![]() ![]() I asked if he could create a dummy account so I could see how the whole thing works for a column for The Drum. Someone named “Elliot Shefler” replied and said he was a co-founder and the spokesperson. I emailed the address listed on the website. This might not be a surprise, but The Spinner may not be entirely on the up and up. There is this unsupported statistic: “The global number of married men who want their wife to increase the number of initiated sexual advances towards them is estimated to be around 1 billion.” The main advertisement is a video consisting of a fake news anchor and a fake reporter saying a fake script. There is a call to action that would interest only a lecher such as Donald Trump: “Launch your ‘initiate sex’ campaign today!” The “user reviews” are anonymous and so generic that they must be fake. There is a website that looks like it was created by a child in junior high school and includes a home page stock photo of a woman, for some reason, brushing her teeth. But this is a marketing column, so let’s have a look at the communications. I do not even understand how a cookie could control which articles appear on major, third-party news outlets. If any husband would use the platform on his wife, I am sure she would kick his ass to the curb and force him to listen to Nickelback albums on repeat until his head explodes. The Spinner itself is evil – that goes without saying. ![]() The Sun in the UK, not surprisingly, published a sensationalist article last week about the platform without bothering to verify anything. The Spinner, he wrote, is “essentially using a spearfishing attack on friends and loved ones to entrap them in a microtargeting/retargeting peer-to-peer digital psyop”. So did David Carroll, the American media professor who helped to break the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica scandal this year in the UK. “The Spinner is surveillance capitalism in its purest… The Spinner is surveillance capitalism’s Martin Shkreli moment.”ĭoc Searls, an adtech critic and the editor of Linux Journal, condemned the idea on Twitter. “We should all be thanking the Valley Bros that made The Spinner – it might just be what it takes for folks to sit up and take note of (a) how this crap works (b) what it is designed to do (c) how fucked up it all is,” Aral Balkan, a self-described cyborg rights activist, added. What about the stories I write or who I am as a human being would make you think I wanna write about this?” She wrote: “This is by far the creepiest and worst pitch I've ever gotten. Maya Kosoff, a tech writer for Vanity Fair and The Hive, tweeted on 9 July that an "Elliott" – see below – pitched her on the company. ![]()
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