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Comment by ticmasta | Hacker News Reader

The nefarious problem with FB is the illusion of recommendation/discovery. They're not trying to find new and interesting things for you the way say, the cultural aspects of HN performs this feat; they're trying to define your profile and then serve up more of the same to increase engagement or capture your entire sphere of awareness so they can manipulate and shape your perception.'

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so they can manipulate and shape your perception.'..... then group you together with people like you and sell those groups to advertisers, claiming they have some exclusive access to groups like "yoga-loving cat owners"

> they can manipulate and shape your perception.

That sounds pretty malicious for what basically amounts to attempting to serve you the content and ads you want.

>> capture your entire sphere of awareness

Malicious sounding, indeed.

That sounds pretty malicious for what basically amounts to attempting to serve you the content and ads you want.

Basically, serving you the content and ads you want can turn out to be pretty malicious. By doing so, a big company can manipulate and shape your perception. Year by year, data processing is making big companies ever more potent at doing just this. Is it any wonder that it eventually got to a point where we started seeing problems?

They've already intentionally manipulated emotions of a "small number of users" (700k), proved it was possible, and released a paper on it: https://slate.com/technology/2014/06/facebook-unethical-expe...

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