I have been reading Zucked by Roger McNamee. It is a book worth reading even for those who are very familiar with the Facebook story and have a decent understanding of what is so wrong with this "platform". There are any number of long form essays and books on this topic - some of which I have read. Where McNamee shines is in being able to connect the dots and show the reader how Facebook went down this destructive path. Profit over all other considerations and by manipulating human thought and behavior to fuel it's growth engine. I maintain a Facebook page for this blog but never had one of my own.
I use the blog's Facebook page out of a perverse curiosity to understand exactly how Zuck is trying to manipulate the entity that it thinks owns this page - I am sure they have connected dots despite my efforts to make it difficult. How much do they know and what are they doing with that knowledge. I have cranked the dials up and down in terms of how much I would allow Facebook to inundate me with content they believe would stick with me. Based on my home grown experiments with the giant AI machinery of Facebook, I have revealed a few things.
First, Facebook has determined that I would be very interested in Bollywood gossip and glossy pictures of starlets in beautiful saris. Most women will flip through a fashion magazine if they have nothing better to do and yes I do think the sari is the most wonderful thing a girl could wear - just about any woman looks her best in the right sari for her. As far as Bollywood gossip, its not relevant or interesting to me. The names that I am familiar with are past retirement age and certainly don't feed the gossip mill anymore. More likely, I read news of their passing.
Second, Zuck thinks that I am interested in pseudo-science and pseudo-social science. To that end a lot of my feed is populated with headlines that suggest research and analysis backing some provocative "finding". Provocative is key here - never saw a story that was not click-bait. The sources are almost always dubious. The likes of Nature or Lancet are not referred to in any of these things. The pseudo social science is even more hilarious. An entire essay could be structured around a line chart and the author could draw the most preposterous, unsupported, unverifiable conclusions from it. The final take-away is always along the lines of "the world is going to hell in a hand-basket".
Whomever is cranking the levers to create the fake AI at Facebook has not being getting it right about me. I like saris as much as the next desi woman and but fake research is really not my thing. I bet they are missing the mark with millions of others too. But it takes a level of vigilance to mess the AI up to the point that it turns into a joke and can't really do the harm that Facebook is set up to do if allowed to run unchecked. As the authors in the HBR article point out this charade of magical, automatic, machine-driven AI needs to stop and companies like Facebook need to own up to what is really going on:
The first step is to require more transparency from tech companies that have been selling AI as devoid of human labor. We should demand truth in advertising with regard to where humans have been brought in to benefit us — whether it’s to curate our news to inform our body politic, or to field complaints about what some troll just posted to our favorite social media site. We should know there’s human labor in the loop because we want to have both the capacity to recognize the value of their work, and also to have a chance to understand the training and support that informed their decision-making, especially if their work touches on the public interest.
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