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HOW OFTEN DO you react to an advertisement on your social media profile that seems completely out of place? A product that you’ve no interest in or – as happened to me last week – a political message that I fundamentally disagreed with. The answer is probably not very often.
We have become so blasé about social media platforms using our personal data and search habits to provide us with targeted content that it has become unusual to see something you don’t agree with.
It is this that makes it blissfully easy for political campaigns to steer the minds of swathes of voters. Sue Halpern, writing in The New York Review of Books last month, explores how the Trump campaign benefitted from fake news and targeted Facebook content that catered to voters’ personal fears and ideologies. In fact, the campaign was so confident based on reading Facebook that they sent Trump on last minute trips to Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, states that others would have strongly predicted were unsympathetic to him.
Why is targeted content so powerful?
To illustrate, see how quickly you can answer these questions:
If you gave an instant response there is a good chance you gave these answers: 10 cents, 100 minutes, 24 days. If you thought about the questions for a bit longer, maybe you reached the correct answers: 5 cents, 5 minutes, 47 days.
The way we think can be divided into two broad categories called System 1 and System 2.
System 1 is made up of our gut responses, instincts and immediate desires. System 2 is the slower, more controlled method that involves critically analysing information.
If you got the answers wrong it’s not a reflection on you. A study of over 3,000 people of different ages, genders and backgrounds found that 83% of them made at least one mistake. Why?
We are mentally lazy
Because it is really hard to resist a gut response that “seems true”. Humans are mentally lazy. It takes a lot of attention and willpower to use System 2, processes that are already highly in demand in our busy lives. System 1 is based on what are called “cognitive biases”, essentially rules of thumb that we use to get answers that are intuitively right.
One cognitive bias we all have is called confirmation bias. This is the tendency to lend more credence to anything that supports our own view. Evidence that conflicts with our beliefs is jarring so we (unwittingly or not) tend to ignore it and place a greater weight on something that aligns with our beliefs, often regardless of the source. This is where the explosion of targeted advertising becomes problematic.
When we mindlessly scroll through Facebook we are not deeply processing what we read. We are often bored with half of our attention on something else. Given the ease with which System 1 will accept answers that “seem right”, targeted ads are more likely to be accepted uncritically. Given our tendency towards confirmation bias we are less likely to question the source if it tells us something we want to hear. We become willing and accepting recipients of “fake news”.
What can we do to stop this?
At some stage in school you probably learned the scientific method. This list of remote four-syllable words (observation, hypothesis, analysis, modification) essentially means being curious, gathering data that rigorously tests an idea and then updating your belief on the basis of the results, regardless of whether they support your theory or not.
The scientific method is not something that should be buried in a school textbook. It is a set of guidelines we can all use in our daily lives.
The problem with targeted advertising is that it encases us in a bubble that can’t be popped by contradictory evidence because we are never exposed to it. Everything we read becomes a reflection of what we want to hear and think we already know.
While targeted content may mean you get to see more cute dog videos and I get more advertisements for chocolate, it also has a more sinister consequence where we are no longer challenged, no longer exposed to novelty and no longer have to update our beliefs when contradictory evidence proves them wrong.
Targeted advertising isn’t going away but we will have to make more of an effort to adopt the scientific method and to purposely seek out evidence that contradicts us. It may jar when our pet theories are tested but it may also be the only way we can safely steer ourselves out of this postmodern “fake news” era.
Deirdre Robertson is a researcher on the Behavioural Science team at the Economic and Social Research Institute investigating how policy can help people to overcome cognitive biases in consumer and health decision-making. She was the Irish winner of international science communication competition FameLab.
Install Ad Blocker – problem solved.
Just look up “how to stop targeted adverts” and there’s settings in your browser and phone etc. to turn off this.
@Eugene Tyson:
That doesn’t solve the problem of everything you seeing in your you tube, twitter and facebook feeds being targeted at you. It’s not just about ads.
I only came across this article because it appeared in my facebook feed. It appeared in my facebook feed presumably because it’s an issue I have discussed and shared articles and videos about in the past.
A lot of people, especially SJW types, actively contribute to the problem further by blocking people online they disagree with. That’s another source of the problem.
@Eugene Tyson: No. In a lot of cases a person or business depend on those ads. All you are doing is killing their revenue. People think a personal ad blocker is a solution but it’s far from it. The solution is to stop websites showing multiple intrusive ads on one page.
@ML and Optimisation: you should be able to peruse the internet at your leisure. Often what i look at in work follows me back home to the laptop. I have no interest in 100% of adverts as they are all things researching for work. So targeted ads definitely dont work. You can follow some very simple steps in browser and in apps to stop this behaviour.
@Chief: @Chief: why would care about anyones revenue in adverts that i dont want to see? When im watching telly i will channel surf to avoid ads. Is this affecting anyones revenue. In truth its your choice if you want to see adverts or not.
@Chief:
The Brave browser allows you to contribute a certain amount of money per month to websites that you like and visit frequently while also blocking adverts. The site loses advertising revenue but you can choose to compensate them and reward them for providing useful content.
You can also donate to them directly if you use built-in ad blockers on other browsers. In my mind that’s far more productive.
@Thought for Food: No thanks.
@Piarais Mac Maoláin: No, because I read the news everyday. The Journal is one of my many news sites that read every day.
@Eugene Tyson: let’s say you had a blog that people read every day, your costs are, domain name, server hosting, bandwidth, your time ect. Your ads on your blog generate your income to pay for these costs. If I visit your blog everyday with my ad blocker turned on do you think that’s fair of me? Do you think I think it’s fair? Both of us know it isn’t. What was the cost to me to turn off my ad blocker so you might get some revenue? Zero. So what’s your problem in not helping someone make an honest buck eh?
