Big Tech platforms make money by micro-targeting ads to their users, so that ads that are more accurately and narrowly tailored are more valuable to p

Segmentation faults: how machine learning trains us to appear insane to one another

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2021-06-17 11:00:08

Big Tech platforms make money by micro-targeting ads to their users, so that ads that are more accurately and narrowly tailored are more valuable to platforms and advertisers than ads that are more general.

Following on the above, the more fine-grained segments you can slice your audience into, the better you can service the long tail of advertisers. So there’s an ad-driven market for audience segmentation that the platforms want to meet.

Advertising works, and in general, a human’s behaviors, preferences, values, and even basic tenets of their worldview can be modified by the media they’re exposed to.

Our society is getting more fragmented and polarized, as existing groups splinter apart online and new, often smaller groups and clusters form around different ideas, claims, worldviews, and identity characteristics.

I understand there are legitimate objections to each point above, but just go with it for a moment. Imagine that the above accurately describes our present social reality in 2021.