The point of this explanation is that it is not you, but Facebook’s assembled version of you (i.e. the doppelgänger) which they point at and say is you. The doppelgänger becomes a simulacrum.
Pragmatism
I often describe myself as a pragmatist, in the philosophical sense. Sometimes things just need to get done, and while ontological (what is real) and epistemological (what is known) debate can be myanmar rcs data valid and interesting, if there’s a deadline sometimes you just have to work with what you’ve got. This is why I’m sympathetic with the temptation of describing a person’s digital persona as that person.
As Joy Boulamwini and Timnit Gebru have reported, algorithms which are only shown the doppelgänger can produce disastrous social results, with machine learning systems often reinforcing gender and racial biases. This is not wholly the doppelgänger’s fault – the person who collected the data was clearly unaware of the bias they were also embedding into the data. But given this oversight, it reveals the pressing danger of a pragmatic view which says the doppelgänger is good enough – sometimes, it really isn’t.