Google And Facebook Didn't Kill Newspapers: The Internet Did

from the check-the-data dept

There is an infamous chart in media circles. It shows newspaper advertising revenue steadily rising until about the year 2000. A few years later, it drops off a cliff. Superimposed on this chart is the exponential growth of Google and Facebook:

Source: Thomas Baekdal

The obvious implication, at least to those who work in journalism, is that Google and Facebook killed their industry. That’s certainly the conclusion Matt Stoller comes to in a recent op-ed for the New York Times:

The collapse of journalism and democracy in the face of the internet is not inevitable. To save democracy and the free press, we must eliminate Google and Facebook’s control over the information commons. That means decentralizing these markets and splitting information utilities from one another so that search, mapping, YouTube and other Google subsidiaries are separate companies, and Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook once again compete.

First, it’s important to note that newspaper advertising revenue peaked a few years before the rise of Google (and many years before Facebook). That’s one hint a broader phenomenon is at work. But more generally, Stoller frames the history of advertising and journalism in a fundamentally incorrect way. He argues as if the ad-based business model for local journalism was the natural state of the world — upended only by Facebook’s and Google’s so-called "monopolies." In reality, print newspapers had a monopoly on local information distribution due to the prevailing technologies of their time. These regional monopolies were slowly eroded by the introduction, first, of radio and then television (see Lorain Journal Co. v. United States). But, ultimately, newspapers were disrupted by the internet.

Source: Matthew Ball

So, why did newspapers have a local monopoly in the first place? Mostly due to the high fixed costs (e.g., printing presses, warehouses, reporters, delivery trucks) and low marginal costs (i.e., paper and ink) of newspaper production and distribution. Therefore, it was very easy for newspapers to dominate the local market with one bundled product, which included everything from political news and opinion to sports and classifieds. The monopoly profits were used to fund, among other things, investigative journalism (which would lose money as a standalone business but provides value and prestige as part of a bundle).

The internet blew this arrangement to pieces. No longer was owning printing presses and delivery trucks sufficient to charge advertisers and readers whatever you wanted. The newspaper was unbundled by many internet companies, large and small. The infographic below shows how different digital services peeled off a piece of the newspaper value proposition:

Source: Haseeb Qureshi

For example, Craigslist, eBay and other free or low-cost digital classified ad services out-competed print classified ads:

Source: Business Insider

Google and Facebook entered the ad market with more efficient self-service platforms for advertisers and quickly gained market share. Stoller attributes their success not to superior efficiency but to anti-competitive acquisitions:

Enabled by a loose merger policy, there was a roll-up of the internet space. From 2004 to 2014, Google spent at least $23 billion buying 145 companies, including the advertising giant DoubleClick. And since 2004, Facebook has spent a similar amount buying 66 companies, including key acquisitions allowing it to attain dominance in mobile social networking. None of these acquisitions were blocked as anti-competitive.

What this merger analysis omits, however, is that the vast majority of these were vertical mergers, meaning the acquired company wasn’t a direct competitor with the acquirer. In other words, Google is not dominant in search today because it engaged in killer acquisitions of rival search engines. Of the 66 Facebook acquisitions, only Instagram is a plausible case of horizontal integration between social media companies (and, even then, Facebook invested heavily post-acquisition).

But Stoller also exaggerates the extent of their market power, calling them “global monopolies sitting astride public discourse.” In 2018, the global ad market was about $540 billion. Google’s revenue from advertising was $116 billion; Facebook’s was $55 billion. That’s a combined 32 percent market share. Not quite a monopoly (or duopoly, technically).

Source: Benedict Evans

And if you expand the market definition to include both advertising and marketing, as Benedict Evans shows in the chart below, then Google and Facebook’s share gets cut in half.

Source: Benedict Evans

Stoller concludes by saying, “Advertising revenue should once again flow to journalism and art.” But even if we break up all the big tech companies, your local newspaper will not magically have a profitable ad business again. The money currently flowing to consolidated Facebook would go to the newly independent Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp (or other digital services if you curtail advertising on social media). Internet platforms are simply more efficient at matching advertisers with customers than are traditional newspapers.

If we want to “fix” journalism, it will require a new path forward (i.e., innovative business models). We've tried radical protectionism before: In 1970, Nixon signed the Newspaper Preservation Act, which gave newspapers a special carve-out from the antitrust laws. According to the NYT (in 1999!), it had no effect on the end result:

But in the world of 1999, does the loss of a newspaper matter as much as it did in 1970, when the scores of cable channels and hundreds of Web sites did not exist?

