[Air-L] Facebook needs to open up its data to impartial, outside researchers

Robert W. Gehl lists at robertwgehl.org
Sat Nov 12 09:39:48 PST 2016


Or maybe we need to leave this corporate media behemoth, one that is
openly about selling our sociality, desires, and fears to the highest
bidder, which every four years will happen to be political campaigns.
Did you like Trumpism? If so, that bit of data is fed back to you in an
increasingly intense form. Were you so convinced of another Clinton in
the White House that you liked a campaign slogan? Then you get those
marketing messages fed to you to confirm your beliefs. Now we get to go
back to having particular brands of shoes and cars presented to us, but
rest assured, in the next election cycle it will shift back to reductive
political slogans and clickbait conspiracy theories.

Trading away our thoughts, fears, desires, and preferences for the
chance to connect to one another remains a terrible exchange.
Previously, we humans connected with one another just fine without
having to bare our souls to a corporation.

So the answer to the quandary of Facebook and the 2016 election is not
more open data. It's less. And it's up to us to recognize this and leave
Facebook for something better.

- Rob

Robert W. Gehl
Associate Professor, Department of Communication
Affiliated Faculty, Department of Writing & Rhetoric
The University of Utah
www.robertwgehl.org | @robertwgehl
www.socialmediaalternatives.org
Sent from our OS on our Internet

Please read my book: Reverse Engineering Social Media
Winner of the 2015 Association of Internet Researchers Nancy Baym Book Award
http://www.temple.edu/tempress/titles/2275_reg.html

On 11/12/2016 09:27 AM, Jeff Pooley wrote:
> Facebook needs to open up its data to impartial, outside researchers: the future of democracy in the U.S. may hang in the balance: 
> 
> http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2016/11/11/we_can_t_know_whether_facebook_is_to_blame_for_trump_s_win.html
> 
> 
> ---------
> 
> Jeff Pooley, Ph.D.
> Associate Professor of Media & Communication
> Muhlenberg College
> 2400 Chew St., Allentown, PA 18104
> 484-664-3677
> jeffpooley.com
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