#microtargeting

«En el microtargeting, los votantes no están informados del programa político de un partido, sino que se los manipula con publicidad electoral adaptada a su programa, y no pocas veces con fake news. Se comprueba la eficacia de decenas de miles de variantes de una anuncio electoral. Estos dark ads psicométricamente optimizados suponen una amenaza para la democracia. Cada cual recibe un mensaje diferente, y esto fragmenta al público. Grupos distintos reciben información diferente, que a menudo se contradice. Los ciudadanos dejan de estar sensibilizados para las cuestiones importantes, de relevancia social. Están más bien incapacitados por haber quedado reducidos a ganado manipulable de votantes que tiene que asegurar el poder a los políticos. Los dark ads contribuyen a la división y polarización de la sociedad y envenenan el clima del discurso. Además, son invisibles para el público. De este modo, socavan un principio fundamental de la democracia: la autoobservación de la sociedad.»

Byung-Chul Han: Infocracia, la digitalización y la crisis de la democracia. Taurus (Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial), pág. 37. Buenos Aires, 2022.

TGO

@bocadosdefilosofia

When you understand that Republicans are not entirely cookie cutter, you can frame messaging to instigate division among the various GOP subgroups.

Data journalist Nate Cohn separates the GOP into six groupings based on poll responses regarding various issues.

In a specific state or legislative district you might be able shape issues in such a way as to make a Republican candidate seem unpalatable to certain elements within the party. Even if disaffected Republicans don't vote for the Democratic candidate outright, they may simply skip voting for any candidate for that particular office.

In Arizona in 2022 the GOP nominated a particularly dreadful slate of candidates for statewide office. They lost by several percentage points even while the GOP did passably in downballot races.

[W]hile majorities of Republicans side with Mr. Trump on almost every issue, those majorities are often quite slim: Around 40 percent of Republican-leaning voters support aid to Ukraine, support comprehensive immigration reform or say abortion should be mostly or always legal.

Mar 22, 2020

TL;DR: Without targeted ads companies wouldn't be doing so much privacy invasion of people. They could still sell ads and make money that way just not with incentive to use your data. AND it wouldn't even hurt the ad revenue that much.

"Policy makers have been trying to figure out what to do about Facebook and other social media giants. They have argued over whether to revoke platforms’ Section 230 immunity, launched a barrage of antitrust investigations, and introduced a number of competing privacy bills into the Senate. Above all, they’ve tried to browbeat the companies into adopting better policies around things like fact-checking, content moderation, and political ads.

"What they haven’t done is question social media’s underlying business model.

"...

"The solution to our privacy problems, suggested Hansson [Basecamp cofounder David Heinemeier Hansson], was actually quite simple. If companies couldn’t use our data to target ads, they would have no reason to gobble it up in the first place, and no opportunity to do mischief with it later. From that fact flowed a straightforward fix: “Ban the right of companies to use personal data for advertising targeting.”

"If Hansson’s proffer—that targeted advertising is at the heart of everything wrong with the internet and should be outlawed—sounds radical, that’s because it is. It cuts to the core of how some of the most profitable companies in the world make their money. The journalist David Dayen argued a similar case in 2018, for the New Republic; and since then, the idea has quietly been gaining adherents. Now it’s taken hold in certain parts of academia, think-tank world, and Silicon Valley.

"The thinking goes like this. Google and Facebook, including their subsidiaries like Instagram and YouTube, make about 83 percent and 99 percent of their respective revenue from one thing: selling ads. It’s the same story with Twitter and other free sites and apps. More to the point, these companies are in the business of what’s called behavioral advertising, which allows companies to aim their marketing based on everything from users’ sexual orientations to their moods and menstrual cycles, as revealed by everything they do on their devices and every place they take them. It follows that most of the unsavory things the platforms do—boost inflammatory content, track our whereabouts, enable election manipulation, crush the news industry—stem from the goal of boosting ad revenues. Instead of trying to clean up all these messes one by one, the logic goes, why not just remove the underlying financial incentive? Targeting ads based on individual user data didn’t even really exist until the past decade. (Indeed, Google still makes many billions of dollars from ads tied to search terms, which aren’t user-specific.) What if companies simply weren’t allowed to do it anymore?

"“To me, banning targeted ads is the ultimate root-cause solution when it comes to privacy,” Hansson told me. Seemingly every week, there’s another article exposing some company’s creepy behavior. A recent European study, for example, found that the gay dating app Grindr was sharing user data, including precise location history, with 35 different third parties.

"But while each revelation is disturbing, the stories shouldn’t really shock us. The behavioral advertising business model has given rise to a teeming ecosystem of adtech firms, including data brokers, that pass user information through each step of the chain between publishers and advertisers. It’s all perfectly legal and very profitable, which explains why established companies like Adobe, Comcast, and Amazon have been getting in on the action. “The only reason that Facebook and others are collecting this data, buying this data—stealing this data—is because the data is so valuable,” Hansson said. “If you reduce the value of that data to near zero, then the entire incentive disappears.”