The new media landscape and the growing competition for advertising dollars, make it harder for a weak newspaper to survive, and make its survival less urgent, Mr. Lacy believes. ''I'm not sure I'd call the Newspaper Preservation Act a failure,'' he said. ''Just a nonsuccess. People back then did not realize that this would not make a difference in the long run.''

It’s possible policymakers could construct another special protection for journalism. But it would entail massive state control of media that no one would be satisfied with. Resurrecting the regional monopolies once enjoyed by local newspapers is both undesirable and unrealistic.

Filed Under: ads, business models, competition, democracy, internet platforms, journalism, matt stoller, trust
Companies: facebook, google

Yes, News Sites Need To Get Out Of The Ad Surveillance Business -- But Blame The Advertisers As Well

from the takes-two-to-tango dept

Doc Searls has a great recent blog post in which he rightly points out why Bernie Sanders' "plan to save journalism" is completely misguided and will fail. It's worth reading -- with the key point being that Sanders' plan to save journalism assumes a world that does not exist, and one where heavy regulations will somehow magically save journalism, rather than stifle it. As Searls notes, that's not the world we live in. We live in a world of informational abundance, which changes everything:

Journalism as we knew it—scarce and authoritative media resources on print and air—has boundless competition now from, well, everybody.

But there's an interesting point Searls makes later in his piece, suggesting that part of the problems with the news today is that the old school news publications have bought into "surveillance" based business models -- and nothing will change until they dump that and move back towards brand advertising:

Meanwhile, the surviving authoritative sources in that mainstream have themselves become fat with opinion while carving away reporters, editors, bureaus and beats. Brand advertising, for a century the most reliable and generous source of funding for good journalism (admittedly, along with some bad), is now mostly self-quarantined to major broadcast media, while the eyeball-spearing “behavioral” kind of advertising rules online, despite attempts by regulators (especially in Europe) to stamp it out. (Because it is in fact totally rude.)

He later says:

I think we’ll start seeing the tide turn when when what’s left of responsible ad-funded online publishing cringes in shame at having participated in adtech’s inexcusable surveillance business—and reports on it thoroughly.

And, to some extent, I agree. I've pointed out a few times now that, especially for news publishers, the evidence suggests that there's no real benefit to behavioral advertising that requires sucking up all the data.

But this is not just about the publishers. You may note that we at Techdirt use some tracking in our advertising. Because, if we didn't we'd have no advertising, and no advertising revenue at all.

Every single time I write about this, I point out that we have eagerly approached tons of advertisers, even those who promote themselves as supporting privacy, and offer what we think is a great freaking deal to do no-tracking, brand advertising on Techdirt -- which we think our users would appreciate. And every single time one of two things happens: we never ever hear back or we eventually get passed on to some cog in the advertising machine with a spreadsheet who simply can't understand what we're trying to offer, and the whole thing falls apart. We've had multiple long conversations with large companies -- some of whom are "famous" for supporting privacy, and we point out all the benefits of doing a brand advertising program that doesn't track, and we just get politely brushed off or ignored.

So, yeah, I'd love it if the media -- including us! -- went back to brand advertising that doesn't require surveilling on visitors (though, lots of you already use adblockers, which is totally cool by us). But, since not a single advertiser seems willing to buy such ads, we're kinda left in the lurch. So, as I do every time, I'll again say that if you happen to have an advertising budget and believe that supporting Techdirt in a way that we can highlight that you support us without requiring sucking up data on our community please contact us. Given our experiences so far, I'm not holding my breath.

Filed Under: ads, behavioral ads, business models, doc searls, journalism, surveillance, tracking

Facebook And Twitter Hope To Fix California's Troubled Privacy Law With...Misleading Ads?

from the you're-not-helping dept

With the federal government doing little to pass a real privacy law for the modern era, states have begun rushing into the void. That's unfortunately resulting in some state privacy laws that are a lacking in the...quality department. That's been particularly true in California, where the government recently passed the new California Consumer Privacy Act. While the law may be well intentioned, we've noted how the rushed bill has plenty of problems that need fixing if it's ever going to actually work. Murky definitions and drafting errors leave the bill a bit of a muddled mess, with the potential to even undermine other, existing laws.

