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Aram Zucker-Scharff Profile picture
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4 Feb, 5 tweets, 1 min read
This is a weirdly specific and awfully crazy thing to have to worry about but... is anyone else concerned that news organizations constantly using photos of Gre*ne wearing masks with crazy ideas on them is in effect amplifying her crazy ideas?
As someone super obsessed with share card images and what belongs on them vs what doesn't... perhaps we should consider if open graph/header images with things like 'Stop the St*al' are effectively retweets/mini-op-eds?
If readers only read headlines and look at the image on Facebook... isn't any image of her basically telling the story as much, if not more, than any headline? And if that image is dominated with a weird conspiracy message on her mask (clearly readable) aren't we... spreading it?
I just obsess over share card images (I know others do too) and editorial choices inherent in what may be the only exposure someone gets to a piece, if they never click through to the full article; and these images are just popping out to me as worrisome.
Especially because she is *clearly* wearing these masks with these messages *specifically* to have them captured by the press. Her audience for these messages is not other people in Congress, it's us, the public. This is basically giving her free op-ed space in every publication.

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More from @Chronotope

Aram Zucker-Scharff Profile picture
5 Feb
"Surrendering our privacy to the government would be foolish enough. But what is more insidious is the Faustian bargain made w/the marketing industry, which turns every location ping into currency... in the marketplace of surveillance advertising." nytimes.com/2021/02/05/opi…
"The data is supposed to be anonymous, but it isn’t. We found celebrities, Pentagon officials and average Americans..."
"It became clear that this data — collected by smartphone apps and then fed into a dizzyingly complex digital advertising ecosystem — was a liability to national security, to free assembly and to citizens living mundane lives."
Read 9 tweets
Aram Zucker-Scharff Profile picture
5 Jan
Here's the thing, as someone who sees themself both in ad tech & as a privacy advocate: Advertisers who seek personalized targeting will focus on platforms with the most personal data: Facebook & Google. But I don't believe the status quo of ad targeting is the only future of it.
The idea that advertisers will walk away from platforms that don't provide personalized targeting simply doesn't hold up. Advertisers buy posters and billboards and TV ads and lots of other things that don't promise the accuracy of web advertising...
Further, the promise of that accuracy has mostly been false. Year after year after year we see that ad products that promise perfect accuracy and tracking don't work, are giving false results, are proving entirely ineffective, or have unexpected negative brand impact...
Read 20 tweets
Aram Zucker-Scharff Profile picture
25 Jun 20
Back in 2016 I identified the most successful strategy for Facebook, especially if you weren't afraid of dipping your hands in a bit of content fraud, was to "be massive" to spread your content out among a number of different Pages that appeared to have different topical focuses.
Today: "Popular Information has discovered a network of large Facebook pages — each built by exploiting racial bias, religious bigotry, and violence — that systematically promote content from The Daily Wire." popular.info/p/the-dirty-se…
This has been a long-standing content fraud strategy, one I even tested myself by setting up some tests to see how easy it was to create massively parallel posting using basic tools like RSS and IFTTT. The answer is: it is very easy.
Read 24 tweets
Aram Zucker-Scharff Profile picture
10 Jun 20
So this represents a fun set of assumptions.

1. You do all your reading based on things you click on Twitter

2. Twitter tracks every single article you click on and records the full URL against your profile.

3. Retweeting unread links is very common

It's particularly interesting b/c by pushing you to click through Twitter will likely be expanding its detailed data on users. & b/c the last time I did a data export from Twitter (Aug 2018) there was no list of links that I clicked on, a thing we can assume Twitter stores now.
So either Twitter has started storing click through data on profiles at a specific level it previously avoided or its exports exclude it? I'm running another data export now to see if I get every link I clicked on via Twitter.
Read 17 tweets
Aram Zucker-Scharff Profile picture
9 Jun 20
Most ways ad tech targets ads against users, even in broad demographics, is generally specific enough to be discriminatory if anyone bothered to look into it.
Like the obvious ones are redlining of specific discount offers for loans against geographic regions, something Facebook was called on to deal with, but is available via the rest of the advertising ecosystem. Job offers are the other obvious one...
I mean if you don't think that some jobs are targeted exclusively against age specifically or representative demographic categories that proxy for age generally then you have never talked with a recruiter for SV.
Read 29 tweets
Aram Zucker-Scharff Profile picture
8 Jun 20
What if "feed" is a really terrible product design for news?
Like, feeds of content are the result of long ago engineering conventions, not really related to how we consume content. It's just really easy to get stuff by its "last modified" date and database systems will return your queries in date order and so we got time sorted feeds.
And then algorithmic feeds came out of the assumption that improvement was needed at the ordering level, as opposed to how content was presented.
Read 28 tweets

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