Week 3 Blog – Lachlan Bahr

After reading this weeks readings and attending the class discussions around dark ads I realise now that large corporations such as Google and Facebook not only hold power over society in terms of monetary wealth and personal information but also the possibility to provided personalised targeted “dark ads” which could lead to harmful outcomes like spreading misinformation, reinforcing dangerous radical ideological views and discriminating against people of certain race, creed, religion, gender or age. Whilst there are a lot of positives which can come for brands from targeted advertising such as gaining traffic from an audience which is most likely to consume the product these negative which I mentioned earlier pose a serious threat to the safety of society’s political discourse. I found that the idea of the Ad Observatory was very intelligent and provided a way for large corporations to be held accountable for the content which they enable to be seen on there platform and the advertisements which they push. 

 

After looking through my own ad archive I found the the ads I received for the most part were relevant to my own interests. These “targeted ads” which were clearly trying to gain my interest by showing products and articles which aligned with my Facebook/Google search history such as shoes, music and eating places in the city. I also found that the few ads which were in the area of politics vastly differed on the political spectrum depending on which site I was on. On Facebook I found I was often getting articles which skewed more towards conservative and right wing political ideologies. However, when on google I was receiving ads which were closer to the left wing political ideologies. I found that this matched with this weeks reading as they mentioned that ability for political parties to reach a certain audience without being scrutinised is more of a feature to them then a threat or a flaw of the platform.