While all sides of the debate have descended upon the California legislature in a bid to try and fix the bill's language, Silicon Valley lobbying giants have been busy running some highly misleading ads in a bid to try and soften the bill. Under the banner of "Keep the Internet Free," the Google, Twitter, Facebook, and Microsoft-backed Internet Association has been running ads trying to claim that the bill would result in users having to pay errant fees just to use the internet:

"The FREE websites and apps you use every day could start costing you,” announced one such ad on Twitter.

“Using the internet shouldn’t hurt your wallet,” began another that predicted browsing the Web could someday seem like paying at the pump for gasoline."

And while California's proposal certainly has numerous problems, any claim it's going to result in the internet being turned into some kind of pay-to-play hellscape is just nonsense. Sacramento-area users who actually click on the ad are directed to a website that further tries to suggest the new bill will suddenly have users paying to access social media in much the same way they have to pay to buy gasoline:

This obviously isn't the Internet Association's first foray into misleading privacy lobbying. Silicon Valley worked hand in hand with the telecom sector early on to try and stall California's privacy law efforts, pushing ads and talking points claiming that a state-level privacy law would embolden extremists, endanger children, and litter the internet with annoying popups, none of which was actually true. This was after telecom and Silicon Valley worked hand in hand to kill some fairly modest (and far better written) FCC privacy rules back in 2017.

Granted, Silicon Valley giants have some very good reasons to oppose the California bill, given it's rushed and sloppy language could easily result in steeper additional operational costs and numerous unforseen headaches.

At the same time, it's oddly understated that these companies would much prefer it if no privacy law were passed at all, and if a bill is passed, they'd prefer it be loaded with so many loopholes as to be largely useless. Even if the bill lacked troubling language, no major company actually wants to suddenly face million/billion dollar losses due to restrictions on data monetization or behavioral ads, and the combined lobbying firepower of the telecom, tech, insurance, healthcare, and marketing industries makes passing any privacy law with teeth a steep uphill climb.

The problem in California is the bill is slated to go live (warts and all) on January 1, though actual enforcement isn't expected until at least next summer. Efforts by privacy advocates to strengthen the bill have stalled, so their focus now is simply keeping the tougher portions of the bill intact:

"After two failed bids to strengthen the 2018 law, data-privacy advocates say their goal for the year is simply to keep the Privacy Act intact.

"We’re basically looking to hold the line on everything." said Lee Tien, a senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based group that advocates for stronger consumer protections online. "We’re watching for gut-and-amends and the usual shenanigans on the floor."

In contrast, the tech sector's goal is to try and weaken the definitions of what's collected, how it can be shared, and who it can be sold to. And while the industry certainly has plenty of other of legitimate reasons to oppose the bill as currently written, further muddying the waters with additional layers of misleading advertising isn't likely to help their cause.

Filed Under: ads, california, ccpa, lobbying, misleading ads, privacy
Companies: facebook, google, internet association

What If Google And Facebook Admitted That All This Ad Targeting Really Doesn't Work That Well?

from the the-data-obsession dept

You may have heard the famous line from early department store magnate John Wanamaker that "half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." Over the past decade or so, various companies have argued that their ability to provide a ton of data, combined with whatever algorithmic magic they could throw at their platforms, could lead to a magical mythical world in which there were perfectly targeted advertisements. And, of course, in the past few years there have been literally just two places where advertisers believe they can get perfectly targeted advertisements that don't waste half (or more) of their ad spend: Google and Facebook.

The end result of this thinking is that Google and Facebook need to engage in what people refer to as "surveillance capitalism," collecting a ton of data on everyone, building a huge profile about every user, and snooping on basically everything everyone does all day. This is why people have been getting more and more annoyed about the privacy trade-offs over the past few years (though, not so annoyed that they've stopped using these platforms in any significant way -- though, that could happen). It also has resulted in advertisers assuming that they must put the bulk of their ad dollars into those two platforms on the assumption that the money is better spent there. Indeed, the most recent IAB report on this noted that while the internet ad market continues to rise, 90% of the growth went to Facebook and Google (together the two companies represent about 58% of the total market share for online ads, but 90% of the growth in 2017).

Advertisers have been completely sucked into the belief that if you want to get results for your ads, you simply have to throw money at those two giants, and they'll mix some magic pixie dust with all the data they've collected, and voila: perfectly targeted advertising. Everyone get so focused on magic words like "big data" and "artificial intelligence" and "machine learning" that they rarely ask the larger question: does any of it actually matter?

