The opaque and frequently deceptive world of online advertising
Interesting. Public service media report on how Facebook helps advertisers target users of Facebook, and Facebook creates code to stop them. ProPublica is one:
A number of organizations, including ProPublica, have developed tools to let the public see exactly how Facebook users are being targeted by advertisers.
Now, Facebook has quietly made changes to its site that stop those efforts.
ProPublica, Mozilla and Who Targets Me have all noticed their tools stopped working this month after Facebook inserted code in its website that blocks them.
No transparency for you-oo, sorrreee.
“This is very concerning,” said Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., who has co-sponsored the Honest Ads Act, which would require transparency on Facebook ads. “Investigative groups like ProPublica need access to this information in order to track and report on the opaque and frequently deceptive world of online advertising.”
…
Facebook has made minor tweaks before that broke our tool. But this time, Facebook blocked the ability to automatically pull ad targeting information.
The latest move comes a few months after Facebook executives urged ProPublica to shut down its ad transparency project. In August, Facebook ads product management director Rob Leathern acknowledged ProPublica’s project “serves an important purpose.” But he said, “We’re going to start enforcing on the existing terms of service that we have.” He said Facebook would soon “transition” ProPublica away from its tool.
Facebook has launched an archive of American political ads, which the company says is an alternative to ProPublica’s tool. However, Facebook’s ad archive is only available in three countries, fails to disclose important targeting data and doesn’t even include all political ads run in the U.S.
ProPublica’s tool regularly found advertisers that Facebook’s missed.
What it all adds up to, said Knight First Amendment Institute senior attorney Alex Abdo, is “we cannot trust Facebook to be the gatekeeper to the information the public needs about Facebook.”
Is that kind of like the way we can’t trust Trump’s family to be impartial government servants?
And everyone constantly harasses me because I’m not on Facebook….
“We’re going to start enforcing on the existing terms of service that we have.”
So they already have terms which supposedly require ad transparency, but they’ve not bothered enforcing them. They were there just for show, because otherwise they would make fewer $$$$$$$$$$$.
Iknklast: Don’t let anyone change your mind. I’ve been on Facebook since October, because I now have to be for work purposes. Now, I’m not an IT wizard (or IT witch, I suppose… doesn’t have the same ring, does it?) But I’m not incompetent when it comes to figuring out new things. I cannot get my head around how Facebook has achieved world domination while being so utterly user-unfriendly… non-user-friendly… it’s shit, is what I’m saying.
Catwhisperer, a friend of mine has been trying to set up a Facebook page for a writing group of which I am a member, and her stories of the hassles she is undergoing because of a previously existing page started by someone no longer active, and which no one can actually find on Facebook, but which is interfering with her starting a page for the group…well, if I wasn’t already convinced by other reasons not to be on Facebook, that would have convinced me.
I am continually told that you cannot be a successful writer without being on Facebook, because apparently that is the only place you can reach an audience. I disagree. I think you can find ways to reach people without Facebook; it just takes more work, and most writers (myself included) are not skilled at marketing, they’re skilled at writing.
One cannot be a successful writer without being on facebook? I hope you laugh at the people telling you that, iknklast, or at least ask how writers managed in the ancient days before God made the internet and saw that it was good.
Anyway, Facebook and similar social media outlets are the natural home of the TL:DR (too lazy, didn’t read) generation. I can’t think of a worse place to promote one’s writing unless said writing is no more than two lines long, chock-full of ‘so’ and ‘like’, heavy on abbreviations, and ends with ‘lol’.
AoS – agreed. And at one point, Margaret Atwood was refusing to be on Facebook, and was still successful. I don’t see her as a valid counterargument, though, since she already had made her name, and her loyal fans would be her loyal fans whether she ever did Facebook or not.
The thing is, I get a lot more writing done than those who are on Facebook, partially because I don’t spend all my time on Facebook. I spend much of my free time actually writing. No, I haven’t sold millions of copies of my books, but…even on Facebook I doubt that would happen since the books I write are likely to appeal to a smallish audience. I don’t write commercial fiction. The words I use are too long, the paragraphs are too long, the plots do not follow a formula.
Could Facebook sell a few more copies? Maybe, depending on how I presented myself and how much I was willing to do to get there, but it wouldn’t be worth it to me in the end to sacrifice my privacy to that extent (or to give my family an easy way to contact me, since apparently picking up the phone and calling is too much trouble).