Antonio García Martínez at Wired writes about the effects of scaled pricing based on algorithms in Facebook's advertisement auction. Just buying advertisements in the auction does not guarantee that the ads get through to the target audience so the "clickbaitiness" of the ad is estimated by algorithms which adjust the price. Ads estimated to be "clickbaity" by the algorithm get lower prices so more can be purchased with the same money. The more problematic the ad, the more cost effective it is for the buyer.
A canny marketer with really engaging (or outraging) content can goose their effective purchasing power at the ads auction, piggybacking on Facebook's estimation of their clickbaitiness to win many more auctions (for the same or less money) than an unengaging competitor. That's why, if you've noticed a News Feed ad that's pulling out all the stops (via provocative stock photography or other gimcrackery) to get you to click on it, it's partly because the advertiser is aiming to pump up their engagement levels and increase their exposure, all without paying any more money.
During the run-up to the election, the Trump and Clinton campaigns bid ruthlessly for the same online real estate in front of the same swing-state voters. But because Trump used provocative content to stoke social media buzz, and he was better able to drive likes, comments, and shares than Clinton, his bids received a boost from Facebook's click model, effectively winning him more media for less money. In essence, Clinton was paying Manhattan prices for the square footage on your smartphone's screen, while Trump was paying Detroit prices. Facebook users in swing states who felt Trump had taken over their news feeds may not have been hallucinating.
Thus the advertisement auction algorithms themselves were yet another major factor in the results of the 2016 US election.
See also: Trump and the weird attention economy of Facebook
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 26 2018, @09:14AM (14 children)
If your system of governance is endangered by Facebook ads, then your system of governance needs to be replaced.
I nominate capitalism instead.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 26 2018, @09:20AM (5 children)
You want to replace bourgeois liberal democracy with a bourgeoisie dictatorship?
As expected of the quality American education system.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 26 2018, @09:27AM (4 children)
More or less, your purchasing power is based on how useful you've been to society (an heir to a fortune represents the person who bequeathed that fortune).
A democratic vote, in contrast, is given away for free to any moron; it's worthless—it means nothing.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 26 2018, @09:32AM (3 children)
> your purchasing power is based on how useful you've been to society
I find doctors to be vastly more useful to society than footballers, but I'm pretty sure their respective purchasing power doesn't reflect that.
It takes only a moment to think of how your suggestion doesn't work. Perhaps put (more?) thought into it next time, if you want to convince anyone.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 26 2018, @09:39AM (1 child)
Doctors are useful, sure, which is why they are highly compensated (and which is why their educations are so incredibly expensive).
However, it turns out that the common man lives for Monday Night Football (or whatever). For so may people, the footballers are why Joe Plumber gets his ass out of bed to fix someone's toilet in the middle of the night: Joe Plumber wants to be able to throw a Super Bowl party for his friends and family.
Get it yet?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 26 2018, @04:52PM
Not sure if I should mod this insightful, but you're correct on that observation. Like it or not, footballers are demonstrably more highly valued by society than doctors. An individual doctor may be extremely valuable at any given moment to somebody who's sick, but a footballer is valuable to millions and millions of fans year after year. The cumulative value of the footballer adds up quickly and surpasses the value any given doctor could ever hope to have.
Perhaps if men were angels, they would not value footballers so highly, or maybe they would value footballers from their own local community more than a small, distant, elite class of athlete celebrities.
When a football team wins the Superbowl, there's a chaotic celebration in the team's home town that can shut the entire city down for days.
When a doctor discovers a treatment for an horrible condition previously thought untreatable, it's a bunch of meh all around. A paper gets published. There might be a news article. Nobody is out celebrating in the streets.
If men want these priorities to be different, then men must decide in their own hearts that their priorities shall be different. Until then, footballers will be more valuable than doctors, because that is how men comparatively value those two professions in their hearts.
How I wish men were angels so that they might celebrate advancements in the arts and sciences with the fervor they reserve for footballers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 01 2018, @02:59AM
Same for janitors. In contrast to footballers, it's honest work and essential to the smooth operation of any school, business, or government office. Honest work ought to pay a livable salary, like it did for a while.
Janitors have a big disadvantage over doctors because if they do their job well enough no one notices they're there. Just try working or even visiting a building where the janitors have been eliminated and outsourced to firms that really cut corners with the cleaning. Even if you are a slob, you will notice ... and not like it.
