As Biden Looks To Ban Targeted Ads, Activists Look To Use Them To Get News To The Russian People
At Tuesday's State of the Union address, one of President Joe Biden's pledges regarding the internet, was that he wanted to ban targeted advertising. Lots of people cheered this on, because lots of people absolutely loathe targeted advertising - which is sometimes, misleadingly, referred to as surveillance capitalism." My own opinion on this is that basically all of it is overrated. I don't think that targeted advertising even works that well, and think we'd be better off if companies didn't rely so heavily on it - but also think that even if we got rid of it, people would still be mad over something else these companies did. Also, part of the reason why people hate targeted advertising so much is because it's just not that good. If it actually worked, I'm not so sure people would be so mad about it.
That said, I really don't see how effective or useful a ban on targeted advertising would be. And, at the very least, it would bar creative uses of targeted advertising like a bunch of activists who are looking to use targeted advertising to get around the Russian government's desire to block all news of its invasion of Ukraine from the Russian citizenry.
Vladimir Putin is scared of the truth. That's why he's shut down independent media and social media.
The Russian people deserve better. Yet they struggle to get unbiased news.
But it's very hard for Putin to shut down online advertising. So we're going to use digital ads to show Russians independent news about Ukraine.
These ads will be shown to people in Russia, and Russian-occupied Ukraine. We'll use modern digital advertising to show real news about what is happening in Ukraine, from high quality sources.
The Russian people can make up their own minds about what is going on in Ukraine. And when they see it, we are confident that Putin will be weakened.
We've built a team of digital campaign experts, who can get around Russian government restrictions. We've already run some test advertising today - showing people news from independent news websites.
See? That seems like a pretty powerful and (dare I say it?) useful application of targeted advertising. But under the Biden administration's plan, it would be banned.
At some point people do need to realize that not all targeted advertising is problematic. The real problem is that nobody really knows what information companies have on them, or how it's being shared and used. The issue is not so much the targeting, but the data itself and the lack of transparency and lack of control by end users. Calling for an outright ban on targeted advertising, once again, misdiagnoses the problem" and comes up with an overly broad solution that seems less than helpful.