Social media companies are advertising companies... From today's vantage point, the Arab Spring stands out as an iconic cautionary tale... would-be revolutionaries, reformers, and human rights defenders were among the first to master the power of what we used to call "Web 2.0," but authorities caught on quickly and used the new tools to crack down on threats to their grasp on power. Similarly, the 2008 Obama campaign was the first to harness online advertising to reach the right voters with the right message... but 10 years later the same techniques are propelling right-wing authoritarians to power... and being used to fan the flames of xenophobia, racial hatred, and even genocide.

... Online tracking is ubiquitous... Companies collect this information in order to monetize it... The targeted advertising business model incentivizes companies to amass as much information as they can... As Chris Gilliard explains in a recent essay, “surveillance capitalism turns a profit by making people more comfortable with discrimination.” This is manifested in practices like digital redlining, differential pricing, racist search results, and social media filter bubbles... The onus is on Silicon Valley to demonstrate that firms can guard against surveillance capitalism’s gravest harms without uprooting their business models—or better yet, to find new revenue streams that don’t rely on commodifying people’s private behavior. [refers to Alphabet, Facebook, Google & Twitter]