Facebook cannot stop exploiting user emotions while revenue depends on prediction.
Evidence
Facebook publicly denied these practices, but Antonio Garcia-Martinez, a former Facebook product manager and author of a useful account of Silicon Valley titled Chaos Monkeys, described in the Guardian the routine application of such practices and accused the corporation of “lying through their teeth.” He concluded, “The hard reality is that Facebook will never try to limit such use of their data unless the public uproar reaches such a crescendo as to be un-mutable.” Certainly the public challenge to Facebook’s insertion of itself into the emotional lives of its users, as expressed in the contagion study, and its pledge to self-regulate did not quell its commercial interest in users’ emotions or the corporation’s compulsion to systematically exploit that knowledge on behalf of and in collaboration with its customers. It did not, because it cannot, not as long as the company’s revenues are bound to economies of action under the authority of the prediction imperative. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 959
Categorization
- DEFINE: Plainly states the ‘prediction imperative’ as the structural driver that makes self-regulation of emotion-data exploitation impossible.
- XREF: connects to: Facebook data employees work continuously to influence users’ moods and behavior — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 940; Facebook’s subliminal emotional manipulation acted on hundreds of thousands of users beyond their awareness — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 944; Facebook targets vulnerable young users with advertising at emotionally weak moments — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 957 (+2 more)
Broader Connections
- More social media connections can worsen users’ emotional states through comparison loops
#corroborates(0.72) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1473