Ad Hominem #2
Sudden changes draw backlash...
Welcome back to Ad Hominem, a weekly-ish newsletter where I share stories from around the web on the changing nature of AdTech, surveillance capitalism, and the privacy issues that face every individual in the modern marketplace. If you’ve been forwarded this email from a friend, you can read other issues and sign up here.
Tim Berners-Lee has unveiled a global “contract for the web.” This is probably not much more than a symbolic gesture, but it might still be a good idea. Documents like this take on persistent meaning, and the web needs some sort of “Magna Carta” that will inscribe some basic norms around privacy, accessibility, and content. This arriving just as Amnesty International declares the social media giants to be an unprecedented danger to human rights. More coverage of the “contract” on The Verge.
Senator Ron Wyden has sent Jeff Bezos a letter full of probing questions about Amazon’s Ring security cameras. I’m still coming to understand Ring as a platform, but I’ll be talking about this platform more in future. Amazon has barely touched the world of monetized advertising, but that is likely to change very soon. It’s good to see Congress raising eyebrows on these issues as Americans feel increasingly uneasy about how their data is used.
FCC Chair Ajit Pai gave some comments on new attempts to block robo-call spam at the carrier level. Spam and scam calls are a serious issue, especially for senior citizens, but the public phone number system has also been an open protocol for almost a century. Changes to this protocol represent a fundamental change to society. Steve Jobs is famous for getting his first internship at HP because he simply picked up the phone and placed a call to an executive. If the FCC and network carriers begin to offer customer-approved “whitelists” and block all other calls, our access to each other as members of a society will be significantly restricted.
Twitter’s ban on political ads is now in full effect. It’s worth noting that Twitter is a much smaller player in this space than Facebook, but this decision has already sent political groups in the UK scrambling. Google, meanwhile, has simply opted to change how focused their ad targeting tools can be. As of today, I’m of the opinion that we need some regulation to govern how ad micro-targeting works, rather than an all-out ban on political content, but until there’s some consensus around what that looks like, I’m happy to see Twitter play it safe over sorry. In the US, the Democrats disagree with me and are attacking social networks for restricting ad access rather than screening them for accuracy, which is a much harder problem. It seems that government and private industry are now in a game of chicken to see who will set up the Ministry of Truth first. The EFF meanwhile, isn’t happy with any of this.
“Political reach should be earned and not bought,” said Vijaya Gadde, Twitter's head of legal and policy at Twitter during a press call — drawing a contrast with Facebook, which has rejected calls for a similar ban, contending that political advertising is an important element of free expression that benefits political challengers and grassroots campaigns.
Twitter is banning all ads that mention specific candidates, elections, or legislation. The ban on any advertising applies to campaigns, government officials, PACs and 501(c)(4) groups — that is, nonprofits designated for tax purposes as somehow promoting social welfare, a broad category covering groups spanning from the Sierra Club to Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity.
This great piece titled “Platforms and Publishers: The End of an Era” from the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia goes in deep on how the world is shifting back away from the years of consolidation of publishers onto platforms that gave rise to the modern social web. This newsletter and the many others like it are prime examples of how publishers are seeking more independent ways of reaching their audiences.
Small Bites of News:
Google & Samsung fix Android spying flaw. Other makers may still be vulnerable.
Developers are looking for alternatives to Facebook for user authentication
This report on how disinformation is affecting AdTech
If you have any feedback on this or any other issue of Ad Hominem, please let me know on Twitter. Thank you for your time and attention. I know it’s your most precious resource.
— Sam