Wonderful OpEd piece by Zeynep Tufecki on the current row about Facebook’s supposed ideological bias. I particularly like this:
With algorithms, we don’t have an engineering breakthrough that’s making life more precise, but billions of semi-savant mini-Frankensteins, often with narrow but deep expertise that we no longer understand, spitting out answers here and there to questions we can’t judge just by numbers, all under the cloak of objectivity and science.
Well worth reading in full.
The reason we’re having a Referendum about EU membership has nothing much to do with EU membership. It’s because Cameron needed some way of getting the Europhobes in his party off his back. So he threw them a Referendum, much as one would throw a leg of lamb to a pack of baying wolves. Some thought it was a stroke of tactical genius at the time. In fact it was a colossal strategic error, because — whatever happens on June 23 — the Tory party has been rent asunder. And it’s hard to imagine a vote that will change that. Even a large Remain margin won’t appease the Euronutters. A narrow Remain vote will simply make them salivate for a return match. And of course a Leave vote will mean that both Cameron and the country are screwed. Some genius, eh?