(Score: 5, Informative) by turgid on Monday February 26 2018, @10:06AM
We used to be educated in the use of critical thinking skills. We were taught how to analyse literature and poetry as teenagers. We also read 1984 and some of George Orwell's essays. I was in the debating society. This was all at a state run comprehensive secondary school. For many years now this had gone into decline. There has been a simmering meme in the background that the state education system is some sort of Marxist brainwashing conspiracy. In the UK this resulted in Michael Gove becoming Education Secretary and the deconstruction of state education and the persecution of professional teachers.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Monday February 26 2018, @10:13AM (5 children)
Edgy, but I don't buy it. Empowering impressionable idiots is part of the reason democracy works so much better than the alternatives. Disempower the unthinking masses (which appears to be what you're suggesting) and your system is going to be far worse than democracy.
Capitalism is an economic system, not a system of governance, AC. Come back when your ideology is baked through.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 26 2018, @10:25AM (4 children)
That's all there is: The allocation of resources to this or that.
Socialists end up allocating all available resources to futile bread lines.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Wootery on Monday February 26 2018, @11:17AM (3 children)
No, this is an absurd oversimplification.
Democracy isn't all about decision-making, it's also about preventing the masses feeling disenfranchised. The point of giving a vote to everyone who is governed, isn't merely to improve the decision-making process - it's also to legitimise the government.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 26 2018, @01:11PM (1 child)
You know how you get people to feel enfranchised? Voluntary trade; capitalism.
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Tuesday February 27 2018, @10:13AM
...and what about the system of government?
Capitalism is an economic system, not a system of governance, AC. Come back when your ideology is baked through.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 26 2018, @07:10PM
You know how you get people to feel enfranchised? Voluntary trade; capitalism.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 26 2018, @11:42AM
Capitalism has never been implemented.
Unless you use it for a generic "might makes right" philosophy, in which case it is always eventually implemented so no effort is needed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 26 2018, @09:18AM (6 children)
Please. PLEASE!
Trump won at a fraction of the cost of the Clinton machine.
Those who have functional brains can read this [bloomberg.com].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 26 2018, @09:27AM
I bet the TV ads cost a lot more than Facebook ads.
(Score: 1, Redundant) by realDonaldTrump on Monday February 26 2018, @09:41AM (3 children)
Thank you, THANK YOU! That's another great article. It says I did very well in the digital, because of my cyber savvy. That's so true. And let's thank Dan Scavino, Jr. Strategic Media Services. And Cambridge Analytica. Great work, everybody!
(Score: 4, Touché) by stretch611 on Monday February 26 2018, @12:00PM (1 child)
Yes, you won... barely... yet you lost the popular vote.
Why?, How? Because South Park's vision of the election between a turd sandwich and a giant douche came true. There were as many democrats that hated Hillary as there were Republicans that hate trump.
Who lost? The american people... regardless of the outcome.
As for cyber savvy? Your internet usage of twitter is the most telling of all. It is about as intelligent as cats saying "I can has cheezburger." At least a small percentage of people found the latter humorous for a short period of time.
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 2, Redundant) by realDonaldTrump on Monday February 26 2018, @04:45PM
Our Constitution is great. We defend our Constitution, and we believe in the wisdom of our Founders. They worked very hard on that one. They were very smart guys, they put a lot of thought into it. Into, should we have elections. And how should our elections work. All in the Constitution. And they saw that going by the popular vote could bring many problems. Many problems. So they said, let's not do that, we'll have an Electoral College. Where you don't vote for the President. You vote for a guy. Or now we have some ladies in the mix, right? And a bunch of THOSE guys get together, they vote for the President. And it's worked very well. Even for Crooked Hillary and her supporters. Even though she lost OVERWHELMINGLY. Because it's worked very well for America. If she'd become President, very bad for our Country. As you know. And the Clintons & their people are part of our One Team, One People, One American Family. But they're not in my White Houses and that's a good thing. I know you agree on that one.
2000, were you around in 2000? Let me tell you, we had a VERY SPECIAL election. Where, for a little while, people didn't know which way it would go. Bush or Gore, right? Very famous election at the time. Big debate over Florida, counting the votes in Florida. And recounting them. So many people say it was rigged by Low Energy Jeb. Obviously, it was rigged. People don't know this, but probably Gore's guys would have gotten into the Electoral College if they recounted a little bit differently -- not the way Gore asked for. But that didn't happen, we got Dubya. A TOTAL DISASTER, as everyone knows.
