Facebook Announces “Feedback Advertisements” to Cut Bad Businesses
Facebook’s crackdown on “fakes” continued this week.
The social media giant announced Tuesday that users will soon be able to review businesses whose ads pop up on their feed. Using these reviews, the company says it will be better able to track its paid advertising, and possibly ban businesses that receive the most negative feedback.
The initiative, corresponding to recent changes in news feeds and the removal of the “trending” feature, is aimed at those ads that advertise low-quality products, or businesses that are consistently slow in their delivery times.
This news comes not-so-coincidentally following recent scandals accusing Facebook of its own shady product delivery and activity.
On the surface, this news clearly helps users. Facebook is “an advertising-supported device,” the company itself has said. So, it makes sense to take money from every business willing to pay for advertising on their site.
But, in light of many user complaints and accusations of a lack of oversight (plus some good old-fashioned common courtesy), the crackdown makes sense. But, the ban is what’s grabbing most people’s attention.
While the company’s blog does say that businesses will be given ample warning and tips on how to improve their public image on Facebook, too much negative feedback could ultimately lead to reduced ads showing up on the site, and an outright ban of the business from advertising.
This announcement fails to address fake customer reviews, or the potential for bot accounts to target competitive ads in a particular market. Plus, in terms of slowed wait times, consistent negative feedback could be the result of seasonality, supply-chain kinks, or any number of reasons.
A good example of this is Elon Musk’s call for review-based journalism, Pravda, named after the famous official Soviet newspaper. There was a ton of blowback from the journalism community, calling the idea (among other things) useless, idealistic, and inapplicable.
But, these types of systems aren’t just ideas, they’ve been tried before. Klout, a social media platform founded in 2008 and forgotten by 2009, used a similar system to rate its users social influence. Each user would receive a rating from 1–100 apparently based on “social media analytics.”
Besides the scary similarities to that one Black Mirror episode, it didn’t work, and the company was acquired in 2014.
It’s nice to imagine a Facebook employee personally going through each and every negative review and complaint, but with the size of the user base and advertising activity, it’s likely that this system will be ultimately based in algorithms.
Sure, Amazon does the review thing, but at least they try to find out who’s in your network to get rid of fake promotions from employees or friends.
Ultimately, Facebook isn’t doing the worst thing here. It just remains to be seen how accurate this new “ratings” system will be, and whether it will fall in line with other failed attempts in myriad other fields.
Businesses large and small will just have to wait, watch, and hope an army of trolling reviewers doesn’t attack their social media ads.
But with recent blunders top of mind, it’s hard to have much faith in Facebook.
This content was originally published on the Veem blog. Check it out for more information and exclusive articles.
