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Facebook is constantly experimenting on consumers — and even its creators don’t fully know how it works. (www.sauder.ubc.ca)

submitted 21 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Users of social media platforms like Facebook are part of constant marketing experiments

Because algorithms are driven by AI and machine learning, it’s impossible to know how social media companies are choosing what to show — and not show — different groups of people

Because there is no “random assignment”, marketers can’t fully tell if one ad might work better than another one.

In the process, groups of social media users can be excluded from important messages

Algorithms are so precise, they can target people down to an individual level

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 18 hours ago

I had an idea a while ago on how you could lightly regulate social media platforms.

Require them to:

Group users into cohorts of a size greater than X. ie, individual level targeting isn’t allowed. The higher this number the better.
make available to users the cohort they are in
publish openly every single cohort and their size
make it possible to view feeds as if you were in a specific cohort.

Will this stop them funnelling customers into rabbit holes? No, probably not.

But it would make “targeted indoctrination” harder as they would have to try and indoctrinate multiple people at once. And it would make it more transparent just how many people are being fed propaganda or whatever you want to call it.