It’s not just political ads that are made to divide us
Targeted ads can play heavily on our vulnerabilities
Regulating adverts
The Protein World case illustrates how regulators work. Because they respond to consumer complaints, the regulator is open to considering how adverts conflict with perceived social norms. As social norms evolve over time, this helps regulators keep up with what the public considers to be harmful.
Consumers complained about the ad because they felt it promoted and normalized a harmful message. But it was reported that only378 commutersraised complaints with the regulator, of the hundreds of thousands likely to have seen them. This raises the question: what about all the others? If the campaign had taken place online, people wouldn’t have seen posters defaced by disgruntled commuters and they may not have been prompted to question its message.
What’s more, if the ad could have been targeted to just the subset of consumers most receptive to its message, they might not have raised any complaints. As a result, the harmful message would have gone unchallenged, missing an opportunity for the regulator to update their guidelines in keeping with current social norms.
Sometimes ads are harmful in a specific context, as when ads for high-fat-content foods are targeted to children, or when gambling ads target those who suffer from a gambling addiction. Targeted ads can also harm by omission. This is the case, for example, if ads for shoes crowd out job ads or public health announcements that someone might find more useful or even vital.
These cases can be described as contextual harms: they’re not tied to specific content, but rather depend on the context in which the ad is presented to the consumer.
Machine learning algorithms are bad at identifying contextual harms. On the contrary, the way targeting works actually amplifies them. Severalaudits, for example, have uncovered how Facebook has alloweddiscriminatory targetingthat worsens socioeconomic inequalities.
Digging deeper
The root cause of all these issues can be traced to the fact that consumers have a very isolated experience online. We call this a state of “epistemic fragmentation”, where the information available to each individual is limited to what is targeted at them, without the opportunity to compare with others in a shared space like the London Underground.
Because of personalized targeting, each of us sees different ads. This makes us more vulnerable. Ads can play on our personal vulnerabilities, or they can withhold opportunities from us that we never knew existed. Because we don’t know what other users are seeing, our ability to look out for other vulnerable people is also limited.
Currently, regulators are adopting a combination of two strategies to address these challenges. First, we see an increasing focus oneducating consumersto give them “control” over how they’re targeted. Second, there’s a push towards monitoring ad campaigns proactively, automating screening mechanisms before ads are published online. Both of these strategies are too limited.
Instead, we should focus on restoring the role of consumers as active participants in the regulation of online advertising. This could be achieved by blunting the precision of targeting categories, by instituting targeting quotas, or by banning targeting altogether. This would ensure that at least a portion of online ads are seen by more diverse consumers, in a shared context where objections to them can be raised and shared.
In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, efforts were made byThe Electoral Commissionto prise open the hidden world of targeted political ads in the run up to the UK’s 2019 election.Some broadcastersasked their audience to send in targeted ads on their social media feeds, in order to share them with a wider audience.Campaign groupsandacademicswere able to analyze targeting campaigns in greater detail, exposing where ads could be harmful or untrue.
These strategies could also be used for commercial targeted advertising, which would break the epistemic fragmentation that currently prevents us from collectively responding to harmful adverts. Our research shows it’s not just political targeting that produces harm – commercial targeting requires our attention too.
Article bySilvia Milano, Postdoctoral Researcher in AI Ethics,University of Oxford;Brent Mittelstadt, Research Fellow in Data Ethics,University of Oxford, andSandra Wachter, Associate Professor and Senior Research Fellow, Oxford Internet Institute,University of Oxford
This article is republished fromThe Conversationunder a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article.
Story byThe Conversation
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