As more and more questions are raised about the data practices of Facebook and Google, it seems worth questioning whether or not they actually need to be collecting all this data, and how much of a loss it actually is if they don't. Just recently, Facebook announced that -- as part of a settlement with the ACLU -- it was drastically changing how it handles certain ads: specifically that it would no longer allow such granular targeting for housing, employment, or credit ads -- all three of which were seen in the past as leading to discriminatory outcomes.

If such targeting really was important and useful, you'd think that this would have resulted in Facebook's stock price cratering. Instead, it went up.

The little secret behind all of this that very few people want to admit is that, in most cases super-targeted ads are crap. They don't perform well. That's because even if you're putting the ad in front of the right demographic, most of the time they don't care or don't want to see whatever it is that you're pushing. Or, it shows an ad for something you already have (or the ever popular laugher: something you just bought and don't need to buy again).

Unfortunately, most advertisers don't quite realize this yet, and Google and Facebook are in no rush to tell anyone (though, frankly, they should be more upfront about all of this). Some are realizing this through other means. It didn't get that much attention, but back in January it was reported that, because of the GDPR, the NY Times stopped using behavioral targeting for ads... and found its revenue went up. The Times is doing much more basic targeting now: just contextual and geographical.

And, if anyone should know this, it should be Google. For much of Google's existence, its big secret sauce was not deep knowledge about the people seeing the ads: it was just matching them against their search terms. That is, just a bit of simple contextual information, rather than tying it to a giant portfolio of data about you. It's really just over the last decade that Google really focused hard on building data profiles on everyone and "customizing" everything. There may be some advantages to some of those customizations -- and there are certain useful things that come with the data -- but better targeted advertisements... don't really seem to be among them.

Frankly, if Facebook and Google want to get regulators off their backs, they might start by coming to terms with this basic fact themselves and choosing to stop collecting so much data on everyone. Recognizing that they can still build incredibly powerful ad-driven businesses without so much data would be a big step forward. Right now, unfortunately, it seems that everyone remains bought into the myth that they need this data, that their business models are dependent on this data, and that this data is actually useful in the advertising context. Bursting that myth might mean that advertisers aren't quite as enamored with Google and Facebook over the long haul (though, they'd still spend a ton of money with them), but it might lead to a better overall experience for users, and a hell of a lot less regulatory pressure.

Filed Under: ad targeting, ads, business models, surveillance capitalism
Companies: facebook, google

New Study Says The Removal Of Craigslist Erotic Services Pages May Be Linked To An Increase In Murdered Females

from the for-the-good-of-the-many-or-whatever? dept

Under the guise of targeting sex traffickers, FOSTA has both done damage to Section 230 protections and sex workers' literal lives. The law has yet to result in any credible, sustained damage to human trafficking, but that hasn't stopped the bill's supporters from trotting out debunked numbers anytime they need a soundbite.

There will likely be no studies performed by the government to determine FOSTA's actual impact on sex trafficking, but plenty of academics are offering evidence that pushing sex work further underground is endangering the lives of sex workers. This is just the icing on the stupid, life-threatening cake as multiple law enforcement agencies -- including the DOJ itself -- pointed out passing FOSTA would make it more difficult to hunt down traffickers.

A study released in 2017 showed the introduction of erotic services section on Craiglist tracked with a 17% drop in female homicides across many major cities. Craigslist spent a few years being publicly vilified by public officials -- mainly states attorneys general -- before dumping its erotic services section (ERS). This didn't stop sex work or trafficking, but it did shift the focus away from Craiglist as everyone affected found other services to use.

A newly-released study [PDF] (via Sophie Cull) shows there's been a corresponding increase in female homicides since the point Craigslist dumped ERS. Online services -- enabled by Section 230 -- helped sex workers stay safe by reducing or eliminating a few of the more dangerous variables.

In the context of prostitution, online clearinghouses have the potential to improve safety by redirecting exchange through the clearinghouse and replacing more risky outdoor face-to-face transactions and/or other intermediaries (e.g., pimps) with indoor, direct transactions (Bass, 2015a,b). Matching online through the clearinghouse enables both sides of the market to discern the quality of the match ex ante, through such activities as informal screening, circulated black and white lists, and online reviews (Cunningham and Kendall, 2011b; Grant, 2009). This may provide the ability for sex workers to identify and screen out violent clients, law enforcement, and scammers.

The wholly expected happens when you take these safeguards away by eliminating online services, like Craigslist did in 2010.

[W]e find evidence that ERS significantly reduced female homicide rates by as much as 10-17 percent. We do not find evidence that this was a more general reduction in homicide, as ERS is unrelated to male murder, females killed by an intimate partner, or manslaughters. This strengthens our assessment that ERS-driven changes in sex markets were the primary driver of the reduction in female murders.

