To discriminate, by its primary definition, is simply to recognize differences or distinguish between things. By its secondary definition, discrimination refers to the unjust application of discrimination along categories like race, sex, or age.
Facebook's trying to provide a platform that's attractive to marketers, and seems to be doing some optimizations of targeting "under the hood." Obviously, performance marketers are trying to optimize for number of clicks per placement, and if Facebook as a channel has better stats on this, they'll choose to invest more advertising dollar into Facebook. This is their entire business model.
I see nothing wrong with this whatsoever. They're providing more value by connecting people with the right content, facilitating transactions. More so, they seem to be doing it by understanding who is interested in what sorts of products or services. The information they'd be leveraging to get at this is purely the outcome of aggregating an enormous amount of individual choices -- click, or don't click. This isn't unjust discrimination, it's just application of knowledge about who is most interested in what at the time, full stop.
I think what people are starting to pick up on here, and why people are upset by this, is that advertising messaging gives people what they want, and tech-enabled message targeting can do that far more effectively than ever before. Tech has enabled targeted marketing to subsume a person's day-to-day experience of the outside world far more than in the past. This makes it an agent of unprecedented social control -- information exposure and availability is now administered, de facto, by a handful of large privately held corporations.
I suppose I'm just suggesting that the motivations for the civil rights acts of half a century ago, and the narrative based around unjust discrimination based on protected classes, is simply not the right level of analysis. And Facebook isn't the enemy here, any more so than any one of the marketing channels competing with them for advertiser dollars. This is industry-wide, and it's an existential concern about the exercise of information delivery.
Seems like an excellent development to me. Wikimedia has done remarkable things, and Wikipedia has probably done the most to protect both expression and authoratitivity on the open web. Bravi.
Slashdot Mirror
To discriminate, by its primary definition, is simply to recognize differences or distinguish between things. By its secondary definition, discrimination refers to the unjust application of discrimination along categories like race, sex, or age. Facebook's trying to provide a platform that's attractive to marketers, and seems to be doing some optimizations of targeting "under the hood." Obviously, performance marketers are trying to optimize for number of clicks per placement, and if Facebook as a channel has better stats on this, they'll choose to invest more advertising dollar into Facebook. This is their entire business model. I see nothing wrong with this whatsoever. They're providing more value by connecting people with the right content, facilitating transactions. More so, they seem to be doing it by understanding who is interested in what sorts of products or services. The information they'd be leveraging to get at this is purely the outcome of aggregating an enormous amount of individual choices -- click, or don't click. This isn't unjust discrimination, it's just application of knowledge about who is most interested in what at the time, full stop. I think what people are starting to pick up on here, and why people are upset by this, is that advertising messaging gives people what they want, and tech-enabled message targeting can do that far more effectively than ever before. Tech has enabled targeted marketing to subsume a person's day-to-day experience of the outside world far more than in the past. This makes it an agent of unprecedented social control -- information exposure and availability is now administered, de facto, by a handful of large privately held corporations. I suppose I'm just suggesting that the motivations for the civil rights acts of half a century ago, and the narrative based around unjust discrimination based on protected classes, is simply not the right level of analysis. And Facebook isn't the enemy here, any more so than any one of the marketing channels competing with them for advertiser dollars. This is industry-wide, and it's an existential concern about the exercise of information delivery.
Seems like an excellent development to me. Wikimedia has done remarkable things, and Wikipedia has probably done the most to protect both expression and authoratitivity on the open web. Bravi.