The paper is just the latest major web presence to abandon its own commenting system in favor of just importing commenting functionality from Facebook. It’s a tempting switch to make if you’re running a site: you want comments from people so your site feels like a community and people coming back but online comments are often shrill, abusive, stupid, and anonymous. Facebook solves that to some extent by affixing real names – and hopefully some small dollop of accountability- to the comments. Of course, it just expands Facebook’s clutches in the process. They know where you go, they build a profile. Suddenly they know you probably live in Los Angeles. Then they can serve you up ads for businesses in LA and collect revenue from someone who wants to target you. Welcome to the future.
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