The democratic issue with Facebook and other SoMes remains as long as there isn’t a record of what people see on their walls.

I’m Danish and our laws regarding advertising may seem a little totalitarian to Americans, but here you have to be rather public about your advertising and who it targets. You obviously can’t tell who exactly sees a poster on a public wall, but you can get a general picture of how advertising is utilised.

The one place you can’t though is on SoMe because there is no record of your personal wall. Facebook at least makes overall spending public now, unlike LinkedIn and others, but no one can tell how the advertising that the money buys is targeted.

This is an issue because hearing something enough times changes your perspective on reality. But more than that, we have to take the SoMes word for it when they say they aren’t targeting children with tobacco, sugar or toy commercials, which is illegal here.

So it’s interesting that Facebook does these things to tools that might track what they won’t willingly provide.