Grazie alla benevolenza dei miei followers su Twitter, il testo (pubblicato ieri dal Nouvel Observateur) è stato tradotto in inglese in maniera collaborativa. Siccome alcuni me l'avevano chiesto, lo posto in lista: Never mind the algorithms: the role of click farms and exploited digital labor in Trump’s election http://www.casilli.fr/2016/11/20/never-mind-the-algorithms-the-role-of-explo... "Trump campaign directly bought 60% of his Facebook followers. Those fans and most of his likes come from click farms in the Philippines, Malaysia, India, South Africa, Indonesia, Columbia… and Mexico. Facebook prides itself as being on free service. But it is also a huge marketplace for our personal data: contacts, preferences, network engagement etc. Today Facebook artificially limits the organic reach of content shared by its users. If for example you have 1000 “friends”, less than 10% will read your hilarious jokes or watch your kitten videos. Facebook officially claims that it is about filtering spam. But actually it has implemented a business model aimed at making users pay for a wider reach via sponsoring posts. This model is of less concern for individual users than for corporations and bad hair politicians whose marketing strategies are predicated on this social networking service: the latter are incentivized to have millions of users reading their propaganda, and they will pay to obtain more clicks. The fact is that this system is now based on “click-farms” that exploit workers living in developing or emerging countries. This huge market uncovers the delusion of voluntary participation in online social media, today constrained by the injunction to produce clicks within a productive system relying on an invisible workforce – invisible because literally offshored on the other side of the globe. What would have happened if the rights of these micro-workers had been upheld, if they had had a way to resist freelance jobs blackmail, if they had had a voice to protest against and to refuse to contribute to the imperial dreams of a sociopath surrounded by a court of morally bankrupt lackeys? To acknowledge this hidden click labor and to find ways to regulate it and to protect ourselves from its negative consequences is also – and above all – a fight against barbarism." -- Antonio A. Casilli Associate Professor, Telecom ParisTech Research Fellow, Edgar-Morin Center (EHESS) Member, Interdisciplinary Institute for Innovation (i3 UMR 9217 CNRS)