A Quote by Antonio Garcia Martinez
If you'd come to me in 2012, when the last presidential election was raging and we were cooking up ever more complicated ways to monetize Facebook data, and told me that Russian agents in the Kremlin's employ would be buying Facebook ads to subvert American democracy, I'd have asked where your tin-foil hat was.
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I don't think anyone would object to Facebook selling ads or having ads directed at me, as long as people didn't think those ads were manipulated by personal data.
I was at Facebook in 2012, during the previous presidential race. The fact that Facebook could easily throw the election by selectively showing a Get Out the Vote reminder in certain counties of a swing state, for example, was a running joke.
Targeted ads, I think, are useful because I don't want to see all the crap. I'm not interested in buying a Mercedes Benz, but I am interested in buying a new MacBook Air. So if organizations like Facebook can actually make the ads more relevant to me, if they know what I am interested in, I have no problem with that.
I haven't sworn off Facebook. I'm on Facebook. There's a fan page on Facebook that I will update, but I'm on there myself under a pseudonym, because there were a lot of people able to private-message me on Facebook, and it was getting really weird.
As a Facebook user, do I have control of the data Facebook keeps about me? Concretely: can I examine and modify that data using tools of my choosing which are built for my needs?
For a while, I couldn't join Facebook because of my last name. During the registration process, I was asked for my real name, and when I wrote 'Fake,' it rejected me. Finally, a friend working for Facebook took care of me.
We help Chinese companies grow their customers abroad. They use Facebook ads to find more customers. For example, Lenovo used Facebook ads to sell its new phone. In China, I also see economic growth. We admire it.
We started off as this platform inside Facebook; and we were pretty clear from the beginning that that wasn't where it was going to end up. A lot of people saw it and asked, 'Why is Facebook trying to get all these applications inside Facebook when the web is clearly the platform?' And we actually agreed with that.
I made a tin man costume with tin foil and furnace parts because I thought it would help me be more heartless.
In Harlem, Facebook was big. Kids would make Facebook 'families,' where they would change their last name on Facebook and have the same last name as their friends. I had this girl I was talking to, and she changed her last name to West, so I changed mine to West, too. It wasn't until later that I took the 't' off.
I haven't sworn off Facebook. I'm on Facebook. There's a fan page on Facebook that I will update, but I'm on there myself under a pseudonym, because there were a lot of people able to private-message me on Facebook, and it was getting really weird. And then with MySpace, I just don't read messages. I delete everything, and I just post updates every now and then.
'Targeting' is polite ads-speak for the data levers that Facebook exposes to advertisers, allowing that predatory lot to dissect the user base - that would be you - like a biology lab frog, drawing and quartering it into various components, and seeing which clicked most on its ads.
When someone at the State Department proclaims Facebook to be the most organic tool for promoting democracy the world has ever seen - that's a direct quote - it may help in the short run by getting more people onto Facebook by making it more popular with dissidents.
When you use Facebook, you're always logged in, and your identity and relationships - to others, to content, to apps and services - are assets Facebook can use to customize your experience (oh, and your ads).
The best thing that would happen is for Facebook to open up its data. Failing that, there are other ways to get that information.
Facebook isn't helping you make new connections, Facebook doesn't develop new relationships, Facebook is just trying to be the most accurate model of your social graph. There's a part of me that feels somewhat bored by all of this.