The study pulls from a number of data sets (including the FBI's annual crime reports), but notes there are still some limitations that prevent this from being an exact determination. For one, most homicide reports don't note whether the person killed was a sex worker. For another, the data lags because homicide reports date from the time the body was found, rather than the time the person was actually killed. From this underreported and laggy data, some inferences can be drawn, even if it's impossible to say for certain what percentage of female homicides involved sex workers. If anything, the buggy data may point to an even greater reduction in violence against sex workers via the introduction of online marketplaces.

Are these magnitudes plausible? It is difficult to answer this question given that the true incidence of prostitution homicides is unknown. Most datasets do not record whether a female victim of a homicide was a sex worker, and those that do suffer from severe underascertainment biases built into the data collection methods. To our knowledge there is only one study that has attempted to estimate the incidence of prostitution homicide as a share of female homicides (Brewer et al., 2006). The authors concluded that 2.7 percent of all female homicides are prostitution deaths by clients. But this study has significant limitations. It is based on select data only from Chicago, St. Louis, Washington state, North Carolina, the SHR, 33 urban counties for one cross-section, and Colorado Springs. The issue of underascertainment bias would conceivably hold, and maybe moreso, for this select sample. Thus we interpret their estimates to be, at best, a lower bound. Our estimate of a 10 percent reduction in female homicides does suggest, though, that ERS created an overwhelmingly safe environment for female sex workers — perhaps the safest in history.

This is not to suggest government officials and lawmakers pushing laws like FOSTA don't care about people's lives. But I'm not sure what counterargument they can provide for legislation that not only results in increased harm to (mostly) women, but also undercuts the immunity that has allowed the internet to thrive. I guess the old adage is being spun to read "It's better for dozens of sex workers to die than for third-party service providers to go free."

Filed Under: ads, fosta, homicides, murder, sex workers
Companies: backpage, craigslist

Broadband ISP CenturyLink Is Blocking Users' Internet Access Just To Show An Ad

from the ill-communication dept

US telco CenturyLink is under fire for temporarily disabling the broadband connections of broadband customers in Utah unless they click on an ad for CenturyLink security software. Even more oddly, the telco is repeatedly (and falsely) trying to blame a new Utah law for its ham-fisted behavior.

It began when a CenturyLink user in Utah posted to Twitter that his CenturyLink broadband line suddenly and mysteriously stopped working. Using what appears to be JavaScript ad injection (an already contentious practice), Centurylink then sent the user a notice stating his broadband connection would not be restored until he acknowledged receipt of the message, which appears to be a glorified advertisement for CenturyLink's @Ease filtering and security software:

In a blog post first spotted by regional Utah news outlets and subsequently Ars Technica, the user explains how he was initially under the impression that CenturyLink had tried to block him from visiting a phishing website, only to realize later that the ISP was really just temporarily holding his connection hostage until he engaged with a product ad:

"At first glance I was worried that I had somehow been redirected to a malicious website and that this was some kind of phishing attempt... After all, I didn't navigate here. I attempted to do another search but still ended up at this same notice. I considered the idea that maybe my ISP had detected some kind of threat coming from my network and that's why I was seeing this official looking page. Eventually, after reading over the page several times, I clicked "OK" and my internet was back."

When criticized, CenturyLink repeatedly told the user and many reporters (myself included), that it had to block user access in this fashion due to a new Utah law:

Except that's false. Utah is, Techdirt readers will be aware, home of what has been a near-constant stream of ridiculous efforts to filter porn, a technically impossible task (something backers of the idea refuse to learn). And while this new law in question is dumb, it's not quite that dumb. The law requires ISPs to inform users that filtering software is available to them as a sort of half-measure toward combating porn. ISPs can do this in a number of ways; the law specifically recommends either including mailers in user bills or sending an email.

The law does not require that ISPs sever access to the internet in order to show them ads for an ISP's own software, something CenturyLink executives appear to have come up with on their own. That's something the bill's author himself confirmed when asked by the impacted user on Twitter:

Users on Reddit indicate this wasn't isolated to just this user -- all Utah CenturyLink customers appear to be experiencing this unnecessary, heavy-handed nonsense. Now it's possible CenturyLink could argue it was just over-complying to adhere to the law, but since the law is pretty clear an email is ok, this argument doesn't hold up. More likely, CenturyLink executives either thought they'd use the law as a marketing opportunity, or wanted to bring attention to the dumb new law. Unfortunately that's not really accomplished by behaving stupidly yourself.

