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Pastimes : Investment Chat Board Lawsuits
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To: sense who wrote (12268)11/29/2019 1:14:21 AM
From: Jeffrey S. Mitchell  Read Replies (1) of 12465
 
As for Facebook, there is a saying that if the product is free to you, as Facebook is, you are the product. Facebook makes money from selling user data to allow their advertisers to reach a much more targeted audience vs the old-fashioned email spam or direct mail pieces. My personal opinion is that anytime you control who receives a message, you are indeed a publisher.

By way of example, say ACME Tractor creates really retailed ads about how their tractors blow away the competition. They then buy generic ads on Facebook which Facebook then runs as is to 10,000 random users. Assuming nine of ten people in general are not farmers, maybe 1000 people even read the ads. Contrast that to Facebook instead charging much more money to ACME to reach "just" 2000 users, but with a guarantee that these 2000 are all farmers. The key difference here with my prior "ride board" example is that it is Facebook making the decision as to who receives a given message as opposed to Facebook reacting to someone else's decision.

But, of course, Facebook has billions of dollars and a team of lawyers. It's hard to see anyone with deep enough pockets to take them on to reach such a verdict. Rather, my sense is that Facebook would find it way cheaper to just pay people off who challenge them on this if need be, as opposed to losing a cash cow.

- Jeff
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