4 ms·

At least it will take away the incentive from the all-powerful tech companies to stop pushing and optimizing political messages with their core-business interes

• slg 7y ago
  Active user totals and engagement numbers are still a big driver in valuations so the incentives still align with not cracking down too hard (as long as legitimate users aren't pushed away by the inauthentic content).
  • jimkleiber 7y ago
    This aspect has puzzled me deeply. I imagine the following scenario: I'm the CEO of a social network trying to raise a new round of funding. I go to investors and say that we have 100M users on the platform and growing by 10M users per month. The investors like these numbers and decide to invest. A few years later, the investors find out that when I said 100M users, I actually meant 50M real human users and 50M bot users. When I said growing by 10M users per month, I actually meant by 5M real human users and 5M bot users per month. At what point does this become criminal fraud?
    • mc32 7y ago
      An investor should ask the hard questions like you know, how many of them are bots? It’s not hard to ask.