Who Gets Targeted—Or Excluded—By Ad Systems?
Source: Original art by Paweł Kuczyński
Separate from the algorithms that shape the spread of user-generated content, advertising is the other arena in which policymakers must dig deeper and examine the engines that determine and drive distribution. Traditional advertising places ads based on context: everyone who walks by a billboard or flips through a magazine sees the same ad. Online targeted advertising, on the other hand, is personalized based on what advertisers and ad networks know (or think they know) about each person, based on the thick digital dossiers they compile about each of us. In theory, advertisers on social media are responsible for determining which audience segments (as defined by their demographics or past behavior) will see a given ad, but in practice, platforms further optimize the audience beyond what the advertiser specified.45 Due to companies’ limited transparency efforts, we know very little about how this stage of further optimization works.
newamerica.org/oti/reports/its-not-just-content-its-business-model/
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