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.

1/

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.

2/
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.

3/
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.

4/
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.

5/
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.

6/
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."

7/
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.

8/
"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"

9/
"To violent, Trump-addled conspiracists plotting insurrection"

https://t.co/Q8lsg2yCXg

10/
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.

11/

More from Cory Doctorow #BLM

More from Machine learning

Starting a new project using #Angular? Here is a list of all the stuff i use to launch my projects the fastest i can.

A THREAD 👇

Have you heard about Monorepo? I created one with all my Angular (and Nest) projects using
https://t.co/aY5llDtXg8.

I can share A LOT of code with it. Ex: Everytime i start a new project, i just need to import an Auth lib, that i created, and all Auth related stuff is set up.

Everyone in the Angular community knows about https://t.co/kDnunQZnxE. It's not the most beautiful component library out there, but it's good and easy to work with.

There's a bunch of state management solutions for Angular, but https://t.co/RJwpn74Qev is by far my favorite.

There's a lot of boilerplate, but you can solve this with the built-in schematics and/or with your own schematics

Are you not using custom schematics yet? Take a look at this:

https://t.co/iLrIaHVafm
https://t.co/3382Tn2k7C

You can automate all the boilerplate with hundreds of files associates with creating a new feature.
Really enjoyed digging into recent innovations in the football analytics industry.

>10 hours of interviews for this w/ a dozen or so of top firms in the game. Really grateful to everyone who gave up time & insights, even those that didnt make final cut 🙇‍♂️ https://t.co/9YOSrl8TdN


For avoidance of doubt, leading tracking analytics firms are now well beyond voronoi diagrams, using more granular measures to assess control and value of space.

This @JaviOnData & @LukeBornn paper from 2018 referenced in the piece demonstrates one method
https://t.co/Hx8XTUMpJ5


Bit of this that I nerded out on the most is "ghosting" — technique used by @counterattack9 & co @stats_insights, among others.

Deep learning models predict how specific players — operating w/in specific setups — will move & execute actions. A paper here: https://t.co/9qrKvJ70EN


So many use-cases:
1/ Quickly & automatically spot situations where opponent's defence is abnormally vulnerable. Drill those to death in training.
2/ Swap target player B in for current player A, and simulate. How does target player strengthen/weaken team? In specific situations?
10 machine learning YouTube videos.

On libraries, algorithms, and tools.

(If you want to start with machine learning, having a comprehensive set of hands-on tutorials you can always refer to is fundamental.)

🧵👇

1⃣ Notebooks are a fantastic way to code, experiment, and communicate your results.

Take a look at @CoreyMSchafer's fantastic 30-minute tutorial on Jupyter Notebooks.

https://t.co/HqE9yt8TkB


2⃣ The Pandas library is the gold-standard to manipulate structured data.

Check out @joejamesusa's "Pandas Tutorial. Intro to DataFrames."

https://t.co/aOLh0dcGF5


3⃣ Data visualization is key for anyone practicing machine learning.

Check out @blondiebytes's "Learn Matplotlib in 6 minutes" tutorial.

https://t.co/QxjsODI1HB


4⃣ Another trendy data visualization library is Seaborn.

@NewThinkTank put together "Seaborn Tutorial 2020," which I highly recommend.

https://t.co/eAU5NBucbm

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"I really want to break into Product Management"

make products.

"If only someone would tell me how I can get a startup to notice me."

Make Products.

"I guess it's impossible and I'll never break into the industry."

MAKE PRODUCTS.

Courtesy of @edbrisson's wonderful thread on breaking into comics –
https://t.co/TgNblNSCBj – here is why the same applies to Product Management, too.


There is no better way of learning the craft of product, or proving your potential to employers, than just doing it.

You do not need anybody's permission. We don't have diplomas, nor doctorates. We can barely agree on a single standard of what a Product Manager is supposed to do.

But – there is at least one blindingly obvious industry consensus – a Product Manager makes Products.

And they don't need to be kept at the exact right temperature, given endless resource, or carefully protected in order to do this.

They find their own way.