And people said, what about the popular vote, let's go by the popular vote. So we can have our President Gore. Those are very FOOLISH people. Because the Bush campaign, the Gore campaign, they were campaigning all along to get their guys into the Electoral College. Not to win the popular vote. If you look at the popular vote, it was close. Like 500,000. If the Dems took out Ralph Nader -- people don't know, he was running for President -- probably not so close. The Clintons know some guys that do that kind of thing, you know? They call it wet work. But campaigning for the popular vote, very different kind of campaign. You go different places, you say different things. To play to the city folks more. And maybe, probably, Dubya could have won the popular vote if he tried, he was very big in Texas. So many people in Texas! Maybe sneak some money over to Nader, right? And the Dems knew that. They didn't say, let's change our Constitution and have the popular vote. They didn't seriously try to change it. There's a couple of ways to change it, you can do an amendment. Or hold a convention. We're doing the convention, as you know.
You say the American people are LOSING. They tell me I'm doing a GREAT JOB. My approval ratings right now are magnificent. 50%. That's better than Obama had after his First Year. I think Parkland has a lot to do with it, I'm moving very strongly to PROTECT THE CHILDREN and people love that. They see that I always put America First. Always, always.
My tweets, a lot of those are Dan Scavino numbers. And they've taken me very far. Obama, supposedly he has more followers. A lot of them are Fake, they're bots. But can you remember even one Obama tweet? They're very boring! Mine are so much fun. People remember mine. They talk about them. Our Fake News media love to talk about them, to write about them. People want to know, what's Donald J. Trump going to do next? I'm VERY UNPREDICTABLE, something our enemies need to keep in mind. But -- spoiler alert -- I'm going to be President for a few more seasons. More than a few. Somebody said I'm keeping Twitter in business single handedly. It's so true. I am Twitter. And you see people writing "Sad!" all the time now. That's from my tweets, it's caught on tremendously. I call it WINNING!
(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Monday February 26 2018, @11:59PM
Wow. I should have known the Dems would be all over this story. And VERY UNFAIRLY moderating. As if thanking my campaign people -- my Social Media Manager, my media buyer, my strategic communication consultants -- is somehow "Offtopic" and "Redundant" to a story about my campaign's Social Media buys. They're SORE LOSERS. Who don't know, who don't want to know, how I won. Or how Crooked Hillary lost. "What Happened," they don't know, they don't care. They just keep telling themselves, "oh, Russia, Russia, Russia." And maybe Russia did interfere, did try to interfere. I don't know, I never said they didn't. But I know I had some VERY SMART people working for me, they did a GREAT JOB.
While the Dems did something very corrupt, that they've been doing since 1968. They call it superdelegates, it's a VERY CORRUPT way of not listening to their members. And I was a member, I was a Democrat. I'm from New York, it's very solid for the Dems. But I quit because I saw what a mess it was. And the superdelegates, as everybody knows, picked a terrible candidate. They picked the vessel of all of the global special interests -- including Russians -- seeking to run our government and our lives. And the American people, overwhelmingly, told her "NO!"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 27 2018, @04:00AM
I'm so glad Trump was able to win the electoral college vote by spending only $600M. It's a great sign that the plutocracy is over.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 26 2018, @09:28AM (1 child)
At least now WIRED is admitting it wasn't Russians.
To say the ads were "problematic" is to admit you were "With Her". No, they weren't problematic. They were efficient, helping to save us from ruin even though she and her minions spent twice as much.
(Score: 4, Disagree) by jimtheowl on Monday February 26 2018, @09:43AM
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Virindi on Monday February 26 2018, @09:46AM (1 child)
So, ads are sold by clicks rather than views, and as a result ads which are more likely to get a click are priced lower.
Based on the way it is sold, the pricing model makes sense. But it is an absolutely terrible idea to sell it that way. They are encouraging the worst possible ads! Is that really what they want on their platform?
Or have they decided that the average Facebook user is so conditioned to have crap shoveled in their face, that having the worst possible, most distracting ads is just part of life for them?
If they are right that their users don't care, that is extremely sad.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Bot on Monday February 26 2018, @11:52AM
It is as if FB and Youtube wanted users to LOSE TIME on their platform.
I add youtube because promoting videos whose thumbnail is not part of the footage and clearly altered is otherwise retarded.
Do you believe retards rule the world? think again.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Monday February 26 2018, @11:48AM
Obama sold HOPE and CHANGE.
Trump just said "see?" to those who got no hope and change for the worst.
Wired can retroactively come with all the theories they want, they are not falsifiable. Trump is likely another puppet anyway.
Account abandoned.