![]() ![]() ![]() It’s a company, and its profits come from advertising. But even without our employees involved in the sales, we can do better.”īut Facebook isn’t really a town square. “Most ads are bought programmatically through our apps and website without the advertiser ever speaking to anyone at Facebook,” Mark Zuckerberg wrote a few days ago. It’s also setting its own limits, noted Betsy Sigman, professor at Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business. Zuckerberg is envisioning Facebook – not as an advertising or media company – but as a sort of public square. There are only about 120 officially registered political parties on Facebook’s platform worldwide, according to Socialbakers, which is a pretty good indication that most political parties using Facebook do not register as such. It’s limiting the changes to the political arena, saying it will make political ads more transparent and strengthening the political ad review process – and hiring more people, 250, which seems small, but a start. And the general lack of oversight and lack of transparency that exists on Facebook likely exists across the other platforms it owns, including Instagram and WhatsApp.įacebook’s response to the discovery that its platform was manipulated has been to announce a series of changes and reforms. If Dark Posts are being used by bad actors in the political arena, they are probably being used by bad actors in commerce, where there are laws and standards that we live by, as well. “There is nothing mysterious or untoward about the system itself, as long as it’s being used for commerce instead of politics,” he wrote. (There’s also a loophole in campaign finance laws that means social media is exempt from some of the rules ensuring transparency.) In influential op-ed in the New York Times, University of Virginia professor Siva Vaidhyanathan pointed out the dangers of Dark Posts’ use by political entities, because it allows campaigns to circumvent laws that try to ensure transparency in the political system. In the case of the Russian scandal there were about 3,000 posts placed by 470 accounts and pages spending about $100,000. It has been easy enough for someone with bad intentions to set up a fake account, apparently, and have at it. ![]() Facebook defines unpublished posts as anything that originates first as an ad, as opposed to a post that would appear on an advertisers' own page one of the common reasons for "unpublished" posts, the company says, is so advertisers don’t clutter their own pages. There are a lot of them: 18% of the posts brands use are Dark Posts, according to Socialbakers, a VC-backed social monitoring firm. They’re essentially untied from a company’s main branding effort and are often used by companies to target specific groups or experiment with new messages. CNBC reported Friday that he will sell stock worth between $6 billion and $12.8 billion at the current share price of $170, over the next 18 months.ĭark Posts Are Not Only Used For Politicsįor the past few weeks, we’ve been transfixed by the news that bogus Russian accounts bought thousands of Facebook ads – so-called Dark Posts – that appeared to amplify, as Facebook said, “ divisive social and political messages across the ideological spectrum-touching on topics from LGBT matters to race issues to immigration to gun rights.”ĭark Posts, which Facebook calls “unpublished posts,” are those that appear outside an account’s timeline. The hyper efficient business model has made Mark Zuckerberg and many other employees incredibly wealthy. Facebook earns more than $1 million for each of its 17,000 employees. But judging by the results, the need to scale turned into an unfettered desire for profits. Maybe someday we’ll create morally capable algorithms, but that time is not yet.įacebook, like many tech companies, has tried to sell itself as a do-good company – and it has connected billions of people across the world. And more importantly, they have cut people out of the system almost entirely, and turned the monitoring over to algorithms. In ways that we are only beginning to recognize, social media companies, perhaps especially Facebook, have removed the transparency and the breadth of our conversations, which lent a little accountability to the world of advertising. ![]()
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