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Advertisers and Facebook don't have to try to target emotionally troubled teens in order to target emotionally troubled teens. All they have to do is have an ad

Advertisers and Facebook don't have to try to target emotionally troubled teens in order to target emotionally troubled teens. All they have to do is have an advertisement that works well on emotionally troubled teens, have sufficiently correlated targeting tools, and run an optimization algorithm like gradient descent. To take a slightly different example: it doesn't matter if Facebook doesn't offer racial targeting if a payday loan company runs ads segmented by zip code and picks the best performing areas that happen to be predominantly black. EDIT: This should teach me to read the entire article first, since I made up an example that was literally used in the article. My bad.

fnbr 10y ago
The main problems they're talking about are PR problems, not ethical problems (if you assume that advertising itself is ethical, which I don't necessarily think is true). Specific types of targeting are then bad because of the optics, not because of their efficacy. Put another way, there's no ethical problem with recommending that people who follow Jay-Z should follow Obama, but there's a PR problem there.
- eridius 10y ago
  > Put another way, there's no ethical problem with recommending that people who follow Jay-Z should follow Obama, but there's a PR problem there. I agree with that specific statement, but I would say there is an ethical problem with the similar situation of recommending payday loans to poor people. The difference is recommending Obama to Jay-Z followers isn't harmful to those followers, but recommending payday loans to poor people is.
  - meric 10y ago
    And that difference is temporal - in the same way Obama as a person can change and payday loan interest rates and regulations can fluctuate
  - ThrustVectoring 10y ago
    Targeting seems, to me, to be ethics-neutral in terms of first-order effects. It amplifies the effectiveness of both positive-value and negative-value advertising. Like, roads can be used both for transporting troops to invade a country as well as to transporting food to relieve a famine, and better roads improve the effectiveness of both. Like, advertising payday loans to poor people may be an acceptable cost of advertising if it gets out valuable mesothelioma information as well.
  - fnbr 10y ago
    I mean, is it any less ethical than recommending that poor people purchase things in general? The point of advertising is to convince people to make purchasing decisions that they wouldn't have otherwise made, which is almost always damaging financially. To be clear, I'm not arguing that you're wrong- I think that the argument you made applies to advertising in general, and that it's correct.
    - eridius 10y ago
      > The point of advertising is to convince people to make purchasing decisions that they wouldn't have otherwise made, which is almost always damaging financially. That's not really true. People purchase things because they decide that the benefit is worth the cost. Advertising makes people pick one brand over another when they already plan to buy something, and it helps sway someone's decision when they're not sure if it's worth buying. It also brings their attention to products that they wouldn't otherwise have known about. But this sort of advertising is almost never "damaging financially", unless you think the act of buying something counts as financial damage.

fnbr 10y ago

The main problems they're talking about are PR problems, not ethical problems (if you assume that advertising itself is ethical, which I don't necessarily think is true). Specific types of targeting are then bad because of the optics, not because of their efficacy. Put another way, there's no ethical problem with recommending that people who follow Jay-Z should follow Obama, but there's a PR problem there.

eridius 10y ago
> Put another way, there's no ethical problem with recommending that people who follow Jay-Z should follow Obama, but there's a PR problem there. I agree with that specific statement, but I would say there is an ethical problem with the similar situation of recommending payday loans to poor people. The difference is recommending Obama to Jay-Z followers isn't harmful to those followers, but recommending payday loans to poor people is.
- meric 10y ago
  And that difference is temporal - in the same way Obama as a person can change and payday loan interest rates and regulations can fluctuate
- ThrustVectoring 10y ago
  Targeting seems, to me, to be ethics-neutral in terms of first-order effects. It amplifies the effectiveness of both positive-value and negative-value advertising. Like, roads can be used both for transporting troops to invade a country as well as to transporting food to relieve a famine, and better roads improve the effectiveness of both. Like, advertising payday loans to poor people may be an acceptable cost of advertising if it gets out valuable mesothelioma information as well.
- fnbr 10y ago
  I mean, is it any less ethical than recommending that poor people purchase things in general? The point of advertising is to convince people to make purchasing decisions that they wouldn't have otherwise made, which is almost always damaging financially. To be clear, I'm not arguing that you're wrong- I think that the argument you made applies to advertising in general, and that it's correct.
  - eridius 10y ago
    > The point of advertising is to convince people to make purchasing decisions that they wouldn't have otherwise made, which is almost always damaging financially. That's not really true. People purchase things because they decide that the benefit is worth the cost. Advertising makes people pick one brand over another when they already plan to buy something, and it helps sway someone's decision when they're not sure if it's worth buying. It also brings their attention to products that they wouldn't otherwise have known about. But this sort of advertising is almost never "damaging financially", unless you think the act of buying something counts as financial damage.