Social networks and the prisoner’s dilemma
I’ve recently begun to explore the idea that social networks could follow the successful Wikipedia model and become non-profit services managed in open source, with total transparency, without any kind of advertising and simply trying to respond adequately to the needs of their users.
The internet advertising model is exhausted. It began by copying traditional print formats, then we saw Yahoo!’s segmentation based on the section of the catalog in which the ad was found; Google then did it according to the search term; while Facebook was able to garner the smallest detail of our online behavior; but the reality is that we are tired of being a product bought and sold by social networks.
Hyper-segmented advertising should be banned, because it uses variables of our behavior that should never have been for sale or available to anyone. Meta’s supposed mission, expressed as “we foster communities and make the world a more united place” translates, in practice, as “we are trying our best to get you to spend as much time as possible here, so you will reveal more information about yourself that we can sell to advertisers”. Hypocrisy writ large. The relationship between social networks and users is a clear example of the prisoner’s dilemma: rational agents who could collaborate for mutual benefit who instead betray each other for individual reward.
