The product Facebook sells is you
Congress and tech companies are eager for an easy PR victory, but requiring advertiser disclosures won’t solve what’s wrong.
If you’ve ever felt like you’re not in control of your brain anymore, the reason is that you’re not. Your memory, executive functions, reward system and consciousness itself have been deliberately altered by a group of young men who live in California. You sleep less. You remember better (all those posts help commit moments to memory). You’re addicted. And you now have several layers of consciousness, some of which are entirely external to you, like the brain inside Netflix that knows you like political thrillers.
Facebook, and by extension Silicon Valley, is in damage control. “Tech Giants, Once Seen as Saviors, Are Now Viewed as Threats,” The New York Times reports. Among their transgressions: selling Facebook ads to Kremlin trolls, stifling criticism at a Google-funded think tank and allowing racist fringe groups to infiltrate and reframe mainstream political discourse.
As Max Read noted in New York magazine, Facebook has assigned itself the duty to monitor national elections in foreign governments. “We have been working to ensure the integrity of the German elections this weekend,” Mark Zuckerberg said ahead of last month’s…
