We hear a lot about Facebook as a platform for manipulation - using machine learning to bypass our critical faculties and trick us into believing things that are bad for us - but the real show is in Facebook's ability to target, not manipulate.

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People who hold disfavored views struggle to find one another and mobilize. To find other people that feel the same way as you and make common cause with them to effect political change, you have to reveal your views and suffer social sanction.

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Search allows people who hold these views to find one another. If you have a deep feeling about your gender being nonbinary but don't know the words for it, you can search for communities of people who have those words, join them, and discover who you've been all along.

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This is why, in this moment, so many ideas are migrating from the fringe to the center: ideas about racial justice, gender identity, alternatives to market systems, etc. People have harbored these views all along, but have held back on expressing them.

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Being able to express yourself in private, among people who share your views, is a prelude to going public and putting your case to the wider world in hopes of effecting change.

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This goes for ALL disfavored views: not just ones we laud, but also the ones we deplore. Many Americans have nursed secret white supremacism but only whispered about it, because saying it aloud would attract social sanction, with real consequences.

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Search let these people find each other. Having formed groups, they were able to brave social consequences and begin to shout about it. When they did, they converted people who were sort-of racist all along to their cause. "Radicalization" is closely related to "convincing."

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But search isn't the only way that groups with hard-to-find traits can be discovered: there's also targeting. Ad-tech companies spy on us, ascribe traits to us, then sell the right to target those traits to advertisers.

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"Show my ad to midwestern high school cheerleaders"

"To people shopping for a new fridge"

"To the owners of senior dogs"

"To people with diabetes"

"To readers of cyberpunk science fiction novels"

"To people skeptical of Big Tech"

"To Bernie Sanders supporters"

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"To violent, Trump-addled conspiracists plotting insurrection"

https://t.co/Q8lsg2yCXg

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To be fair, the Facebook ads "for body armor, gun holsters, and other military equipment next to content promoting election misinformation and news about the attempted coup at the US Capitol" were probably not necessarily targeted at "coup plotting" per se.

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More from Cory Doctorow #BLM

Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: Stop saying "it's not censorship if it's not the government"; Trump's swamp gators find corporate refuge; and more!

Archived at: https://t.co/7JMcAbaULj

#Pluralistic

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Monday night, I'll be helping William Gibson launch the paperback edition of his novel AGENCY at a Strand Bookstore videoconference. Come say hi!

https://t.co/k3fvBdqOK0

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Stop saying "it's not censorship if it's not the government": I didn't expect the Spanish Inquisition.

https://t.co/7I0MpCTez5

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Trump's swamp gators find corporate refuge: The Swamped project.

https://t.co/MUJyIOr2iw

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#15yrsago A-Hole bill would make a secret technology into the law of the land https://t.co/57bJaM1Byr

#15yrsago Hollywood’s MP loses the election — hit the road, Sam! https://t.co/12ssYpV46B

#15yrsago How William Gibson discovered science fiction https://t.co/MYR0go37nW

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More from Machine learning

With hard work and determination, anyone can learn to code.

Here’s a list of my favorites resources if you’re learning to code in 2021.

👇

1. freeCodeCamp.

I’d suggest picking one of the projects in the curriculum to tackle and then completing the lessons on syntax when you get stuck. This way you know *why* you’re learning what you’re learning, and you're building things

2.
https://t.co/7XC50GlIaa is a hidden gem. Things I love about it:

1) You can see the most upvoted solutions so you can read really good code

2) You can ask questions in the discussion section if you're stuck, and people often answer. Free

3. https://t.co/V9gcXqqLN6 and https://t.co/KbEYGL21iE

On stackoverflow you can find answers to almost every problem you encounter. On GitHub you can read so much great code. You can build so much just from using these two resources and a blank text editor.

4. https://t.co/xX2J00fSrT @eggheadio specifically for frontend dev.

Their tutorials are designed to maximize your time, so you never feel overwhelmed by a 14-hour course. Also, the amount of prep they put into making great courses is unlike any other online course I've seen.

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So the cryptocurrency industry has basically two products, one which is relatively benign and doesn't have product market fit, and one which is malignant and does. The industry has a weird superposition of understanding this fact and (strategically?) not understanding it.


The benign product is sovereign programmable money, which is historically a niche interest of folks with a relatively clustered set of beliefs about the state, the literary merit of Snow Crash, and the utility of gold to the modern economy.

This product has narrow appeal and, accordingly, is worth about as much as everything else on a 486 sitting in someone's basement is worth.

The other product is investment scams, which have approximately the best product market fit of anything produced by humans. In no age, in no country, in no city, at no level of sophistication do people consistently say "Actually I would prefer not to get money for nothing."

This product needs the exchanges like they need oxygen, because the value of it is directly tied to having payment rails to move real currency into the ecosystem and some jurisdictional and regulatory legerdemain to stay one step ahead of the banhammer.
Recently, the @CNIL issued a decision regarding the GDPR compliance of an unknown French adtech company named "Vectaury". It may seem like small fry, but the decision has potential wide-ranging impacts for Google, the IAB framework, and today's adtech. It's thread time! 👇

It's all in French, but if you're up for it you can read:
• Their blog post (lacks the most interesting details):
https://t.co/PHkDcOT1hy
• Their high-level legal decision: https://t.co/hwpiEvjodt
• The full notification: https://t.co/QQB7rfynha

I've read it so you needn't!

Vectaury was collecting geolocation data in order to create profiles (eg. people who often go to this or that type of shop) so as to power ad targeting. They operate through embedded SDKs and ad bidding, making them invisible to users.

The @CNIL notes that profiling based off of geolocation presents particular risks since it reveals people's movements and habits. As risky, the processing requires consent — this will be the heart of their assessment.

Interesting point: they justify the decision in part because of how many people COULD be targeted in this way (rather than how many have — though they note that too). Because it's on a phone, and many have phones, it is considered large-scale processing no matter what.