[nonostantement #105] - virtual influencers / surveillance capitalism / filter bubbles

Welcome to nonostantement: a random newsletter that gives you personal recommendations of cool stuff.

#SOCIALMEDIA

• ‘It’s sort of the Wild West’: How Instagram influencers are disrupting healthcare
  "More and more social media influencers are being tapped to spread the word about public health campaigns, pharmaceuticals, even medical devices. It’s a booming but complicated business."

• Charting new territory
  "How The Economist designs charts for Instagram"

• Was Instagram the Steal of the Century?
  "Instagram collected about $20 billion in ad revenue last year, Sarah Frier and Nico Grant of Bloomberg report, citing unnamed sources. That’s more than a quarter of all of Facebook’s sales last year — and a sea change from 2012, the year that Facebook bought Instagram, when the service had no ads."

• Teens have figured out how to mess with Instagram's tracking algorithm
  "Teenagers are using group accounts to flood Instagram with random user data that can't be tied to a single person."

• Can virtual influencers build real connections with audiences?
  “People affiliate these platforms with reality and real people. There’s a soap opera element to social media, where we engage with all of these different people’s conflicts and stories – but I don’t know whether people are ready for those platforms to have fictional narratives on them.”

#PEOPLE

• Liegasm, Jealoushy, and Feminamity Introducing 78 new emotions.
  "This week, the Cut is exploring a scientific theory that suggests we have infinite emotions, so long as we can name them — and so we did, asking writers to identify new ways to feel."

#THEDARKSIDE

• You Are Now Remotely Controlled
  "Surveillance capitalists control the science and the scientists, the secrets and the truth."

• Leaked Documents Expose the Secretive Market for Your Web Browsing Data
  "An Avast antivirus subsidiary sells 'Every search. Every click. Every buy. On every site.' Its clients have included Home Depot, Google, Microsoft, Pepsi, and McKinsey."

• The truth behind filter bubbles: Bursting some myths
  "Many voices warn that social media may be filtering out news that we dislike. Here's what the research says about it"

that's it for now.

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