How pay per click advertising damage information integrity
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/20/us/elections/trump-campaign-ads-democrats.html
The article talks about how the Trump campaign is aggressively using targeted advertising to spread their message at a greater rate than the opposing Democrats. This oversaturation of targeted ads relates heavily to our discussion of advertisement auctions. The article states that Trump is abusing the auctioning algorithm that Facebook uses by creating targeted ads that are more likely to gauge involvement. These ads will then be recognized by the algorithm to generate more clicks, more revenue for Facebook, and thus will be shown more often compared to the more moderate ads from the Democrats. This means that Facebook, through its algorithm, is allegedly encouraging more divisive content because those generate more engagement for Facebook and more revenue, thus creating a vicious positive feedback loop for hatred and divisiveness.
Another downside to paying per click advertising is that they encourage content that is engineered to generate clicks while not being wholely concerned with information integrity. For example, the article mentions that the Trump campaign utilizes false information regarding a Democratic candidate to generate more engagement. Furthermore, the article says that Trump’s focus on refining his ads for more engagement further solidifies his influence on the platform with regards to Democrats.
From the article, we can see that the dominant strategy for a pay-per-click ad system is to make ads that… generate more clicks. This trend is particularly troublesome as it incentivizes websites to engineer their content to generate more short-term engagement but lack any substance to retain users on the sites for long. In fact, sites such as BuzzFeed have already adopted the strategy of generating as much “click-bait” content as possible rather than focusing on quality or fact-checking.