The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google

by Scott Galloway

Deleting Facebook doesn’t do much to protect your personal information from being misused.

The site has already harvested your data, created a detailed data set on you, and made it part of the ad targeting it offers to millions of advertisers.

Even if you delete Facebook, it has Pixels on other sites you go to that will keep adding to its data set. Together with other aggregates, Facebook knows the stores you go to, what you purchase, and what apps you download. It will keep gathering data on you through its subsidiaries Insta...

Google and Facebook are redrawing the media map.

Combined, Facebook and Google control 51 percent of global mobile ad spend, and their share grows every day.

Facebook has five million advertisers.

Advertisers have just two platforms to market their products online.

Advertisers need Facebook much more than Facebook needs any one, or t...

This underscores the dominance of the digital giants.

It’s not just that their machines are getting smarter, day by day, as they gorge on our data. They also attract the best and brightest.

they fight for market dominance, both Facebook and Google can be expected to make bold bets on the future.

One especially expensive route leads to virtual reality, and that’s where Facebook stole the march on the industry.

A devouring beast, Facebook will continue with more of the same.

With its global reach, its near-limitless capital, and its ever-smarter data-crunching AI machine, Facebook, in combination with Google, will lay waste to much of the analog and digital media worlds.

The Times agreed to let Facebook post its articles natively on the platform. That means you can read the whole article without leaving Facebook and stepping onto the Times’ site.

That may sound good, but the reality is that it leaves Facebook in control.

That means it can increase or decrease its customers’ exposure to the Times as it chooses,

This reduces what was once one of the proudest institutions and brands in American medi...

Facebook decides which content is best suited to convey advertising,...

“Live by the algorithm, die by the algorithm” is right.

The prime material—the oil—for Facebook is the billions of identities it is following and getting to know in ever-greater detail. The easy money is on the sure things in its people portfolio.

By comparison, virtual reality goggles, curing death, laying fiber, self-driving cars, and other business opportunities represent much longer odds.

If people make it clear, with their clicks, likes, and posts, that they hate certain things and love others, those people...

News feed visibility is based on four basic variables—creator, popularity, type of post, and date—plus its own ad algorithm.

Marketing to moderates is like fracking for gas. You only do it if the easier alternatives aren’t available.

Thus, we are exposed to less and less calm, reasonable content.

So, Facebook, and the rest of the algorithm-driven media, barely bo...

The true believers, whether from left or right, click on the bait. The posts that get the most clicks are confrontational and angry. And those clicks drive up a post’s hit rate, which raises its ranking in both Google and Facebook.

That in turn draws even more clicks and shares.

This is how these algorithms reinforce polarization in our society. We may think of ourselves as rational creatures, but deep in our brain is the impulse for survival, and it divides the world into us vs. them. Anger and outrage are easily spiked.

Politicians may seem extreme. But they are just responding to the public—and

and the anger we are working up daily in our news feeds, our m...

Forty-five percent of Americans, and much of the world, turns to Facebook for its news.

Yet Facebook doesn’t want to be seen as a media company. Neither does Google.

Respectable companies in the news business recognize their responsibility to the public and try to come to grips with their role in shaping the worldview of their customers.

That’s a lot of work, and it dents profits.

Now people can argue forever about whether the shrinking ranks of responsible media actually achieve balance and get it “right.”

Still, they try.

When the editors are debating which stories to feature, they at least consider ...

Not everything is clicks a...

But for Facebook, it is.

Sure, the company tries to hide this greed behind an enlightened attitude. But basically it’s the same MO as the other winners in the tech economy, and certainly the rest of the Four—foster

Don’t kid yourself: Facebook’s sole mission is to make money.

Once the company’s success is measured in clicks and dollars, why favor true stories over false ones? Just hire a few “media watchdog” firms to give you cover.

As far as the machine sees it, one clic...

Pizzagate posts got likes and reposts in the hundreds of thousands.45 Nine percent of the electorate and 46 percent of Trump voters believed it was true.

The shit sandwich here is that having legitimate news next to fake news has only made the Facebook platform more dangerous.

the presence of the New York Times and WaPo on Facebook has legitimized fake news.

Really excellent point here!

Fake news stories are a far greater threat to our democracy than a few whack jobs wearing white hoods.

But fake stories are part of a thriving business.