The disturbing Facebook scandal we're all ignoring
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
>The animation will be delivered to certain African American voters through Facebook “dark posts” — nonpublic posts whose viewership the campaign controls so that, as Parscale puts it, “only the people we want to see it, see it.” The aim is to depress Clinton’s vote total. “We know because we’ve modeled this,” says the official. “It will dramatically affect her ability to turn these people out.”
Highly targeted negative political advertising is the norm, but when the digital director for a campaign is openly using the ethnicity option in facebook to "affect her ability to turn these people out", it feels wrong.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-27/inside-the...
We have laws about that stuff, for good reason. They don't address political speech, however, and probably wouldn't pass constitutional muster if they did. This is the sort of tawdry viciousness we've come to expect from Trump, but it's solidly within the "marketplace of ideas". The only way to respond to this is with opposing targeted ads.
There are tons of metrics that correlate heavily with race, combinations of which that can be used in place of this metric. Facebook shouldn't be at fault when an advertiser abuses them.
If a landlord took online rental applications, the company providing the technology for the applications wouldn't be at fault if the landlord denied all applications from a certain ethnicity.
Face it: Facebook offers the option to exclude people based on race. This is wrong. Period. Race is one of the protected categories, and you cannot discriminate (or give preferential treatment to) based just on race.
You could say the same thing about Pirate Bay, Silk Road, Uber (for helping its drivers bypass local license requirements), AirBnb (for helping landlords bypass local tenancy laws).
All these companies help people break the law... The ones which help people break 'important' laws are prosecuted (E.g. Silk Road and Pirate Bay) - But the ones which help people break minor laws tend to be left alone mostly.
Our society is evolving in such a way that our laws are slowly degrading - Particularly the laws designed to protect the working classes. What all these companies are doing is effectively turning us all against each other for their own benefit.
This may be an inevitable response to the ongoing proliferation of unnecessary laws?
For example, it will be interesting to see how AirBnb will affect house prices in countries which are currently deemed 'tenant-friendly' (as opposed to 'landlord-friendly') - Those countries have laws designed to make property investment unsavoury for landlords and this has kept house prices down so far, but with the flexibility of renting out through AirBnb, housing might become an attractive investment option in those countries.
It's wishful thinking to expect the degradation of a law be inversely correlated to is value to society (however you want to calculate that, "necessity" or otherwise).
Any ISP or Hosting Company that lets you do something illegal should be punished.
Does this article add anything new?
And to answer your question, no, other than using a click-baity title.