“It’s not really expression of anything. It’s freedom of manipulation; freedom of engineering people’s brains to be ideal victims. Maybe that’s something societ

“It’s not really expression of anything. It’s freedom of manipulation; freedom of engineering people’s brains to be ideal victims. Maybe that’s something society needs to prohibit.” I think governments were first in this space of “engineering people’s brains to be ideal victims” and will remain active in that long after any regulation is crafted to limit individuals and corporations from doing the same. Engagement optimization seems like a thing that can be regulated, but it’s just the same thing tv stations have been doing forever, basically marketing. I think really the problem is a different one. People need better education especially when it comes to ethics. Psychological experiments (a/b testing for example) should be governed by boards that oversee the ethics of experimenting on human subjects. Stallman identifies the problem as “popularity” but what if popularity required behaving ethically and not doing what is incontrovertibly unethical human subject research for personal greed.