🎵 The song for this post is Pick Up The Pieces, by Average White Band. 🎵
Ian Bogost and Alexis Madrigal wrote a pretty solid in-depth look at Trump's Facebook game, often mentioned but poorly understood. If you hear stories like "Trump ran 100,000 Facebook ads in April" and not really known what that meant, this demystifies. It's also, of course, terrifying: much like COVID was a story of something we could have contained if we acted fast enough and now the cat is well out of the bag, Society May Never Be The Same, and institutions we relied on will never recover, Facebook's control over the Internet and minds of the populace is past the point of easy repair. I don't know how anybody thinks populations are "above" propaganda with even a cursory understanding of history. And hey, Facebook's nonconsensual research on its users demonstrates it too.It's also the entire business model: "we influence users [their purchasing decisions via ads]"
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://morepablo.com/2020/04/facebook-ads-video.html