Dec. 17 of last year. The company knew every search he had made on its platform, including one for books on “progressive community organizing” and other sensitive health-related inquiries he thought were private.
“Are they selling products, or are they spying on everyday people?” asked Samirah, a Democratic member of the Virginia House of Delegates.
If you are an Amazon customer, you can obtain your data under Help – Security & Privacy – Request Your Personal Information (Under Privacy).
How Facebook and Google fund global misinformation ($)
Karen Hao for MIT Tech Review:
Before Instant Articles, articles posted on Facebook would redirect to a browser, where they’d open up on the publisher’s own website. The ad provider, usually Google, would then cash in on any ad views or clicks. With the new scheme, articles would open up directly within the Facebook app, and Facebook would own the ad space. If a participating publisher had also opted into monetizing with Facebook’s advertising network, called Audience Network, Facebook could insert ads into the publisher’s stories and take a 30% cut of the revenue.
Instant Articles quickly fell out of favor with its original cohort of big mainstream publishers. For them, the payouts weren’t high enough compared with other available forms of monetization. But that was not true for publishers in the Global South, which Facebook began accepting into the program in 2016. In 2018, the company reported paying out $1.5 billion to publishers and app developers (who can also participate in Audience Network). In 2019, that figure had reached multiple billions.
Early on, Facebook performed little quality control on the types of publishers joining the program. The platform’s design also didn’t sufficiently penalize users for posting identical content across Facebook pages—in fact, it rewarded the behavior. Posting the same article on multiple pages could as much as double the number of users who clicked on it and generated ad revenue.
Clickbait farms around the world seized on this flaw as a strategy—one they still use today. Clickbait actors cropped up in Myanmar overnight. With the right recipe for producing engaging and evocative content, they could generate thousands of US dollars a month in ad revenue, or 10 times the average monthly salary—paid to them directly by Facebook.
Spoiler: Facebook knew about it.
What I read, watch and listen to…
I’m reading The Death of Languages, an essay by Rebecca Roache for Aeon.
I’m watching last week’s episode of CBC Marketplace, which investigates homoeopathic drugs sold in pharmacies, and the best winter boots for Canadian weather. A note on the latter: There really is something exciting about an academic yelling, “Fail! Fail! Fail both ways!” Maybe it’s just the now-dormant A-student in me.
I’m listening to C. Brandon Ogbunu on Afrofuturism as a Tech Framework on CIGI’s Big Tech, hosted by Taylor Owen.