On Social Media, Microsoft Researcher Suggests Advertiser Profiles
Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter should require advertisers to establish public-facing profiles with information about all their ads, a Microsoft researcher said Friday, arguing this could help eliminate toxic, viral political commercials. Speaking at a Georgetown Law Center conference, Microsoft Research’s Tarleton Gillespie suggested the profiles include targeting logic from ads, saying that's one way platforms could return value to consumers: “That’s our data that we handed to them for free.”
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University of Tennessee School of Law scholar Maurice Stucke said on a separate panel that in a more competitive digital market where “data-opolies” don’t exist, platforms might have to pay to collect user data, suggesting consumers aren't being “adequately compensated.”
Gillespie also cited the Honest Ads Act (S-1989), which would require online platforms to follow ad disclosure rules long imposed on TV and radio (see 1710190054). Gillespie called the legislation a “good step” toward cleaning up social media. James Grimmelmann, a law professor at Cornell's Tech and Law schools, compared that to what he sees as the useless proposal to ban bump stocks in trying to address U.S. gun violence. The Honest Ads Act “is something by itself that is going to do almost nothing, and it so easily circumvented, and yet you have to start somewhere, and the failure to do anything just leads to even greater chaos,” Grimmelmann said.
Grimmelmann said viral appeal is distorting the lines between parody and reality. The ability of content hosts to monetize the size of an audience, he said, inspires extreme positions that get a lot of attention, which leads to phenomena like fake news. He cited a headline claiming Pope Francis endorsed then-candidate Donald Trump during the 2016 election. Though a reader might assume the headline is false, the emotional reaction is similar to a fan of professional wrestling, Grimmelmann said: It’s emotionally engaging, and that’s what matters. There's a ready supply of content that people will spend time looking at, whether it’s real or not, he said. Both wrestling and fake news are presenting something that is false as if it were real, which draws reactions, he said. Another example is The Onion, which inspired Reddit’s Not the Onion, a subreddit that offers ridiculous stories that might seem fake but are in fact real, further distorting the line between parody and reality.
Gillespie said online platforms can't survive without content moderation because moderation is at the heart of what these social media giants offer. He suggested platforms rethink content moderation as “constantly tuning” the public discourse: “Far from being occasional or ancillary, moderation is in fact essential, constant and a definition of what platforms do. Moderation is in some ways the commodity that platforms offer.”
During a panel on antitrust, Lina Khan of the Open Markets Institute cited her recent paper “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox.” She said Amazon has captured technologies that other businesses rely on to do business, calling it the 21st century railroad. This allows for the exploitation of price discrimination, she said. Social implications of allowing firms to discriminate in prices for individuals based on their search history haven't been explored, she said.
Outgoing FTC Commissioner Terrell McSweeny said on a separate panel that increasing competition in digital markets will help improve consumer rights, but that alone won't be sufficient, nor will be adjustments only to privacy law. That’s partly because platforms are “aggregating a huge amount of data,” she said. “Without meaningful modernization of consumer rights and the control over your data, you’re really not going to get the kind of competitive impact that you might be looking for.” She said government needs to catch up with powerful technology that's “shaping all of our lives.”