So you overhear people saying sniffily that they’re surprised that a certain prime minister is staying in the Hilton Garden Inn rather than the Seehof Hotel, or that a celebrity mistakenly tried to cut in line for a panel, too uneducated to realize they were pushing past a Nobel laureate. The narcissism of small differences. In other words, the WEF

A Trump operative named Brad Parscale ran the operation together with the embedded Facebook staff, and he basically invented a new way for a political campaign to shitpost its way to the White House, targeting voters with misinformation, inflammatory posts, and fundraising messages. Boz, who led the ads team, described it as the “single best

So there’s shock and panic on Sunday, January 10, when TRAI announces that it’s received only 1.4 million submissions.

And then . . . ​an impromptu meeting with President Obama is added to the schedule, to start at 3:45. Which is exactly when we’re supposed to be driving to President Rousseff. I find out about this minutes before it happens. Someone from the White House must’ve offered it, and I’m sure if anyone on our team asked Mark, he’d have said yes.

If the only thing that will make Facebook change its position is jailing its employees or blocking its service, they’re effectively issuing an invitation to these governments to do just that.

In other words, this is a moment when governments are more interested in surveillance than people’s privacy. Which is good for Facebook’s business.

Boz showed that Facebook’s senior management knew exactly what Facebook was doing. Then he argued that Facebook should step back from all this “optimizing and driving,” instead letting people have greater input and more control over the content they see. But nothing changed.

Five years earlier when I arrived at Facebook, Mark didn’t have a theory of how he and the company should be in the world; he didn’t really have developed opinions about policy or politics, beyond “sign up more users.” The rest of Facebook’s leadership wasn’t very different. Mark really couldn’t be bothered to care. Now he’s developed priorities,

Facebook does work for a beauty product company tracking when thirteen-to-seventeen-year-old girls delete selfies, so it can serve a beauty ad to them at that moment.