Of course this is the kind of ISP behavior our since-discarded net neutrality rules were designed specifically to prevent. And while a few days of press shame may drive Centurylink away from the policy if users are lucky, that's really no substitute for an attentive FCC that actually cares about keeping the internet free from idiotic monopoly ideas exactly like this one. The battle over net neutrality has always been about slippery slopes, and letting an ISP interrupt internet traffic to market its own products--and then lie about it--is slippery as hell.

Filed Under: ads, blocking, broadband, filters, injection, packet injection, utah
Companies: centurylink

The Utter Failure Of FOSTA: More Lives At Risk... And Sex Ads Have Increased, Not Decreased

from the pushing-things-further-underground... dept

Once again, as we predicted, FOSTA -- a law ostensibly passed to stop sex trafficking -- has been a total disaster. Passed based on totally inaccurate moral panics, it has resulted in online censorship and highly questionable lawsuits. But, worst of all, despite all the rhetoric about how it was necessary to save the lives of young girls, it has actually put them at much greater risk, and increased the amount of sex trafficking, while decreasing the ability of police to track down and arrest actual traffickers.

As this was all becoming clear a few months back, the legislators who pushed FOSTA tried to completely rewrite history to claim it was a success. Chief among them was the original sponsor of FOSTA, Rep. Ann Wagner, who announced that FOSTA was responsible for "shutting down nearly 90% of the online sex trafficking business and ads." This was wrong on multiple levels. That number was based on the shutdown of Backpage, which happened before FOSTA was law and had nothing to do with FOSTA. Even worse, an investigation into that 90% number by the Washington Post showed that even it was not true. At that time, the research showed that, while there was a brief plunge in sex ads after Backpage was seized (again, separate from FOSTA), the volume was coming back up to about the same level.

And, now, a new report by software company Marinus Analytics has found that online sex ads are showing up at an even higher rate than before FOSTA became law.

According to Pittsburgh-based software company Marinus Analytics, there were about 146,000 online sex ads posted per day in the U.S. on leading escort websites from mid-September to mid-October—and the company expects the total for this month to be even higher.

In contrast, there were about 133,000 such ads posted on Backpage in the month before its shutdown, Marinus Analytics found.

Instead of backing away amid the government crackdown on sex trafficking, some escort websites are doubling down on their business model and see the Backpage shutdown as an opportunity to expand, said Emily Kennedy, Marinus Analytics' president and co-founder.

"They're really competing with each other for that spot now and so we're seeing frequent activity at this point," she said, adding that as long as the business remains lucrative, "people are going to figure out a way to advertise it."

Of course, unlike Backpage -- which regularly cooperated with law enforcement to help -- these new sites obviously have zero incentive at all to cooperate with law enforcement who are trying to track down actual traffickers. Because, thanks to FOSTA, these sites now need to try to stay away from any attention from law enforcement.

So, to recap, this law designed to stop sex trafficking by criminalizing sites that host ads around prostitution has:

• Not stopped those ads (indeed, they've increased)
• Enabled greater censorship of the internet.
• Enabled wasteful and dangerous lawsuits against internet companies.
• Made it more difficult for law enforcement to track down and arrest actual traffickers.
• Put many, many people in grave risk of injury and death.

So, where are all the supporters of FOSTA now that basically everything that we critics predicted has come true?

Filed Under: ads, ann wagner, fosta, sex trafficking

Wherein Facebook Messes Up Elections By Trying Not To Mess Up Elections

from the early-bird-gets-the-political-ad-buy dept

A few months ago I suggested that calling Facebook a bull in a china shop might not be fair to bulls. I fear the suggestion remains apt, as Facebook throws its considerable weight around in ways that, while potentially well-meaning, leaves all sorts of chaos in its wake. The latest evidence of this tendency relates to its recent announcement of policies designed to limit who can place political ads on Facebook.

The problem is, that's what it's done: limit who can place ads on Facebook. But according to the Verge, all it's done is limit the ability for SOME people to post political ads. As in, only SOME of the candidates in any particular race.

The Verge article notes that the Mississippi primary is set for June 5. But in one particular race for Congress, only the incumbent's authentication paperwork is in order, so only he is able to buy ads. As the day of the election draws near, his challenger finds himself locked out of being able to advertise through the medium.

