Headline Feb 08, 2018/ ''' DIGITAL ONLINE DECEITS '''

 ''' DIGITAL ONLINE DECEITS '''

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A Facebook ad from America's 2016 presidential campaign that was linked to Russia.

SOCIALLY, POLITICALLY AND CULTURALLY, the online ad business is far more dangerous -than many, many care to truly appreciate.

IN 2015, Timothy D. Cook, Apple's chief executive, clearly warned about the dangers of online business, especially its inherent threat to privacy........

the role of the ad business in what's terrible online was highlighted in a recent report by two research groups  -New America and the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard.

''The central problem of disinformation corrupting American political culture is not Russian spies  or a particular social media platform,'' two researchers Dipayan Ghosh and Ben Scott, wrote in the report, titled 
''Digital Deceit.''

''The central problem is that the  entire industry is built to leverage sophisticated technology  to  aggregate user attention and sell advertising.''

The report chronicles just how efficient the online ad business has become at profiling, targeting and persuading people. That's good news for companies who want to market to you -

As the online ad machine gets better, marketing gets more efficient and effective, letting companies understand and influence consumer sentiment at a huge scale for a little money.

*But the same cheap and effective persuasion machine is also available to anyone with nefarious ends*.

The Internet Research Agency, the troll group at the canter of Russian efforts to influence American politics, spent $46,000 on Facebook ads before the 2016 election.

That's not very much -Hillary Clinton and Donald J Trump's campaigns spent tens of  millions of dollars online. And yet the  Russian campaign seems to have had enormous reach.

Facebook has said that the  Internet Research Agency's messages -both its ads and its unpaid posts   -were seen by nearly 150 million Americans.

How the agency achieved this  mass reach likely has something to do with the dynamics of the ad business,  which lets advertisers run many experimental posts to hone their messages, and-

Tends to reward posts that spark outrage and engagement -exactly the sorts that the Russians were pushing.

''You can't have it both ways,'' Mr. Scott said.

''Either you have a brilliant technology that permits microtargeting  to exactly the people you want to influence at exactly the right time with exactly the right message  -or you're only reaching a small number of people and therefore it couldn't be influential.''

The consequencies of the ad business don't end at foreign propaganda. Consider all the  nutty content recently found on YouTube Kids -not just the child-exploitation clips but also-

Videos that seem to be created in whole or in part by algorithms that are mining the system for what's popular, then creating endless variation.

Why would anyone do such a thing? For the ad money. A producer of  videos that show antics including his children being scared by clowns told BuzzFeed that he had made more than $100,000 in two months from ads on his videos.

YouTube, which is owned by Google, has since pulled down thousands of such disturbing videos; the company said late last year that it was hiring numerous moderators to police the platform.  It also tightened the rules for which producers can make money from its ad system. 

Facebook, too, has made several recent fixes. The company has built a new tool   -being tested in Canada and slated to be rolled out more widely this year-

That lets people see the different ads being paced by political pages, a move meant to address influence campaigns like those of the Internet Research Agency. 

It has also fixed holes allowed advertisers to target campaigns by race and religion.

And it recently unveiled a new version of its  News Feed that is meant to cut down on passively scrolling through posts-  part of Mark Zuckerberg's professed effort to improve the network he heads even, he has said, at the cost of advertising revenue.

The tinkering continued on Tuesday, when Facebook  also said it would ban ads promoting  cryptocurrency promotions, some of which have fallen into scammy territory.

YET these are all piecemeal efforts. They don't address the  underlying logic of the ad business which produces endless incentives for  gaming the system in ways that  Google  and  Facebook  often only after the fact.

Mr. Rothenberg said  this was how regulating of advertising was likely to go - a lot of fixes resembling ''What-a-Mole.''

Of course, there is the government.

You could imagine some regulator imposing stricter standards  for who has access to the online ad system, who makes money from it, how it uses private information and how transparent tech companies must be about it all.

But that also seems unlikely; the  Honest Ads Act, a proposal to regulate online political ads, has gone nowhere in Congress.

Yes, Socially. politically and culturally, the online ad business is far more dangerous that the world has generally appreciated. Point and message taken by The World Students Society.

Best, we all listen to Apple's CEO Timothy D Cook and of course, Farhad Manjoo

With respectful dedication to the Leaders, Parents, Students, Professors and Teachers of the  world. See Ya all on !WOW! -the World Students Society and Twitter-!E-WOW! -the Ecosystem 2011:


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