"“Privacy” is only one way of describing the issue. Other experts blame the ad-driven business model for the proliferation of hateful and false content on social media. In a 2019 essay for the Knight First Amendment Institute, Jeff Gary and Ashkan Soltani argued that “restricting or lessening” the ability to microtarget ads would be more effective, and raise fewer free speech issues, than any law policing online discourse. The market for such ads creates incredible demand for users’ attention on both the front and back ends: the more time you spend on Facebook, the more finely it can target you and the more ads you’ll see. Combine that with the fact that users gravitate toward provocative content, and you can see where things might go. In the past, at least, sensation-seeking publications had to worry that sinking too far into the gutter would alienate their advertisers. Now the gutter is a money pit.

"Then there’s politics. A 2018 study by researchers at Data and Society concluded that “today’s digital advertising infrastructure creates disturbing new opportunities for political manipulation and other forms of antidemocratic strategic communication.” Sally Hubbard, director of enforcement strategy at the Open Markets Institute, an anti-monopoly think tank, takes the argument further in a forthcoming book. “I honestly believe we are not going to solve any of the problems that we’re worried about, like election interference and disinformation, unless we ban targeted advertising,” she told me recently. Facebook, she said, has created a “manipulation machine” that can be used to discourage black voters just as easily as to sell sneakers. (Facebook didn’t reply to requests for comment.) “It’s the business model that’s the problem.”

"...

"The proponents of a behavioral advertising ban paint a rosy picture: less discrimination, better civic discourse, a rejuvenated news media. What’s not to like?

"...

"According to Google and others in the industry, microtargeting actually helps publishers to survive. Instead of siphoning off money, behavioral ads boost publishers’ bottom lines by providing their advertisers with more expensive, higher-value opportunities. “Data shows personalized ads are valuable for the entire digital advertising ecosystem: users prefer relevant ads and publishers make significantly more money from personalized advertising,” the company said in an emailed statement. Elsewhere, Google has argued that publishers would lose more than half their revenue if they stopped using the technique. Deighton has made similar findings, in a study commissioned by the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

"But recent academic research suggests that the effect is actually quite modest. Professors Veronica Marotta, Vibhanshu Abhishek, and Alessandro Acquisti compared a major online publisher’s revenue from ads served to users who had cookies enabled—meaning they could be targeted—against revenue from ads served to users who couldn’t be targeted. (Their paper is still in draft form.) After controlling for a variety of other factors, they found that the presence of the cookie alone accounted for a 4 percent average increase in revenue, or 0.00008 cents per click. That’s not nothing, but it’s a lot less than what Google claims—and it has to be weighed against what publishers could be making if the market weren’t dominated by the Facebook-Google duopoly. And here’s a piece of anecdotal evidence: in 2019, the New York Times stopped running behavioral ads in Europe. Revenues were unaffected.

"...

"Proponents of the business model claim, finally, that behavioral targeting is good for the little guy....

"And yet, if behavioral advertising were such a boon to entrepreneurship, you might expect it to have spurred a wave of startup growth. Even more than a decade since the recession, though, both the startup rate and the share of Americans working for small businesses are at historic lows—in large part thanks to the rise of monopolistic companies like Facebook and Google, according to many experts. Microtargeting might help some small enterprises get ahead, but that doesn't mean it’s a boon overall....

"...

"Fordham law professor Zephyr Teachout helped put anti-monopoly issues on the map in her upstart 2014 primary challenge to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. Now she is part of the pushback against microtargeting. In early February, she co-authored a paper arguing that the dominant internet platforms should be treated as public utilities and prohibited from using behavioral ads. If telephone utilities aren’t allowed to eavesdrop on our conversations and sell the details to marketers, then Amazon or YouTube shouldn’t be able to do the same with our browsing history.

"...

Even if a ban on microtargeting were merely a cure-some, rather than a cure-all, it could still be quite powerful. Instead of negotiating baroque regulatory regimes and opt-outs, just alter the incentives. Of course, there would be some victims of this change, some businesses that would struggle to adapt. But Google could still make a fortune selling ads based on people’s search terms (currently around 60 percent of its revenue) and the content of YouTube videos. Facebook would still have its massive user base.

The Future Coalition PAC is targeting according to ZIP code in highly specific ways.

An Elon Musk-funded group called Future Coalition PAC is targeting Muslim voters in Michigan and Jewish voters in Pennsylvania with diametrically opposed political advertisements about Kamala Harris. In areas of Michigan with relatively large Muslim populations, the Super PAC is painting Harris as a close friend of Israel and is suggesting that she is beholden to the beliefs of her Jewish husband Doug Emhoff; in parts of Pennsylvania with relatively large Jewish populations, the advertisements call Harris antisemitic and say she “support[s] denying Israel the weapons needed to defeat the Hamas terrorists who massacred thousands.” 

Meanwhile, a related PAC also funded by Musk is microtargeting likely Black voters on Snapchat with ads that says Kamala Harris is trying to ban menthol cigarettes (surveys have shown that 81 percent of Black smokers use menthols, and big tobacco has disproportionately marketed menthol cigarettes to Black Americans).