In the immediate aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica scandal and Zuckerberg hearings, there were a number of articles, blog posts and tweets about the benefits of the web as an open platform, and the evils of the giants such as Facebook as walled gardens.
And then, during the crackdown on Telegram, I saw a blogger inviting his readers to join his Telegram channel, and it occurred to me, with sudden poignancy, that people are marching into another closed-off garden, the one that is not explorable from the outside and is not particularly friendly towards the web. Which is sad.
On an unrelated note, I do not quite understand the fuss around Facebook, especially the part related to targeted advertising. It seems so natural that if we are to see any ads at all, they better be ads that we may be interested in. Same with political ads: why show me something that I am strongly opposed to? Which means that it's quite natural to expect that people with different tastes will be shown different political ads: it's both more effective for the advertiser and more tolerable for the viewer. But, if I understand the concerns correctly, some people find this objectionable.
