SaTC: CORE: Medium: Increasing user autonomy and advertiser and platform responsibility in online advertising

Northeastern University, Boston MA

Investigators

Abstract

Popular social media services are primarily funded by powerful advertising systems built using data collected from users. While social media's advertising platforms are becoming more feature-rich and powerful, the underlying services themselves are increasingly embedded—--and influential--—in everyone's daily lives. Unfortunately, these advertising systems are opaque and difficult to study. Using complex techniques to overcome these systems' resistance to study, scientists and journalists have begun documenting the harms of the advertising experiences created by online services' advertising systems. This project introduces novel techniques to study users' advertising experiences and the role of advertisers and advertising platforms in creating those experiences. The project will contribute to improving the advertising ecosystem by strengthening the autonomy of end users, as well as ensuring accountability of advertisers and advertising platforms. The project consists of three thrusts, each focusing on a different stakeholder: (1) users, (2) advertisers, and (3) online services. First, the project team is conducting a series of replicable controlled experiments to evaluate the extent to which the controls provided by platforms meaningfully empower users to change the ads they receive and develop improved user controls. Second, the team is focusing on online ad libraries, which provide targeting and delivery information for certain categories of ads. They are collecting this data at scale for all available U.S. advertisers, to develop replicable approaches for measuring (a) how advertisers are using (and abusing) targeting features, (b) the extent to which platform algorithms are steering ads to biased groups, and (c) the consequences of observed advertiser behavior for legislative and regulatory proposals. Third, the project team is focusing on the online service itself; the team is introducing novel techniques that creatively use advertiser tools to study the impact of potential discrimination on intersectional groups. Overall, this project will help (a) promote change in online services' advertising systems toward mitigating negative individual and societal effects, (b) provide replicable approaches to monitoring autonomy and bias concerns in online advertising, and (c) raise awareness among regulators and lawmakers about the extensive and opaque advertising ecosystem that powers these services. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.