@Chief: i honestly could not care less.
@Chief: I got so sick of completely pointless ads for products that i have zero interest in, or more often are not even available in Ireland, so of course i use ad blocker now.
If a site insists on disabling ad blocker, then i wont use that site.
This article is almost identical to the first chapter of Nudge by Thaler – same examples too!
@Seán Kinsella: that’s gas. I wonder do academics use anti plagiarism tools on their own work before final submission?!
@Joseph Bloggs: I was fully expecting the picture of the table to be shown near the end. It’s a Good book, for anyone interested.
@Seán Kinsella: Well spotted and remembered. It is a famous study from Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky.
That example is Behavioural Economics 101 and as well as appearing in Nudge it also appeared in Thinking Fast and Slow.
It should have been acknowledged in the article because plagiarism isn’t cool.
@Will Lynch: Thanks for your interest in the article. For the avoidance of all doubt there was and remains a hyperlink in the article that links to the original research study that developed these examples. Linking to the original research, as is the case in my article, is the correct practice instead of citing books that describe the research. My article is an original article that applies well researched psychological theories (e.g. confirmation bias) to a new context (i.e. fake news). I hope that is helpful in clarifying any issues.
Even in this article the journal manages to pay a writer to say fake news helped trump to win. There’s your bubble right there.
@Mike: You could also take the journal as a counterexample. It runs a daily drumbeat of anti Trump, pro cause du jour. Two thirds of the comments push back on it, regularly. What we don’t see, of course, is the people who don’t comment.
@Mike: No they didn’t Mike, that’s the ad you see, I don’t see that ad. We all see different ads based on our own interests. It’s you that has looked at something based on trump recently and that’s why you are seeing a trump ad.
Well we’ve known this for quite some time, just look at the Alt-Right drones on here and how they repeat the same buzzwords and catchphrases together in unison on every article, it’s like being at Mass at hearing all the zombies respond to the priest!
@Atheos Euripides:
You’re just as guilty of it. By labeling more right-wing and conservative voices as “Alt-Right drones” you’re attempting to de-legitimise opinions and viewpoints that run counter to your own.
@Thought for Food: I don’t have to attempt to de-legitimise the opinions of bigots, the majority of decent people abhor the views of fundamentalist conservatives.
@Atheos Euripides: speaking of catchphrases … Stones and glasshouses springs to mind ;-)
The perfect world where everyone seeks an alternative view point and proactively seeks to invalidate their own views and hypotheses does not exist
Sometimes we are open to alternative perspectives but we are programmed to validate and please ourselves for the majority of the time.
This is why fake news and targeted adverts work so well.
Amazon make me laugh . You spend the week after buying something seeing ads for the thing you bought. Brilliant technology.
This article quotes extensively from research by the Israeli cognitive psychologist Daniel Kahneman without attribution.
Some of the above is lifted straight from the pages of Kahneman’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow.
Plagiarism isn’t cool.
@Will Lynch: Thanks very much for your interest in the article. Just for the avoidance of all doubt there was and remains a link in the article that links to the original research study that developed these examples. Linking to the original research, as is the case in my article, is correct practice instead of citing books that describe the research. My article is an original article that applies well researched theories (such as confirmation bias) to a new context (i.e. fake news). I hope this clarifies things.
In reality we have little control over what we read on the internet. Facebook and google news, for example, use algorithms to create filter bubbles – which are essentially echo chambers – and constantly direct you to stories to what you have read. Aggregation is also a method used to disseminate ‘popular’ news stories to everyone. That’s why your fb is full of ‘what happened next will amaze you’ stories and life hacks despite the fact that you’ve never shown any interest.
Astonishes me how companies make money on targeted advertising, I use Google’s own ad blocker extension on chrome, not a single advert displayed, it’s brilliant, facebooks targeted campaigns are farcical, can anyone really admit to either noticing the rubbish or recalling anything advertisers push. Independent.ie tried a pathetic pop up begging visitors to deactivate the chrome blocker, pleading poverty, they gave up after a while. It seems to me only google, facebook and the likes make money out of advertising , not the fools paying for it
@Joseph Dempsey:
I’ve taken to using the Brave browser on both my mobile devices and personal computer. It allows me to not only block advertisements and trackers but also see exactly how many a specific site might be trying to push my way.
It’s interesting to go onto a site and see just how many attempts said website is making to follow what you’re doing and advertise to you.
There was a lot of Fake News at the time of the Brexit Referendum in Britain. That clown Cameron even predicted there would be war if there was a Leave vote. And that the British economy would tank within weeks.
Similar absurdities were put forward by the H Clinton crowd in the US as to what would happen if Trump won. The reality in the US? Peace abroad and prosperity at home.
The Irish media–RTE, Newstalk, Irish Times– pump out Fake News all the time. One of the main motivations is to make Irish people think the EU is a benevolent God and that it is a Mortal Sin to question Irish membership of that body.
All these targeted ad’s seem to think I’m a pill popping out of control gambler with political aspirations who cares what some idiot finds funny on the other side of the planet.
So ad blocker all the way, If people want to punish visitors to their website, then don’t expect to keep the site going.
We accept beliefs and views if we get something in return as well, as well as other persons beliefs and views if they accept us or allow us to be part of a group too?
We suffer from arrogance and vanity as well as any fantasy that allows us to feel in control, so the media plays people?
have your say