Algorithms and Advertisers: The Age of Mistruth
“…but no one was interested in the facts. They preferred the invention because this invention expressed and corroborated their hates and fears so perfectly.”
― James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son
Fake news has been one of the most scrutinized topics in our country for the past couple of years, mainly due to the rise and Presidency of Donald Trump. How do some segments of the public, having access to the same objective facts as the rest of the country, come away with completely different answers than the majority? One word is all we need to know to answer this question: algorithms. Specifically, algorithms created by social media/search engine programmers and advertisers, that show us information specifically tailored to our personal interests over a vast array of mediums. As Anup Shaha states in his article “Media and Advertising,” the audience (or viewers, or followers, or whatever term you use) are not the consumers that the media crave, rather, they are the product that they, in turn, bring to their advertisers.
The effects of letting advertisers have a vast control over a certain medium have already been documented. “As many critics of media and advertising have pointed out, turning over the support of much of the U.S. media system to advertisers has ensured that media firms fundamentally shape the main streams of entertainments and news into environments that harmonize with the sponsors’ desire to sell their products. Critical analysts also recognize that the commodification of audiences is a central feature of media-advertiser relations. Taking cues from advertisers in symbiotic relationships often fraught with tensions, media firms position themselves to attract certain kinds of people in ways that the advertisers consider better or helpfully different from the media firms’ competitors. As part of standing out in this competition, media practitioners typically exhort their readers, listeners, or viewers to think of themselves primarily as leisure-oriented consumers of media content and sponsored products. Commercial imperatives rarely encourage media firms to urge their audiences to be engaged producers of a civil society or to expect news and entertainment to contribute toward that goal.” (Turrow, Joseph p. 104, 2005).
Essentially, the whole model of media advertisers, and in essence our sources of information to which they rely upon these advertisers for revenue, are based purely out of monetary gain for their company, and nothing else. They have no desire to contribute to the public good, as that would first take away resources from expanding the advertising reach and, second, would enable people with more options, which could have them choose their competitor over themselves. If everyone had an objective source of information with no advertising revenue, our search results would be the same, and thus we would at least be closer to having some type of common truth.
However, as things stand, personalization is what all of us have. How exactly did that pop up ad for Chick-fil-A come up right when you were thinking about dinner? How did they know you were hungry, and in particular, thinking about Chick-fil-A? Are they listening in on your conversations, as some suggest? Well, there is some truth to them surveying your every move, albeit not by listening to you babble on about the latest “Bachelor” episode or the new Kanye single, which would be inefficient. Rather, they monitor your every move on the web. The websites you visited, how long you stayed at each one, how long you were looking at a certain picture, your purchases online, the political videos you watched on YouTube: literally everything that you do online is being recorded and summarily updated so that advertisers can target you for fitting their particular demographic.
This presents us with a problem: if these advertisers are recording our move online, and personalizing our search results on Google as a result, then is there an objective, unbiased news source that is provided to us all? Short answer: no, not at all. Eli Pasier, author of the book “The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding from You”, explains this thoroughly to us. In a Ted talk about his book, “Pasier gave an illustration of how the filter bubble works. In the midst of the spring 2011 political protests in Egypt, he asked two friends to do a search in Google for ‘Egypt.’ One got a lot of information on the protests (not surprisingly), while the other got information on tourism in Egypt. Instead of this search providing results based on some objective, universally valid criteria — like PageRank in Google’s early days — it was personalized to each user.” (Rowland, F p. 1010, 2011). Mark Zuckerberg, when commenting about this, stated that ‘“’A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa’ (p. 1)“ (Rowland, 2011). It begs us to ask the question: is this really how we want the internet to function? One where people can come away with different sets of information, being completely oblivious to everything else that doesn’t involve their personal interests?
It’s a question worth asking, as this has severe consequences. With an uneducated populace, very dangerous people, with destructive policies and goals, can be brought to power and even defended rigorously by those who were duped by their propaganda. One can see this happening right now. People who have objectively hideous policy proposals (as noted by public polls) can get them passed because of their destructive, narcissistic use of media advertising. All one must do is simply find a demographic that one believes they can manipulate (say, middle-aged white men who have anxiety about race relations and are reminiscent of the days of old, when everything “made sense to them” or some similar sounding phrase). Candidates and corporations (who most of the time are completely aligned) can then exploit this for their personal gains. The candidate could do ads stating the horrors of illegal immigrants flooding our borders and the potential for terrorist organizations coming through, stoking their fear even more. The advertisers then can use that fear to sell them products. For example, the NRA could use this candidate’s social media pages/videos to create ads focusing in on one particular violent crime associated with an illegal immigrant, saying that only a “good guy with a gun can defeat a bad guy with a gun.” Even though there is substantial, objective evidence that shows that an increase in gun ownership correlates with an increase in gun deaths, they will promote this lie for financial gain (Lopez, German America’s unique gun violence problem, explained in 17 maps and charts, 2018). If the person doesn’t realize what happened and falls for the bait, they could click on the advertisement and add another note to their vast internet history. In turn, this leads to more search results showing you pro-gun propaganda, which entrenches the viewer further in their line thought, which results in an echo chamber that is very hard to escape.
We haven’t seen anything like this before in human civilization. Never before have we been able to be so informed and knowledgeable on various topics, yet simultaneously be wrong and misguided.
Sources
1. Lopez, German “America’s unique gun violence problem, explained in 17 maps and charts.” Vox. June 29, 2018. Accessed September 18, 2018. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/10/2/16399418/us-gun-violence-statistics-maps-charts.
2. Rowland, Fred “The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding from You (review).” portal: Libraries and the Academy 11, no. 4 (2011): 1009–1011. https://muse.jhu.edu/ (accessed September 18, 2018).
3. Shah, Anup. “Media and Advertising.” Global Issues. 04 Mar. 2012. Web. 27 Sep. 2018. <http://www.globalissues.org/article/160/media-and-advertising>.
4. Turow, Joseph. “Audience Construction and Culture Production: Marketing Surveillance in the Digital Age.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 597 (2005): 103–21. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25046064. (accessed September 18, 2018)
