Making Things Visible
Failure to Design for Accountability in Ad Campaign Technology
Companies relying on programmatic advertising technology chase after individuals through their browsing habits; automatically purchasing and displaying ads wherever, and next to whatever content their target demographic is visiting. Most companies have no idea that they are likely violating their own policies, and fail to guard their image as enthusiastically as they normally would in more public contexts. Enter Sleeping Giants: this effort by a few digital media professionals to anonymously inform companies that they are inadvertently advertising on Breitbart has a growing number of participants and continues to raise awareness, motivating companies to be more accountable.
While commendable, Sleeping Giants’ efforts seem like basic features and part of the service that should be included in marketing campaign solutions. In a December 5, 2016 piece, Nicholas Reville argued that between the seedy articles and comments, Breitbart is in violation of Google’s policy on hate speech and, therefore, should stop supporting their website with their advertising network. I am skeptical that Breitbart will lose access to Google’s ad network. The Trump administration gives the website clout and a semblance of journalistic legitimacy. Meanwhile, Breitbart is responding to market pressure by starting to hire writers that will bring their content closer to mainstream standards. This is in large part thanks to the Sleeping Giants crowdsourced accountability exercise that has resulted in over a 1,300 companies (so far) blacklisting Breitbart for ad placement.
Nevertheless, there are still issues due to how online ads technology works, making it difficult to completely block sites like Breitbart. Nicholas Reville ends his piece with the suggestion that “there should, at a minimum, be a warning and a clear opt-in for advertisers.” He even includes a cheeky screenshot of what the UX would look like, with a note to developers that the checkbox for “Promote my brand on white nationalist websites” should be unchecked by default. Both Google’s policies and technology have failed to achieve accountability in their design in two ways:
- Publishers are not accountable to Google policies. Instead, they are financially rewarded by the traffic generated by writing fake news and hate speech.
- Companies placing ads are not accountable to their own policies and values as they leave it up to Google’s algorithms to automatically select advertisement placement and purchasing.
When designing for accountability in technology, Sara Eriksén observes that a common feature is “making visible and accountable” by looking for communication loops, and “thinking in terms of supporting local visibility and reflexivity in action, and everyday communication and cooperation, rather than managerial intervention and control¹.” I imagine that if these features were incorporated into current tools we might see some of the following:
- there would be an option to limit the content of the automated ad network to providers that are actively certified as compliant with policies;
- companies would be able to programmatically incorporate their brand values into their marketing campaigns to automatically avoid toxic content and comments;
- site visitors should be able to provide feedback to the companies that purchased the ads and to the ad networks directly from the advertisement, without friction in the user experience;
- and companies and ad network providers would be responsive to feedback by empowering employees to make immediate changes consistent with organizational values, using the same tools they used for creating the ad campaign
I am not advocating that Google or any other ad network engage in active editorializing of the internet. However, considerations of accountability must be designed into the technology whenever you are automating decisions that used to be determined by a person. By failing to design safeguards, transparency, and feedback loops into a system driven mostly by market forces, money has flowed away from journalistic institutions to organizations like Breitbart. This automated system works without accountability and against the wishes of most companies that value social responsibility.
Notes
- Eriksén, S. (2002). Designing for accountability
