Facebook Enables Marketing to a Strictly White Only Audience

I should be more precise: Facebook enables marketing to a strictly ‘white affinity’ only adience.

Doug Neil of Universal Pictures and Facebook’s Jim Underwood presented Big Box Office: Marketing Films in a Mobile World at SxSW a few weeks back. They promised the audience that they would get to hear about “the best approaches for mobile marketing: how a monster hit like Jurassic World benefited from mobile-friendly content delivered to a mass audience while genre films benefit from insights into audience segments ranging from multi-cultural to multi-generational.”

In the session Neil explained how the movie Straight Outta Compton was an unexpected breakout hit. According to Business Insider he credited segmenting the audience into three parts: the “general population” (meaning non-African-American and non-Hispanic), African-Americans and Hispanics:

Neil credited part of this to a specialized Facebook marketing effort led by Universal’s “multicultural team” in conjunction with its Facebook team. They created tailored trailers for different segments of the population.

Why? The “general population” (non-African American, non-Hispanic) wasn’t familiar with N.W.A., or with the musical catalog of Ice Cube and Dr. Dre, according to Neil. They connected to Ice Cube as an actor and Dr. Dre as the face of Beats, he said. The trailer marketed to them on Facebook had no mention of N.W.A., but sold the movie as a story of the rise of Ice Cube and Dr. Dre.

The trailer marketed to African Americans was completely different. Universal assumed this segment of the population had a baseline familiarity with N.W.A. “They put Compton on the map,” Neil said. This trailer opens with the word N.W.A. and continues to lean on it heavily throughout.

As to the trailer produced for the Hispanic market, it was a shorter spot that included flashing quotes in Spanish.

Let’s sidestep the fact that Hollywood still seems to think that “black” movies have a hard time being successful. And let’s ignore how tone-deaf these two gentlemen are when it comes to the current situation around race in Hollywood (think #OscarsSoWhite or the upsetting story of Nina Simone’s botched biopic). Instead, let’s look at what this really is:

Racial profiling enabled by Facebook’s data lust

Facebook was quick to explain that they are not identifying their audience as being black. Instead they are merely assessing your affinity with black culture, or as they would call it: whether you “like African-American content”. They promise they won’t make that assessment on the basis of your photos (although surely their research lab must be working on some form of “fracial recognition” system), your name or census data. Instead they’ll look at what you ‘like’ and read online. In simple Facebook-algorithmic terms: if you watch BET and post #BlackLivesMatter links, then we can tell our advertiser you probably know N.W.A. well and don’t need to see the whitewashed trailer.

Some people can’t see what is wrong with a bit of personalisation and are happy that this movie has managed to find a big audience. But they are missing the bigger picture.

Facebook has this type of affinity data on most of its close to 1.6 billion(!) monthly active users. We now have a commercial company building a massive world-scale database that enables anybody with access to that data to slice up the population in whatever way they might find convenient.

Looking for strictly white patronage for your Airbnb? Facebook can help you with that.
Only want millionaires on your dating site? Show some ads to Facebook users from the “rich affinity” group.
Desperate to sell your cancer medication? Facebook can get you a set of people who have ‘liked’ cancer.
Need a list of all the people with Kurdish affinity? Facebook is ready for you!
Jews? Muslims? Facebook can now personalise their experience too…

After initially enabling ‘Web 2.0’, Facebook is now enabling segregation 2.0. I mean, what could go wrong?

Artificial Intelligence as a Service

Companies like Google and IBM are opening up services through APIs that will allow you to do things like check if an image contains adult/violent content, check to see what mood a face on a picture is in, or detect the language a piece of text is written in. Artificial Intelligence as a Service as it were (or maybe Machine Learning as a Service would be more appropriate).

So imagine building your product on top of these services. What happens if they start asking you to pay? Or if they censor particular types of input? Or if they stop existing? Where are the open alternatives that you can host yourself?

For anyone who likes logical Lego, the availability of these plug and play services means that in many cases you don’t have to worry about the base technology, at least to get a simple demo running. Instead, the creativity comes in the orchestration of services, and putting them together in interesting ways in order to do useful things with them…

Source: Recognise This…? A Quick Round-Up of Some *-Recognition Service APIs | OUseful.Info, the blog…

Morozov: tech firms now run western politics

For the past few years I have been saying that more and more of our lives will very soon be under the governance of the big Silicon Valley information giants. Living in Google’s jurisdiction as it were.

Morozov is much more articulate than me. He is now convinced that once this transformation is complete there won’t be a way back.

In fact, technology firms are rapidly becoming the default background condition in which our politics itself is conducted. Once Google and Facebook take over the management of essential services, Margaret Thatcher’s famous dictum that “there is no alternative” would no longer be a mere slogan but an accurate description of reality.The worst is that today’s legitimation crisis could be our last. Any discussion of legitimacy presupposes not just the ability to sense injustice but also to imagine and implement a political alternative. Imagination would never be in short supply but the ability to implement things on a large scale is increasingly limited to technology giants. Once this transfer of power is complete, there won’t be a need to buy time any more – the democratic alternative will simply no longer be a feasible option.

Source: The state has lost control: tech firms now run western politics | Opinion | The Guardian

Raspberry Pi, ownCloud and Ubuntu

ownCloud has really matured in the last couple of months. Both from a technical perspective and as an open source community based project that just kicks ass.

The free software replacement of Dropbox (and eventually GoogleDocs) is fast becoming one the key pieces of infrastructure for a decentralised and open web. I love how absolutely hardcore pro freedom the community of developers is.

It is great to read that they are now also taking very concrete steps towards making it easier to just have this running in your own home.

[The] goal of this project is to create a product home users can buy to easily and quickly get their ownCloud up and running, based on a Raspbery Pi (or something like that!) and a hard drive (or more). Something they will be able to buy from a easy store online, receive home, plug in, configure in some easy steps and – done.

Source: WD Labs, Raspberry Pi, ownCloud and Ubuntu | ownCloud.org

A Video That Every Potential Juror Should See

I’ve written before about the use of police bodycams, mainly looking at what the first person perspective might mean for the way we will see (police) violence in the future.

The ACLU has written an blog post about a video that clearly shows the level of manipulation that is possible for the police around their own footage. The third person viewpoint of a public surveillance camera made that clear in this particular case in point.

Last year I wrote about “acting and directing with police body cameras” — how police officers are likely to increasingly learn to manipulate the photographic record that their cameras create. A stark case study in that kind of manipulation can be found in video of a 2014 arrest in Florida that was released in January and recently came to my attention. It’s the kind of video that everyone should watch in order to become sophisticated and properly skeptical consumers of video evidence.

Source: A Video That Every Potential Juror Should See | American Civil Liberties Union

Update (d.d. 4 April 2016): The New York Times has put up an interactive site that allows you to see the same footage of standard policing situations from different points of view. Do check it out. The main lesson? What we see in police footage tends to be shaped by what we already believe.