Why do companies even want to spy on you in the first place? Because advertisers want to target ads more effectively. Advertisers believe they can manipulate co

Why do companies even want to spy on you in the first place? Because advertisers want to target ads more effectively. Advertisers believe they can manipulate consumer behavior through ads, so they are willing to pay facebook a shit ton for it. As NLP technology gets better and better, you won't even need traditional ads anymore. You can control people's behavior directly just by selectively boosting real organic posts that push for your agenda. It's only impractical right now because they don't have the tech to get that sort of high level control. For example the recent controversy about Youtube radicalizing people with more and more extremist videos is just a bug. In a more boring dystopia you would just be shown better and better Mcdonald memes until you name your first-born a Mcnugget. I can't think of anything this tech won't touch once they have algorithmic control of information. Rather than targeting ads for elections, you might be able to say something like "find all posts that swing voters will find convincing and show it to them". Whoever can convince facebook to do that will name the next president.