What boggles my mind is that Facebook and Twitter are so very complicit by creating platforms for very granular targeting.
You liked the Green Bay Packers, a gun owners group, an old 2008 Tea Party video, live 60 miles outside of a city and between 40-65? Not only is that profile there, Facebook ads will tell you almost exactly how large your reach is.
This is nothing more than information arbitrage, and that the unit economics from advertisers hasn't quite caught up yet. It's what allowed Buzzfeed to exist in the first place, and ultra targeted startups like Teespring to grow, by training a small part of the crowd to become content creators. Moreover, traditional content creators like NYTimes don't even understand how much they are being undercut cents-to-words.
You work out the funnel conversion, hope for some organic spread, and just pump things out. In a few years, this whole thing could be automated and AI generated to sway elections and public opinions. All you need is a training dataset for the targeted population's underlying views and beliefs.
Imagine a startup trying to do this at scale, growing 10% week over week or something insane. At this point it's basically going to match the velocity of information across online networks of people.
If this becomes a positive feedback loop where readers start to accelerate the spread after becoming radicalized - this becomes a social virus.
You liked the Green Bay Packers, a gun owners group, an old 2008 Tea Party video, live 60 miles outside of a city and between 40-65? Not only is that profile there, Facebook ads will tell you almost exactly how large your reach is.
This is nothing more than information arbitrage, and that the unit economics from advertisers hasn't quite caught up yet. It's what allowed Buzzfeed to exist in the first place, and ultra targeted startups like Teespring to grow, by training a small part of the crowd to become content creators. Moreover, traditional content creators like NYTimes don't even understand how much they are being undercut cents-to-words.
You work out the funnel conversion, hope for some organic spread, and just pump things out. In a few years, this whole thing could be automated and AI generated to sway elections and public opinions. All you need is a training dataset for the targeted population's underlying views and beliefs.
Imagine a startup trying to do this at scale, growing 10% week over week or something insane. At this point it's basically going to match the velocity of information across online networks of people.
If this becomes a positive feedback loop where readers start to accelerate the spread after becoming radicalized - this becomes a social virus.