To the business world humans are ultimately just conduits to money. But somehow people think privatizing everything is the best way government can serve the public.
this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2025
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I pirated her book (because fuck her, she was a Facebook exec) and learned that she had a gnarly near-death experience as a child when she got attacked by a shark at the beach.
I didn't finish the book due to a combination of laziness and my general revulsion at anything Zuck adjacent, but if you have the stomach for it there's a cool shark attack story in it for you at least.
Were you rooting for the shark?
/s Meanwhile, in some Signal group: “Should we suicide her or do you guys figure she might have some ICE-worthy tattoos?”
:punch: :americanflag: :fire:
Don’t all social media and internet companies do that? It’s all a case of machine learning. I can’t open Insta these days without being blasted with reels of boobs, cleavage etc. My wife gets reels of cooking, dancing etc. It doesn’t have to do anything with our searches or viewing. They’re using our personal information to create a model and shoving targeted content based on that down our throats. This has the highest probability of increasing engagement on their platform.
Meta purposely pits extreme sides of every issue you could think of, gender, race, class, religion, even vegan, against each other. Every hate comment is great news for Meta. Hate comments mean that person is engaging so they will feed them more of that content and further drag them into their hateful beliefs. And why do they do that? To show them shirt and knicknack advertisements while they're frothing at the mouth.
Fuck Mark Zuckerberg. He's one of the worst humans on the planet and deserves terrible things to happen to him.
I'm convinced insta knows your a guy and will blast you with reels full of chicks no matter what you do.
Yeah, it’s impossible to escape the thottening. Same with snap
But emotional state?
I can't speak to "emotional state", but the thottening is a real thing (I've spent weeks trying to stop having all these ass models from cluttering up my feed, it's impossible)
No, it's not normal. Almost no internet companies around the world try to do anything similar to what Meta did and does. Even if you focus on social media companies, I believe that only a small minority try to do that kind of thing.
For example, here we are on social media. Do you see any targeted advertising? Is it being done by the Lemmy instance? And how many instances are there? Then we could look at Mastodon, or discussion forums, or comment boards, or you name it. Of course you would expect some targeted advertising, like you might find computer advertisements if you're on a computer tech forum, but that's different from targeting users who are in a weak state of mind, precisely because it's targeting their overtly expressed general interests and not their temporary vulnerabilities.
Finally, I think you should go back and read the article. You ranted about companies trying to shove things down your throats, but the article was about how to misuse targeted advertising.
Lemmy is far from normal, it is not profitable as a social media platform and is reliant on donations and generosity.
Google AdSense does similar things to meta, as does amazon. This is far from a misuse, of the technology as that implies that this isn't accomplishing the intended goal, which, aside from laws trying to differentiate children from adults, it does.
Yeah, sorry, but while still going too far, these companies get dwarved by meta when it comes to these practices. I work with certain advertising platforms and know it inside out (don't judge me lol). No way can we target based on emotional state or anything even closely resmlembling that.
Neither google (at least for the first decade or so) or Amazon have such detailed data about you as facebook
Worth noting by the way that instagram is owned by Meta - the very company the post is calling out.
Well sure, but it is more than that. Advertising ,broadly, is literally there expressly to manipulate your emotional state. Social media just gives them more info about your state so they are much more effective at it.
Ban optimisation without popular consent!
Sorry, I'm a bit dense. What do you mean?
Organisations aren't entitled to use automated systems to alter people's behaviour (i.e. here they're using an algorithm to maximise the number of ad clicks). It should only be allowed if it's in the interests of the people affected, and with their (informed) agreement
I am betting it was already in that 40 page agreement you clicked when you singed up 😞
He'll yeah dude! This should be the global law
where would the line between manipulation and traditional advertisement be? theaters frequently exhaust the buttery scent in areas where theatergoers will be to intice them, casinos avoid 90° angels and clocks to disorientate customers and promote time blindness.
I'm not a native speaker and I legit googled "what are casino 90° angels", then I realized it was supposed to be "angles" and now I feel dumb lol
On a 777 the angels blind you with divine light so you can't find your way out of the slot machines.
It's a common mistake for even native speakers. Dessert 🎂 vs desert 🏜️ is another common one
Yes these are also bad.
Facebook used to have a team dedicated to analyzing their apps' risks to children's and teenagers' health. The team concluded that there are indeed many serious health risks for both children and teenagers, especially teenage girls. Shortly after, it got disbanded, and all its recommendations completely ignored.
When the news about that came out, around a decade ago now, I deleted my Facebook profile and tried to tell all my friends/family using FB that ... this is pure fucking evil and they should also get off FB.
They all gaslit me, pretended that news wasn't real, and acted like I was a paranoid delusional maniac.
Nowadays we have basically the same kind of conclusions regarding TikTok and other platforms that focus on short form video content... well, actually even worse conclusions... and they come from actual peer reviewed scientific journals...
But you'll still get people saying 'brainrot isn't real'... when uh, yes thats a clumsy term, but it is basically confirmed at this point that TikTok is as addictive as a drug, ruins your motivation and attention span, fills your with mis and disinformatiin, ruins and warps your self image and self esteem, promotes wildly irresponsible and often illegal financial mindsets/strategies... etc etc...
They took all that data and used it to exploit the kids.
But really, who wouldn’t? They’re not our kids! Well, nearly 100% of them aren’t. Little Johnny will forgive papa for it one day right?
and the ones that are their kids they can prevent from accessing their platform to a better degree than most broke technically illiterate parents could dream of doing.
True!!
OK now they can try climate change (dangit indoor skiing etc. nvm but still that’s not as fun so they take the L)
Not ignored. They weaponized that info internally. And had a road map of potential liabilities and damages that may be involved.
so it served its purpose well
Ignored? Yeah I suppose so, but they sure as shit used the data for their own gain. That team really was the road of good intentions
Wake me up when something gets done about it other than a fine that amounts to about half a day's profit for them.
They need to be jailed and their companied closed
That's how targeted advertising works yes. Not much of a reveal there?
I guess people need the obvious pointed out, and yeah fair enough.
Before I get dogpiled: I'm not defending them. I'm saying it's sad people actually think or thought the bar was higher than this. You can tell me Google, Xhitter, whatever did the same and I'd say the same thing. You're the product. You. Are. The. Product.
I am sure you already know, but the objection here is going after kids. literally profiling and then abusing their vulnerabilities for profit. this isnt your standard cereal box advertising, I think this is something much darker and more disgusting.
edit: added word
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I didn't see the testimony, but I did read her book.
When most people think "targeted advertising", I think they are thinking about something like: this user is a middle-class woman between 18 and 25 who enjoys bicycles, so we'll show her ad X.
According to Wynn-Williams, Facebook/Meta is doing things like detecting when a user uploads, then immediately removes a photo--detecting that as a moment of emotional vulnerability (that is, the user was feeling self-conscious about their appearance), then bombarding them with ads in that moment for beauty products.
I think the former is 'obvious' to most people, but the latter probably isn't--probably because Meta and other advertising companies have put a lot of effort in to keep this on the down low--which is why Wynn-Williams is speaking about it publically.
(not accusing you of defending them BTW, just my 2¢ that this goes beyond what most people would consider obvious, imo)
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It is absolutely baffling that people don't realize that people are the product. I've had some folks tell me that they understand and "don't care" because the service is "free" or whatever, but then they get angry and freaked out when the platform knows exactly what they're thinking, or at least seems to know.
There's definitely a deficit in understanding and education on what corporate social media really does.
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