Doctorow: Facebook targets behavioral correlates, not mind control
Cory Doctorow · Cory Doctorow and Joe Betts-Lacroix on Adversarial Interoperability · Y Combinator · Nov 27, 2019 · at 36:21
Author and activist Cory Doctorow explains how Facebook's ad targeting improves low conversion rates through correlates rather than psychological persuasion.
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“What Facebook is mostly good at is finding people. You know, if you're a refrigerator salesman, you know, you've had this conundrum all your life, as have all your forebears since the dawn of refrigeration, because the median person buys one or fewer refrigerators in their life. This is why refrigerator ads appear beside You know, freeways, because you just got to blitz them and hope someone's buying a refrigerator. You know, the conversion rate on a refrigerator ad through normal means is probably like 0.0000001%. Facebook lets you find people who have correlates of refrigerator purchasing, and they don't have to be very good to improve a conversion rate that's that bad.”
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