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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 20 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] 7 points 13 hours ago

In other news, its been over a decade since Facebook started selling user data to Cambridge Analytica, who used it to massively target and proliferate polarizing political advertising during the 2016, greatly contributing to Trump's win and the proliferation of QAnon insanity and general political diviseness and radicalization in the US.

I'd call that quite an 'experiment', but sure, Facebook is still definitionally doing a massive psy-op campaign, all the time, with new tech too, yep, that's bad.