E. Brian Rose is a Republican candidate for Congress in Mississippi, and is a primary challenger to the incumbent Rep. Steven Palazzo (R-MS). Up until yesterday, Rose said, Facebook had been a critical part of his campaign strategy. He amassed more than 6,000 followers on his official page, using Facebook ads to target voters in hundreds of narrowly defined demographic targets.

Yesterday, Rose’s campaign planned to buy 500 different Facebook ads. The first batch were approved shortly before the new rules took effect. But when Rose went to buy the remainder, he received a message from Facebook saying his ads had not been authorized. Rose filled out the required online forms attesting to his identity. At the end, Facebook said it would send Rose an authorization code in the mail. He was told it would arrive in 12 to 15 days — by which point the election would be over.

It's a fair read of the story that the challenger screwed up: if the incumbent was able to register, then so should have the challenger. But even so, it still looks like Facebook handled the rule change poorly, both in its timing (mid-race in the critical days leading up to an election), and with too drastic a change too dependent on its successful promotion that left too much to chance despite the serious stakes.

Facebook began allowing political advertisers to start the verification process on April 23rd. The company promoted the new process with a blog post and messages inside Facebook directed at administrators of political pages. In May, it also sent emails to page administrators advising them of the changes.

The challenger says he didn't get the notices about the change. It's a contention that seems plausible: even assuming there were no issues with the messages actually being sent out, or ending up caught in a spam filter, they would have arrived in campaign inboxes in the midst of what surely were busy days full of priorities more important than keeping up with Facebook notifications. Even assuming that authentication is the key to addressing political ad-buy abuse, an effective authentication solution should not have risked locking out live candidates in pending elections. The implementation of any solution should produce greater benefit than cost, which does not seem to be the case here. Because while it may be commendable that Facebook is trying to reduce the manipulation by outsiders on America's political campaigns, it accomplishes little if in the process of trying to reduce one candidate's unfair advantage, it ends up creating another. It appears Facebook should have done more to anticipate what might go wrong with its new system before switching over to it, but the lesson here is not just for Facebook but for those fond of pressuring Facebook to do something, anything, to change its existing policies because it turns out that sometimes doing just anything may be worse than doing nothing.

Filed Under: ads, brian rose, elections, mississippi, social media, steven palazzo
Companies: facebook

While Facebook Gets All The Hate, Verizon Continues To Show It's No Better, And Potentially Much Worse For Privacy

from the broader-context-please dept

Facebook certainly deserves ample criticism for its lax privacy standards and its decision to threaten news outlets that exposed them. That said, we've noted a few times now that the uneven press fixation on Facebook obscures the fact that numerous industries routinely engage in much worse behavior. That's particularly true of broadband providers (and especially wireless carriers), who routinely treat consumer privacy as a distant afterthought, with only a fraction of the total volume of media hyperventilation we saw during the Facebook kerfuffle.

Facebook's casual treatment of your data isn't some errant tech industry exception, it's the norm, making #quitFacebook an arguably pointless gesture if you still own a stock mobile phone. In the telecom industry, a disdain for consumer privacy is a cornerstone of their entire business model(s). Companies like AT&T and Verizon aren't just bone grafted to our government's domestic surveillance apparatus, they collect and sell everything from browsing to location data to absolutely anyone and everyone--with little to no real oversight, and opt out tools that may or may not actually work.

Verizon has been particularly busy on the anti-privacy front. You'll recall that the company was fined by the FCC for modifying wireless user data packets to track users around the internet without telling them. The company was engaging in this behavior for two years before security researchers even discovered it, and it took another six months of media criticism for Verizon to offer a simple opt out. Despite the wrist slap, a more powerful variant of this technology is still very much in play at Oath (AOL & Yahoo), Verizon's effort to compete with Google and Facebook in the media advertising wars.

Not long after that, Verizon played a starring role in gutting modest FCC privacy rules protecting consumers (spurred in part by Verizon's tracking tech). Those rules, which Verizon lobbyists dismantled last year, simply required that ISPs be transparent with what data they're collecting and who they're selling it to. When California tried to mirror the FCC's discarded privacy policies, Verizon, Facebook and Comcast lied to lawmakers, falsely claiming that modest privacy protections would harm children, increase internet popups, and embolden extremism. None of it was true.

More recently, Verizon has been facing numerous lawsuits over Yahoo hacks that exposed the data of roughly three billion consumers. And while this was before Verizon's ownership (Verizon wasn't informed of the hacks during negotiations, netting it a $350 billion discount), the company has since been actively trying to prevent customers from suing Oath (Yahoo) or Verizon over future breaches by using fine print to mandate binding arbitration:

"The new Oath terms of service "contain a binding arbitration agreement and class action and jury trial waiver clauses..., which are applicable to all US users," the terms say.

