Selling Keywords, Targeted Advertising, and The Social Dilemma
Netflix’s recent documentary, The Social Dilemma, exposes how technology companies are using algorithms to maximize clicks and therefore profit, at the expense of our free will. Every click in today’s world can be monetized. Advertising has developed from merely paying to show an ad into now paying per click that the ad generates. This evolution is at the core of why our free will has been compromised.
In class we learned about the Vickrey Clarke Groves (VCG) procedure, which is a bidding process that companies like Facebook, who is at the heart of The Social Dilemma, employ to sell targeted ads. This process determines ad prices based on the harm cause to other bidders if the winner had not received that ad slot. VCG maximizes the total value for all the bidders and is determined based on the value each bidder places on an ad slot. Therefore, it is in the best interests of the bidders to bid highly for ads that are placed strategically to reach people who are likely to buy the product they sell. In other words, VCG bidding encourages targeted advertising. As Facebook collects our data, it determines which ads we are more likely to click on, thus increasing the value of those ads for advertisers.
The profit of both Facebook and advertisers rests upon collecting users’ data––a tactic that The Social Dilemma condemns. Targeted advertising has become so ingrained into our daily lives that we don’t even realize we are being manipulated and directed toward outcomes that are profit-maximizing for firms, but not necessarily good for the wellbeing of users. This has important political implications, as what we see is likely to be of the same type of content that is deemed to be what we want to see, rather than showing content that reflects both sides. The monetization of advertisements that we learned about in class has more power than we think. It gives corporations the ability to control and strips away our autonomy, without many even noticing.
https://theconversation.com/netflixs-the-social-dilemma-highlights-the-problem-with-social-media-but-whats-the-solution-147351