Advertising

Rep Robin Kelly (D-IL), a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, is pushing Facebook to strengthen its advertising standards after Russian operatives used the company’s ad service to attack groups like Black Lives Matter during the 2016 elections. In a letter sent to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Rep Robin Kelly pressed the company to “ensure that discriminatory and tactically divisive ad-targeting is aggressively prevented.” The Illinois Democrat pointed to Russian-linked Facebook pages that promoted “incendiary anti-immigrant rallies, targeted the Black Lives Matter movement and focused attentions on critical election swing states like Wisconsin and Michigan.” “It is my belief that Facebook cannot be the Trojan horse through which America’s vulnerabilities are exploited,” Kelly continued.

As Facebook sought to polish its reputation, industry leaders were wrestling with the misuse of marketing tools that had been developed for their benefit.

Facebook is seen as an unavoidable force, not only because it’s the second-biggest seller of online advertising after Google, but also because it provides companies with unprecedented methods for targeting ads to people based on their tastes and habits.

“Sometimes our industry gets so enamored with new things that we lose sight of unintended consequences,” said Sarah Hofstetter, chief executive of the ad agency 360i. “Data and personalization is one of those things. It can be used for phenomenal targeting of potential consumers to buy cookies, toys and book hotel rooms, but it also can be used to target hate groups and inspire nefarious outcomes.” She added, “Whether they like it or not, media companies have a tremendous responsibility to protect the public from itself.”

But while the social concerns over such misuse are clear, brands are not responding by changing the way they spend their advertising budgets, as they did when ads for brands like AT&T were discovered on YouTube videos promoting terrorism and hate speech.

For a sense of the dilemma confronting Facebook over its ad-targeting system, consider the following word: confederate. As of Sept 27, any prospective advertiser who typed that word into Facebook’s ad-targeting engine would be prompted to distribute their ad to a potential audience of more than four million users who had indicated an interest in the Confederate States of America.

The social network recently grappled with revelations that advertisers were able to target Facebook users who used terms like “Jew hater” to describe themselves. But even after the company took steps to shut down those clearly offensive categories, other targeting terms remain that fall into a gray area. That includes categories like Confederate States, which are legitimate in principle but can be potentially problematic or misused in practice. It illustrates the blurry lines and policing challenge that confront Facebook in its ad targeting. And after a year in which the social network has accepted more responsibility to crack down on false or offensive material, and last week, when the company twice announced new measures to prevent abuses by advertisers, some experts said the scale of that challenge is only starting to become apparent.

How much can Facebook tell us about what really happened when it comes to Russian sabotage of the 2016 election? Senate Intelligence Committee Co-Chair Mark Warner (D-VA), who is investigating Russian election interference, has been arguing lately that Facebook needs to come clean. It needs to publicly disclose the full scope and scale of how Russian entities used its social networking platform to spread fake news and propaganda in order to sow divisions among American voters and influence the outcome of the presidential election. We don’t know who paid for the ads on Facebook and, crucially, how and why the purchasers targeted certain Facebook users to see them in their feeds, and whether they worked with anyone in the United States to develop those lists of targets.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced recently that the social network would begin voluntarily requiring disclaimers on political ads that appear on the site. But in 2011 Facebook went to federal regulators to get an exception from a rule that would have forced it to do the same thing.

Federal election regulations state that political "communications placed for a fee on another person's website" must carry disclaimers stating that they are advertisements and who paid for them. Facebook sought an exception to disclaimer regulations citing space constraints for its "character-limited ads." Lawyers for the company argued the ads were so small that a disclaimer would be impracticable. Facebook argued, at the time, that ads on the platform were restricted to 160 characters. However, ads on Facebook have since evolved into sophisticated multimedia experiences. Advertisers can choose to sponsor videos, carousels of images and slideshows. Today, not all of Facebook's advertising options are character-limited.

Google has started overhauling millions of search results in Europe—and neither the search giant nor its detractors are happy about it.

Google is allowing rival shopping-comparison services to bid for and resell advertising space at the very top of Google search results in Europe. The new ads appear alongside similar product ads from Google’s own shopping-ad unit, which Google said is bidding independently in the same auctions. The changes are part of Google’s effort to comply with a European Union antitrust decision that fined the company 2.42 billion euros ($2.71 billion) for using its dominant search engine to favor its own shopping ads at the expense of competitors’ -- and ordered it to start treating itself the same as its competitors. Google is appealing the decision, but is implementing its order to avoid noncompliance fines that can reach total 5% of its global daily revenue, or more than $12 million.

Officials at the Federal Election Commission are reaching out to political ad buyers, among others, to solicit more comments about potential new disclosure rules. At this point, most of the FEC's efforts are around gathering ideas about ways to modernize outdated disclosure laws. Within the FEC and on Capitol Hill, a few other ideas expected to be considered (they're still very far off from actual implementation): Requiring all online political ads to carry disclosures; Creating a database of all political ads; Banning programmatic (automated) political ads from being sold. It will be hard for the six-person commission, usually divided equally among party lines, to come to a consensus around this, according to sources within the FEC, meaning that any major disclosure efforts would have to come from Congress.

So, the Russian ad buy is a significant Facebook purchase, but not one that seems scaled to the ambition of interfering with a national US election. That could be because: 1) Not all the ads have been discovered, so the $100,000 is a significant undercount. 2) That was the right number, and the ads worked to aid distribution of disinformation. 3) The ads were part of a message-testing protocol to improve the reach of posts posted natively by other accounts. Think of it as a real-time focus group to test for the most viral content and framing. 4) That $100,000 was a test that didn’t work well, so it didn’t get more resources. 5) That $100,000 was merely a calling card, spent primarily to cause trouble for Facebook and the election system.

Significant theories of democratic accountability hinge on how political campaigns affect Americans' candidate choices. We argue that the best estimate of the effects of campaign contact and advertising on Americans' candidates choices in general elections is zero.

First, a systematic meta-analysis of 40 field experiments estimates an average effect of zero in general elections. Second, we present nine original field experiments that increase the statistical evidence in the literature about the persuasive effects of personal contact 10-fold. These experiments' average effect is also zero. In both existing and our original experiments, persuasive effects only appear to emerge in two rare circumstances. First, when candidates take unusually unpopular positions and campaigns invest unusually heavily in identifying persuadable voters. Second, when campaigns contact voters long before election day and measure effects immediately---although this early persuasion decays. These findings contribute to ongoing debates about how political elites influence citizens' judgments.

[Commentary] When it comes to business, Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg is undeniably a visionary. But Zuckerberg’s prescient skills seem to waver when the social and cultural intricacies of the real world leak onto his ubiquitous platform. Defensive at times, like when he initially disputed the premise fake news on Facebook may have influenced the 2016 election, Zuckerberg can come across as someone yet to realize the true power and scope of the platform he built. A company optimized for digital engagement, it turns out, may not have been primed to deal with the darkest aspects of humanity and society. Whether Facebook’s public problems are evidence of unintended consequences, shortsightedness or willful blindness is open to debate. But pressure on the company to get policy (and its algorithms) right will only mount now that it counts a quarter of the world’s population as its users, effectively turning the platform into a digital reflection of society.