Congress has considered legislation to ban many mandatory arbitration clauses, but it hasn't followed through yet and the practice remains legal.

The AOL terms already contained a binding arbitration clause and class-action waiver before Verizon bought that company. But the Yahoo terms didn't previously contain such clauses."

Thanks to AT&T's Supreme Court victory in 2011 using contract fine print to erode consumer legal rights is now something we view as the norm. And while everybody can agree that the class action system has numerous problems, the system of binding arbitration is a terrible solution. Under binding arbitration, the arbiter rules for the company they work for the vast majority of the time, leaving consumers shit out of luck. While class actions often only net lawyers a nice new boat, they at least occasionally result in substantive change. Arbitration, in turn, is often more like consumer theater than justice.

The reality is that informed and empowered consumers are more likely to opt out of efforts to monetize their online behavior. And however breathlessly companies like Verizon and Facebook pretend to be dedicated to consumer privacy or policy solutions, they're going to fight tooth and nail against any policies -- even reasonable ones -- that could potentially hamstring that revenue. But however bad Facebook is and has been on privacy, Verizon routinely offers a master class when it comes to undermining efforts at anything even vaguely resembling a solution.

Filed Under: ads, arbitration, fcc, privacy, surveillance
Companies: facebook, verizon

Ten Years Later, Cable Industry Finally Realizes More Ads Is Not The Solution To Cord Cutting

from the who-knew? dept

For years we've noted how the traditional cable TV industry is slowly-but-surely bleeding customers tired of paying an arm and a leg for bloated bundles of often terrible programming. And for just as long we've documented how far too many cable and broadcast executives are hell bent on doubling down on all of the bad behaviors that cause these defections in the first place. That has ranged from knee jerk price hikes in the face of growing streaming competition, to efforts to stuff more ads into every viewing hour, whether by editing down programs or speeding them up to ensure maximum commercial load.

The ugly truth most cable and broadcasting executives can't face is that the era of the sacred cable TV cash cow is over. Television simply isn't going to be as profitable in the wake of real competition and the more flexible, cheaper pay TV alternatives that competition is providing. And while countless industry executives still somehow think this is a fad they can wait out, there's growing evidence that at least a few industry executives are finally getting the message.

Fox executives, for example, last week signaled that they intend to dramatically lower the ad load to two minutes an hour across their networks by 2020 (it's currently 13 minutes for broadcast networks and 16 minutes for cable):

"The two minutes per hour is a real target for Fox, and also our challenge for the industry,” said Ed Davis, chief product officer for ad sales at Fox Networks Group, in an email. “Creating a sustainable model for ad-supported storytelling will require us all to move."

By "move," Davis means "actually compete and adapt," which should be a no brainer after watching ESPN lose ten million audience members in just the last few years. The old model of hammering customers with as many ads as they can stomach (and then some) while also charging massive subscription fees is finished. That's something even Comcast NBC Universal execs seem to realize as they also aim to cut ad load during prime time shows by 10% and the number of ads during commercial breaks by 20%:

"The industry knows that television is already the most effective advertising medium there is, but we need to make the experience better for viewers,” said Linda Yaccarino, chairman of advertising and client partnerships at NBCUniversal, in the statement. “We’re reimagining the advertising experience for consumers, marketers, and the entire industry."

It can't be understated how hard it was for the industry to come to the realization that perhaps it needed to annoy its paying customers less and compete a little more. Many of these same executives have spent the better part of the last decade either ignoring or downplaying the cord cutting threat, many arguing it was just a fad that would end once Millennials began procreating more (that didn't happen). Combined with the rise of more streamlined and expensive alternatives (Dish, Sling TV, AT&T's DirecTV Now, etc.), there's some real signs of evolutionary traction in the stubborn sector.

That said, there's still plenty of opportunities for these companies to double down on bad behavior on other fronts. As TV becomes less of a money maker, many companies have just started jacking up the price of broadband (via either usage caps and overage fees or obnoxious hidden fees), given there's no competitive repercussion. And with the looming death of net neutrality, the use of anti-competitive tactics to jack up your TV/Phone/broadband bill in other "creative" ways is going to grow as these companies seek out their pound of flesh elsewhere.

Filed Under: ads, cable, cord cutting