Political advertising online has rapidly become a sophisticated industry. The fact that most people get their information from just a few platforms and the increasing sophistication of algorithms drawing upon rich pools of personal data mean that political campaigns are now building individual adverts targeted directly at users.
One source suggests that in the 2016 US election, as many as 50,000 variations of adverts were being served every single day on Facebook, a near-impossible situation to monitor. And there are suggestions that some political adverts – in the US and around the world – are being used in unethical ways – to point voters to fake news sites, for instance, or to keep others away from the polls. Targeted advertising allows a campaign to say completely different, possibly conflicting things to different groups. Is that democratic?
Interjecting a Plato quote : "And when he addresses the Assembly, he will make the city approve a policy at one time as a good one, and reject it - the very same policy - as just the opposite at another."
These are complex problems, and the solutions will not be simple. But a few broad paths to progress are already clear... We must fight against government overreach in surveillance laws, including through the courts if necessary. We must push back against misinformation by encouraging gatekeepers such as Google and Facebook to continue their efforts to combat the problem, while avoiding the creation of any central bodies to decide what is “true” or not. We need more algorithmic transparency to understand how important decisions that affect our lives are being made, and perhaps a set of common principles to be followed. We urgently need to close the “internet blind spot” in the regulation of political campaigning.
Yes, exactly. When I talk about regulating speech, people instantly and irrevocably get hung up on the idea of a "ministry of truth" or whatever crude silly notion they insist on. That's not it at all and completely misses the point. Sure, people can say whatever they want. But they cannot say whatever they want and be totally free of any consequences whatsoever in any circumstances : that is a logical inconsistency. The consequences are inevitably regulated (no, I don't necessarily mean by legislation, for crying out loud), whether you like it or not. On the internet the speech itself doesn't have to be regulated but the search algorithms do, by their very definition. Writing a search algorithm is a form of regulation in itself.
http://astrorhysy.blogspot.cz/2017/02/on-sharp-pointy-objects.html
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/11/tim-berners-lee-web-inventor-save-internet?CMP=share_btn_gp
No comments:
Post a Comment
Due to a small but consistent influx of spam, comments will now be checked before publishing. Only egregious spam/illegal/racist crap will be disapproved, everything else will be published.