“Facebook could decide an election without anyone ever finding out; The scary future of digital gerrymandering – and how to prevent it.”

Jonathan Zittrain:

Now consider a hypothetical, hotly contested future election. Suppose that Mark Zuckerberg personally favours whichever candidate you don’t like. He arranges for a voting prompt to appear within the newsfeeds of tens of millions of active Facebook users – but unlike in the 2010 experiment, the group that will not receive the message is not chosen at random. Rather, Zuckerberg makes use of the fact that Facebook “likes” can predict political views and party affiliation, even beyond the many users who proudly advertise those affiliations directly. With that knowledge, our hypothetical Zuck chooses not to spice the feeds of users unsympathetic to his views. Such machinations then flip the outcome of our hypothetical election. Should the law constrain this kind of behaviour?

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