Everybody knew Facebook was using our preferences to target advertising on an individualized basis back at us. That was the trade-off for it offering the public “free” use of Facebook. However, the use of our personal preferences to attempt to manipulate us into believing specific political ideas is too much of a Faustian bargain….
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New media has an obsession with the potential to divine “signals” from Big Data. There’s an emerging belief that, contained within (an often ill-defined, haphazardly constructed, unstructured collection of information dubbed) “Big Data,” there lies (a virtual treasure trove of) signals (whose significance may lie in revealed preferences, network alliances, predictive powers, geospatial epiphanies, or…
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