Facebook Has A Disinfo Problem. And It’s Hiding How Bad It Is.

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This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It first appeared at The Conversation.

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1393000
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In development circles, meta actually means “hidden” – metadata, for example – data about data – isn’t visible to the end-user: it’s hidden or embedded with in the code for use by the search engine algorithm and other AI behind the scenes.

This why “Meta” is a most apt name for FaceBook – all the data about the data remains hidden away.

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Not to quibble, but this is not necessarily, or even generally, true.

If you take the example of one file on a computer’s hard drive, the file’s data would be the actual contents, you know, like a spreadsheet, an email message, malware, whatevs.

The file’s metadata is the data about the file, like its name, its creation and modification dates, size, starting block on disk, inode number, etc. and at least some parts of that are readily viewable, not hidden. Some of the metadata is not going to be of interest to a general user, so it might not be displayed by default in common tools, sure, but “hidden” is not what makes something “meta”.

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I was speaking generally about web development… that said, I’m old enough to remember the whole NSA kerfuffle about pulling metadata about phone calls, etc. that users don’t have easy access to.

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And for spatial data, many governments made metadata directories publicly available before the data themselves were downloadable (you would use the metadata directory to figure out what datasets look like the ones you need, then file a records request and pay a copying fee. The current system of geospatial data portals is much much better, but separate metadata directories are still a thing)

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Same goes for Internet network communication, I can tell you from personal professional experience. But the case of communications analysis, it’s not even ease of access that’s the issue, it’s the storage and processing power required to turn huge piles of (meta)data into useful intelligence.

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