I love Facebook. I’m a recent ‘convert’. And now it allows me to post
photos of lovely little Lila every day for loads of my friends, and
even more people that I don’t even know, to swoon over and ‘like’ and
‘love’ and ‘aaaahhhhhh xxxxx’. And once one person has ‘liked’ it, the
photo goes onto their site too, for their friends to ‘like’. And if
any of them ‘like’ it…

I reckon, working on the ‘7 degrees of separation’ model that there is
only one man in the entire world who hasn’t seen Lila sleeping with
her hands over her head. And he’s a bastard, so we don’t care. His
loss. And that happens within minutes of the photo being posted.
That’s why Facebook made 10 billion dollars last year from
advertising. Because it reaches almost 2 billion people.

But its not some passive form of inter-connectivity, leaving us to our
own devices; you like my granddaughter, I’ll like your chocolate cake.
He likes your puppy vomiting over the Vicar, I’ll like your chimpanzee
in a Ferrari. No, its an algorithm. And it monitors every click we
make, every breath we take, every vow… sorry. It monitors everything
we do on phone, pc, tablet, anything connected. It probably hooks up
with ‘Alexa’, our Amazon music player which/who allegedly is run by
the Chinese hackers. Its all connected. And those clicks dictate which
adverts Facebook shows us. Which friends it thinks ‘we may know’.

The algorithm is a secret. They’re all secret as far as I’m concerned,
in that deeply opaque way of very advanced mathematics. But Facebook’s
is their fortune. Or was, till they started showing people paedophile
sites and instructions for beheading. Which, it must be said, it will
only do if those people are ‘that way inclined’. If you are mates with
Jihadi John and Abu Hamza, its a fair guess that you’ll be into
advanced bomb making. So the Times journalists who set up a bogus page
essentially inviting kiddy-pornographers and Islamic extremists on,
were not disappointed.

Algorithms don’t have a morality. They’re just a very advanced method
of offering you what, statistically, you’re most likely to want. And
when people complain about inappropriate sites, I can’t image that
process is done by people either. If 1% of people complain about
sites, that’s 10million investigations. They probably have another
algorithm for that. Who knows? But its a problem. Advertisers don’t
like being connected with the bombing of a school, the rape of a baby,
Arsenal’s current form. Its immoral, its wrong and really, with all
their vast billions, Facebook should be able to stop it.

Happy Thursday

A xxxx