Goldilocks goes SoMe

I see that Facebook is flapping its corporate hands in shock—shock, I say—at discovering a “coordinated disinformation campaign” (per WaPo) in the run-up to this year’s elections. They claim they can’t find any link to Russia in the pages they’ve shut down, so I suppose that means their “ad” checks are still clearing the bank.

Here’s the thing—everything about Facebook is geared around them producing data that will support whatever they choose to do. And if having all those Russian trolls create pages and engage in activity so that it makes their user numbers look good, they’re going to find data that backs them up.

Every single time they pretend to solicit feedback, it’s in the form of “you want us to do this, right?” not a real attempt to collect our opinions, much less act on them.

A case in point is a survey they fielded a few weeks ago. It was page after page of multiple choice questions that were utterly meaningless. (And don’t even think about a verbatim option.) Here’s one utterly idiotic example:

What does this even mean? It makes me think of Goldilocks and the three bears. If I say I have “too many FB friends”, what are they going to do about it? Bring out the guillotine? And If I say I want more, are they going to cook some up for me? (No, no—I know: they’re going to demand access to my email contacts list and start soliciting people to join up. After all, they need to replace all the fake account they’ve purged.)

But aside from that, I'm pretty sure that Facebook gathered no meaningful information from it. It was a Potemkin survey.