Earlier quoted context omitted.
What are BATs? I am not familiar with this acronym.
Basic Attention Token. Part of the Brave browser.
Thanks for the info. I was only vaguely aware of Brave. This is fascinating. Cheers!
The Creepy Line: a documentary about Google, Facebook and user manipulation
101–103 of 103 posts
Re: The Creepy Line: a documentary about Google, Facebook and user manipulation
#102This documentary makes the extraordinary claim that Google developed Chrome in order to spy on users' browsing behaviour, which is more uncharitable than necessary. I don't trust Google all that much, and I don't think you should either, but that doesn't mean that everything they do is pure cynical exploitation. Defeating these anti-features and misadventures doesn't require a moral crusade, it only requires you to decide not to use the product, and to tell them why through the feedback feature (though some things, like mass gathering of location data, involve plenty of third parties who will probably keep selling your data to Google whether or not you use Google's services directly).
Re: The Creepy Line: a documentary about Google, Facebook and user manipulation
#103I watched half of it... but began noticing the frequent references to how only 'conservative' views are suppressed. And then there were a bunch of Tucker Carlson snippets and then realized something wasn't (no pun intended) 'right'. Looks like M.A. Taylor, from his IMDB page is hyper conservative anti-obama/clinton political hack. Sure, some of what the film talks about - how google and facebook - can nudge peoples o…
> But it is creepy that he has snippets in there projecting them as liberal anti-conservatives hipster organizations. I don't think that means the characterization is false, though. My friends working at Facebook and Google are very liberal and internal polling and their message boards have shown that to be overwhelmingly true for the wider organization as well. > Come on - 2016 would've turned out very different if…
> It's possible that it happened and simply backfired.
This is exactly what happened, from what I can tell, with the one caveat that most of the bias likely came from the human staff they hired to editorialize and moderate. The attempt was noticed, and it backfired spectacularly. If you look at Facebook today, I think it's clear that they mostly don't do this anymore. Facebook's users naturally spend more time and effort sharing and interacting with conservative content than progressive content; thus, the top stories on Facebook are usually from large conservative media (esp. The Daily Wire).