Digital advertising networks are facing dilemmas
that could parallel the debate over widespread downstream liability for ISP’s,
according to a Washington Post story Friday, August 23, 2013, by Hayley
Tsukayama, on p. A14, “A digital ad dilemma for social media: Top sites
struggle to address advertisers’ fears of offensive content”, link (website url) here.
Some advertisers, including parts of Nissan, have
refused to advertise on Facebook when their ads wound up on profiles with
offensive content. But it is very difficult for ad networks or for social media
or service providing companies to predict reliably that a particular profile or
blog could never contain content offensive to particular advertisers. (They all do this, to some extent, including Google, with its PSA's.) That parallels the idea that service
providers (like YouTube) can’t presecreen user posts for violations of law
(copyright, criminal threats, child pornography, trafficking) very reliably –
an idea that has come up again with recent challenges to Section 230 (Aug. 9).
There is an inverse problem, that bloggers and
profile owners see offensive ads on their pages, sometimes from less than
legitimate companies overseas. For
example, I would have no way of knowing in advance that a company whose ads
were placed on my sites was completely legitimate or not involved in some sort
of scam. But ad networks usually give
the publishers or speakers the ability to fine tune allowable ads. I’ve never
(yet) heard of calls that bloggers or social media profile owners should be
held legally responsible for ads that show on their sites. But you never know.
User cookies determine what ads a visitor will
see Webroot used to mark some of the
well known cookies (like Doubleclick) as spyware, but it doesn’t do as much of
that now (in my experience). But the
content of a blogger’s postings or social media content also seem to affect the
ads he sees everywhere (at least it does in my experience) as well as his
location. I haven’t turned off tracking,
and the ads seem to know where I am (like Dallas, Charlotte, New York, LA,
etc).
The article points out business model problems for social
media companies and service providers, both with the practical (and perhaps
unrealistic) prescreening expectations of ad networks, and with “do not track”.
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