Propaganda Machine — Online Advertising

Targeted advertising: a joy and a curse. In a time where information is everywhere and often overwhelming, who wouldn’t appreciate something specifically relevant to them? In Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction, chapter 4 addresses the impact such online advertising campaigns have on the targeted. In her attempt to describe the faults in these practices, for-profit colleges are used as the driving example. These colleges in an effort to do as their name suggests, profit, exploit aspects of the federal educational system. The models “pinpoint people in great need and sell them false or overpriced promises”. With an increase in the availability of federal student loans, these colleges hope to attract students who would qualify for such loans and hence, make the expenses of college seem more affordable than they are. The prospective students they prey on are often lied to and can be led to think of the financial aid they are receiving as “free money”, a view for which the for-profit colleges unethically neglect to correct. Inherently, the more students the advertisements reach, the more profit the colleges stand to make. Enter the information age. Mass data collection has made it easy for these companies to target potentially profitable individuals who in the case of for-profit colleges are members of the lower classes and those who have recently experienced a traumatic experience. By pinpointing these targets “pain point” the advertisers can place the right ads at the right time: leading nicely to an optimization problem. To solve this problem, machine learning has been employed to sift through the data and find patterns which would take longer to discover in the pre-internet, pre-mass information age.

What troubles me the most about this picture, and what O’Neil mentions, is the feedback loops that ensue. In targeting those who already have debt or struggle in other ways while only highlighting the potential benefits and neglecting the cons, leads these individuals into further debt. Keeping them in the same situation in which the targeted advertisements had “promised” to help alleviate. This type of predation is simply unacceptable and should be more effectively monitored by federal legislation for when the going gets rough, as in the case of the bankruptcy of Corinthian College and its affiliates, it isn’t the executives or advertising groups who suffer but the students who were promised a better life.