It’s time to get to know Facebook’s advertising engine — a machine that already knows us well
It has been an intense couple of weeks for Facebook, catalysed initially by revelations that users were deceived about the final destination of personal information they were feeding into a fun third-party survey application. It was purportedly for research, but ended up in the hands of comically sinister digital marketing / advertising firm, Cambridge Analytica.
That straw broke the backs of an entire fleet of camels — there are stories on Facebook’s lingering privacy issues, the ethics of a murky digital advertising industry, data sharing, social media, tech giants, psychometrics, academic research sharing and a fair few other issues.
For me, it was a decent reminder to dig back into my Facebook settings and see what new insights the platform had derived from my likes, comments, browsing behaviour, geo-location and posts.
It’s a mixed bag — there are some startling direct insights into my loves and passions, and there are some ludicrous accidents inferred from random behaviour. As a precaution though, I clear these derived advertising preferences pretty regularly. See yours here.
I discovered something interesting, recently, when clearing a few lingering ad preferences — if you click on the ad, Facebook will show you a few examples of advertisers who have decided to target ads to that particular preference. You can do this for ad preferences you’ve already removed, too.
As an example, the interest ‘Coal’ is targeted by a climate skeptic group, an engineering firm, worker training, a class action involving coal workers, and Peabody Energy’s “Advanced energy for life” pro-coal PR campaign:
That’s pretty telling. You can get an insight into the converging interests of disparate groups just from that one ‘interest’.
Politics is insightful, too. The UK’s Conservative party is targeted by the same climate skeptic group, Kevin Rudd fans are targeted by the purveyors of Nad’s manscaping (!?), fans of the Australian Greens are being targeted by Young Labor Left, and Florsheim is targeting a shoe called ‘THE CHIFLEY’ to people interested in the Liberal Party (alongside climate skeptics, Willie the Boatman beers and…pool fencing??):
Ola, an Indian ride-sharing company just starting up in Australia, is targeting people interested in Uber:
And (this is a testament to my awkward Dawkins fanboy early 20’s tone-deaf rationalist/atheist phase — please don’t judge me), plenty of secular interests are targeted by the Australian Christian Lobby, Christian scripture groups and various religious groups:
Weirdly, people interested in ‘pseudoscience’ are targeted by a psychic medium, a ‘metaphysical teacher’, a clairvoyant and some sort of bird man / moth man information website (did all of these people consciously specify ‘pseudoscience’ as their thing when targeted their ads? That seems like an odd admission).
And, of course, people interested in conspiracy theories and chemtrails are targeted by biohackers, vitamin companies and car fuel suppelments?
Most of what you find there won’t be stunning revelations (the ideological / political ones tend to be more interesting than products), but they’re another small and somewhat obscured glimpse into the machine that sustains a service that we all use very, very frequently.
A big part of Facebook’s woes have come from the mechanics of this advertising machine being obscured and opaque. The company, and its leader, struggle with the idea of being up-front about the nature of the service, and are exasperated with how that breeds distrust.
Mark Zuckerbeg told Vox recently:
“You know, I find that argument, that if you’re not paying that somehow we can’t care about you, to be extremely glib and not at all aligned with the truth. The reality here is that if you want to build a service that helps connect everyone in the world, then there are a lot of people who can’t afford to pay. And therefore, as with a lot of media, having an advertising-supported model is the only rational model that can support building this service to reach people.
That doesn’t mean that we’re not primarily focused on serving people. I think probably to the dissatisfaction of our sales team here, I make all of our decisions based on what’s going to matter to our community and focus much less on the advertising side of the business.”
The disconnect between the genuine optimism of the head of this company and the realities of the way it sustains itself seems to be the root cause of many of the company’s recent woes.
I wonder if brazenly direct communication about our nature as both users and data generators, rather than artificial sweetener about ‘communities’ and experiences, might have been a more sustainable business model. Explain the innards of the marketing engine sustaining the free service - perhaps we’d be okay with the machine knowing our mind if it was on our terms.
Our love of the connection to friends the site provides is so strong and so innate that most of us would stay, undeterred.
Unfortunately, we’re learning about the money-making side of the site in a series rapid, dramatic revelations where the time between each scandal is decreasing. There’s also serious wrongdoing exposed. Consider the same ad targeting I’ve shown above being used to target ‘jew haters’, or to exclude housing ads from people from a certain race:
We’re discovering the true nature of the platform as involuntary revelation — it’s a side to the company that’s been largely hidden, and is still obscured in a network of sub-menus, vague ad explanations and clicks.
The company still rides an incredible wave of goodwill and trust (mixed, of course, with our innate love of social interaction and our susceptibility to habit-inducing design features). We need to know the engine of that machine, because it already knows us far too well.
