Social Media Ads: Is Ethics or Algorithms the Problem?

Jeffrey Wolfe
jw939417@ohio.edu

Anyone with a social media account, for example Facebook or Twitter, has scrolled through their feed and seen an advertisement every few entries. Products you may or may not be interested in are marketed directly to you when your only intent may have been to see what your friends have been doing. Modern television watching involves fast-forwarding through commercials, so why wouldn't we be frustrated when this happens in what feels like a more personal place?

Algorithms

What you search for on social media sites influence what you see from your friends and businesses. According to a recent Buffer.com article, Facebook's algorithm looks at content creating "meaningful interactions" and will prioritize it within your feed. This same article also explains how Twitter prioritizes by ranked tweets first, followed by "in case you missed it," and then everything else in reverse-chronological order.

Why are algorithms important?

Many of the advertisements and posts you see, you've put in front of you by what you've shared, commented on, or searched for. This can be helpful if you searched for your favorite baseball team, only to later see advertisements for merchandise you might want from the same team. However, this can be a detriment in an area like politics.

If one tends to read more conservative or more liberal articles, it is likely that during campaign season you will get advertisements that match those ideals. That also means you're likely never to see the opposing viewpoints ad, either.

https://vrevzine.wordpress.com/2012/10/17/ethical-issues-in-social-media/

In a 2018 article, The Guardian references Robert Mueller's indictment of the Internet Research Agency which alleged a conspiracy using Facebook ads to "encourage US minorities not to vote," making the argument that this direct advertising may work too well.

Ethics

The Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) and the American Advertising Federation (AAF) have guidelines for advertisers to follow regarding honesty, fairness, conflicts of interest, and the free flow of information. Much of the information focuses on how the content should be presented, but where it has no influence is in how the information is disseminated. This is still at the mercy of the algorithms mentioned earlier by each social media outlet.

What can be done?

I believe that the content being created is in general following the guidelines set forth by the PRSA and AAF. It is how that information reaches the consumer, or rather, how it doesn't in some cases, that is the problem in social media advertising today. For social media advertising to be as fair as it is meant to be, the ethics code will need to extend into a standard of information sharing on social media and those platforms must agree to them.