ABSTRACT
Understanding how the Facebook system works is crucial to addressing its challenges. As Siva Vaidhyanathan says, Facebook’s surveillance system is part of its pleasure system. They cannot be severed. Facebook’s ‘storytelling infrastructure’, says Zizi Papacharissi, enables people to place themselves at the centre of developing world events. Researchers for the Norwegian Consumer Council extensively analysed the way in which Facebook’s system is designed to nudge or push users to certain courses of action: In Facebook’s general data protection regulation-popup, the interface was designed with a bright blue button enticing the users to ‘Agree and continue’. Facebook’s advertising system is a complex model that considers both the dollar value of each bid as well as how good a piece of clickbait the corresponding ad is. Facebook, with more data than most, can afford to run thousands of experiments to assess the effectiveness of its attempts to keep locked in its system.
