This is quite right. PragmaticPulp's phrase "an act perpetrated by evil corporations on us helpless individuals" is a bit of rhetorical jujitsu, creating a strawman to set up a rallying cry "I believe people have agency!" You don't have to assume that individuals are "helpless", as if they are generally helpless and lacking agency, to agree that these corporations are exploiting them.
That said, people's agency is limited (bounded rationality). Awareness of how one is being manipulated is not evenly distributed among the population (asymmetric information). And even when there is awareness, people are unevenly affected by it and unevenly empowered to deal with it.
Similarly, Lyft makes it nearly impossible to figure out where to turn off the coupon notifications. And don’t get me started on LinkedIn...
This isn’t just an issue for normal people. It’s also time-consuming and troublesome for anyone short of the dev who built the dark pattern.
What annoys me is new categories of notifications that Twitter turns on by default, even for users who have disabled all of these novel/generic/impersonal notification types.
How is this a strawman? This article is absolutely this inflamatory, if not more so.
> Reddit, for example, has always obfuscated the true Karma score (“to prevent vote brigading”)
There is no reason to believe otherwise. Everyone from Youtube and cheat-bot detection services utilizes the same strategy.
> To the contrary, the Ministries of Truth, Peace, Love, and Plenty will all be private (or publicly traded) entities.
Basically, the conclusion is that we're inevitably going to turn into 1984. There isn't even a suggestion of how to change the situation.
Exactly like tobacco companies had scientists on the payroll to boost addiction. That is the best and most accurate analogue for Facebook I believe, it’s like smoking, it’s addictive and it externalises its harmful effects.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/18/facebook-cambri...
> He was hired to work at Facebook as a quantitative social psychologist around November 2015, roughly two months after leaving GSR, which had by then acquired data on millions of Facebook users.
https://venturebeat.com/2014/06/07/exclusive-to-sell-ads-in-...
> Corey has been working as a quantitative researcher at Facebook since last summer. His growth research team has “two sociologists and a manager trained in communications with a sociologist as an advisor,” according to an article he published early this year. The team helps expand Facebook to developing countries. Corey uses R-based software stack, collects data via Hive and uses a few other coding languages to do his job.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/every...
> We now know that’s exactly what happened two years ago. For one week in January 2012, data scientists skewed what almost 700,000 Facebook users saw when they logged into its service. Some people were shown content with a preponderance of happy and positive words; some were shown content analyzed as sadder than average. And when the week was over, these manipulated users were more likely to post either especially positive or negative words themselves.
> This tinkering was just revealed as part of a new study, published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Many previous studies have used Facebook data to examine “emotional contagion,” as this one did. This study is different because, while other studies have observed Facebook user data, this one set out to manipulate it.
I feel the downvotes were unwarranted. (Not accusing you of Downvoting) Perhaps the user isn't familiar with the industry. I know I'm out of my league with most of the content posted here.
Wall Street gobbled up most ph.D's and researchers years ago, but marketing/ads space have a stranglehold on much of it nowadays.
I see it more akin to the opioid crisis. Just like drug manufactures shouldn't be pushing opioids as a way to deal with minor pain and depression because they know it hooks users. Maybe social media companies shouldn't be pushing hateful and outrageous content to hook their users.
You can sing about personal responsibility all you want. But these companies pay scientists millions of dollars a year to come up with ways to keep you hooked. The only way to win is not to play the game. Normal people are seriously outgunned here.