Policy

[This statement has been lightly edited to help it read as a blog post, but is largely as originally written and delivered. Part of the context here is that the Belgian parliament is considering a range of options, including a ban, for dealing with online political ads. Another part was that the French election was…

Facebook’s most recent set of numbers look bad. They showed users aren’t flocking to the platform in the same way as in previous years. Perhaps they’ve reached saturation point in most markets or users find themselves turned off by the reports following Frances Haugen’s whistleblowing. Alongside this, advertisers are finding it harder to target those…

Last week, the EU Parliament backed an amendment to the Digital Services Act that banned the use of “special category” data “for the purpose of displaying advertising”. If the ban is enacted (the other arms of the EU must agree first), no digital platform or service will be allowed to sell ads targeted at people…

To start this post with something fancy, let’s go back to Thucydides (an ancient Greek historian). He wrote: “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.” For what it’s worth, this is pretty much the root of realist political thought. Everything’s a power game, where…

MIT Technology Review yesterday reported a story about how ‘troll farms’ (probably better described as ‘profiteering content spammers’) copy and repost content to gain (a lot of) traction on Facebook. The spammers’ strategy gamed the way the company chooses to display content to users, ensuring their posts got lots of engagement, before racking up even…

Last week, Ray-Ban, in collaboration with Facebook, launched glasses that take photos and videos, and have little speakers in the arms for playing podcasts and the like (via Bluetooth – the glasses don’t have standalone network connectivity just yet). The speakers are “discreetly” built into the arms, so you can walk around, listening away, without…