Pentland finds Facebook’s “contagion” experiments particularly enlightening, seeing all sorts of practical insights in their complexities. For example, in the corporation’s 61-million-person voting experiment, Pentland sees confirmation that social pressure can be effectively instrumentalized in social networks, especially among people with “strong ties”: “The knowledge that our face-to-face friends had already voted generated enough social pressure that it convinced people to vote.” … With this knowledge and more like it, Pentland’s “we,” the tuners, will be able to activate the “right incentives.”

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 1388