Nice illustration of how easy we can be fooled by numbers: to save gas, do you upgrade your 36 mpg car to a newer 46 mpg car, or do you upgrade your pickup truck from 15 mpg to 18 mpg? You drive both the same amount per year. Most people will select the 10 mpg fuel improvement – but they’ll save twice as much gas if they updated the pick up truck.
Social media algorithms that select what items we see in our feeds or in our “recommended” posts or video lists, may be designed to favor content that features attractive people (usually females, usually young and fit) or which include more sexualized content (broadly defined). Content creators see in their viewership data what works to obtain views and will produce more content like that. The effect is that algorithms may be reinforcing stereotypes of women as sex objects (data suggests this has happened more so for women than men).
Facebook continues to claim they oppose discrimination in all forms, in spite of mountains of evidence showing they continue to discriminate based on age, gender and other attributes in their ad platform.
Facebook’s advertising tools enabled advertising to target potential housing customers by “race, religion, familial status, disability” in order to exclude members of protected classes from renting or buying property.
Third party companies offer to install solar PV arrays on your home and promise to save you money on your monthly electric utility costs. Bloomberg found they use a mix of false assertions, lies, cherry picking and fear as sales methods, to persuade homeowners to sign up and lease the solar PV system for decades. Over time, the lease costs increase such that the homeowner spends far more in the future, while the third party company collects large government subsidies. Few homeowners understand what they got in to. When they go to sell their home, the lease is transferred to the buyer – in effect, TPO solar PV arrays become a dead weight on the home’s future sales potential, particularly to informed buyers who understand the game.
262 web trackers on a single page?
If all it took was a few million dollars and about 100 people to throw an election, why did U.S. presidential candidates spend billions on U.S. media advertising?
We are surrounded by marketing propaganda that has enlisted networks of individuals posting online reviews. These ecosystems seem like organic grass roots “from the people” reviews. But most are marketing “astro turf” operations. That is, they are corporate sponsored activities designed to look like they are “from the people”.
We wrote about rental protest crowds back in 2017. They are now back in the news.
Facebook ad network still being used to target ads based on gender, and in the past, on race, language spoken, age and more discriminators. It is likely all of these discriminators continue to be used.