Tackling the Internet’s Central Villain: The Advertising Business
“The central problem of disinformation corrupting American political culture is not Russian spies or a particular social media platform,” two researchers, Dipayan Ghosh and Ben Scott, wrote in the report, titled “Digital Deceit.” “The central problem is
that the entire industry is built to leverage sophisticated technology to aggregate user attention and sell advertising.”
The report chronicles just how efficient the online ad business has become at profiling, targeting, and persuading people.
“In the early days of online media, the choice was essentially made — give it away for free,
and advertising would produce the revenue,” said Randall Rothenberg, the chief executive of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, a trade association that represents companies in the digital ad business.
“Either you have a brilliant technology that permits microtargeting to exactly the people you want to influence at exactly the right
time with exactly the right message — or you’re only reaching a small number of people and therefore it couldn’t be influential.”
The consequences of the ad business don’t end at foreign propaganda.
That’s good news for the companies that want to market to you — as the online ad machine gets better, marketing gets more efficient
and effective, letting companies understand and influence consumer sentiment at a huge scale for little money.
You don’t need a crazy wall to figure it out, because the force to blame has been quietly shaping the contours
of life online since just about the beginning of life online: It’s the advertising business, stupid.
The role of the ad business in much of what’s terrible online was highlighted in a recent report by two think tanks, New America
and Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy.
