Rob's Notes 12: How Much Should We Invest in Trustworthiness?
My opinion piece about measuring abuse & trust in online advertising
I’ve always struggled to provide an objective answer to variations of the question “are the big platforms spending enough on trust and safety?”. I wrote an opinion piece for Tech Policy Press this week that attempted to give a version of an answer (at least for the commercial part I’m most familiar with). I was grateful that it resonated with several experts I know, and a few journalists who understand online advertising very well. Two of them DM’d me:
“your idea in the op ed, particularly some sort of league table, would really help in holding the platforms to account.”
“Nice op-ed, by the way. Kudos on building the Facebook Ad Library. I was a fan.”
Here’s how it starts, follow this link to read the whole thing!
“When it comes to understanding abuse in the enormously profitable online ads market, large tech platforms currently grade their own homework. Today, all we get from the platforms are reports touting how many millions of violating ads they take down, how many thousands of reviewers they have, or how much money they’ve spent on platform safety. These are as non-comparable as mattress prices, and are little more than media talking points.
And yet there is hope! Regulators in the EU and beyond now require certain basic ad transparency measures from tech platforms. But, by requiring regular disclosures of a sizable random sample of data, regulators could empower third parties to compare platforms’ progress against one another and against clear and understandable baselines.”
Source: DALL-E