Back in January, HuffPost had already run a big story
on why the “surveillance capitalism” business model of both Google and Facebook
is in trouble, by Paul Blumenthal. There are new rules called the General Data
Protection Regulation, or GDPR, set to go into effect in May. And we all know the “national security”
threat of Russian meddling – and the controversies of the Internet and campaign
finance that date back to the early 2000’s and were forgotten.
Pondering what I wrote yesterday – I can
counter-ponder: Hillary Clinton lost the
election because she ran the campaign poorly, and because of the Electoral
College, not just because of the “Russians”.
And users do know that the
content they are fed is based on their past activity, especially likes and
commenting activity (“Likenomics”). True, it drove them into bubbles. But users should know that if they kept on liking
birtherism, that’s what they’ll see in their news feeds.
All of this matters as Congress is surely going to consider
restricting the use of CDA230 (Section 230) to protect social networking sites
that manipulate what users see.
On the other hand, hosting providers don’t do
that. They just serve up what a user
goes to (the user has paid for the domain name and hosting service, or could
have provided his own). The same with
blogging platforms.
Robert Kuttner weighs in further with a more recent
article on How to Regulate Facebook.
There is also a story, by Michelle Fabio of Forbes,
that the Department of Homeland Security wants to maintain a database if
journalists and “media influencers”.
Maybe that includes me!! Count
me in. I was willing to allow my
likenomics to be sold in order to have influence (and escape having to be loyal
to other groups to be heard). Beyond
what has happened already, when this gets matched up with data on the dark web
from other hacks, I could imagine how this could lead to new kinds of personal
intimidation and terrorism by foreign influences even in the US, not just by
the government. Hasn’t really happened
yet.
Look at the Fibbies page on Media Monitoring Services.
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