The Broken Rube Goldberg Machine of Online Advertising
Today, we\u2019re bringing you another episode of Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem.
In a 2018 Senate hearing, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg responded to a question about how his company makes money with a line that quickly became famous: \u201cSenator, we sell ads.\u201d And indeed, when you open up your Facebook page\u2014or most other pages on the internet\u2014you\u2019ll find advertisements of all sorts following you around. Sometimes they\u2019re things you might really be interested in buying, even if you\u2019ve never heard of them before\u2014tailored to your interests with spooky accuracy. Other times, they\u2019re redundant or just \u2026 weird. Like the aid for a pair of strange plaid pajamas with a onesie-style flap on the bottom that briefly took over the internet in December 2020.
Shoshana Wodinsky, a staff reporter at Gizmodo, wrote a great piece explaining how exactly those onesie pajamas made their way to so many people\u2019s screens. She\u2019s one of very few reporters covering the business of online advertisements outside industry publications\u2014so Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke to her this week about what it\u2019s like reporting on ads. How exactly does ad technology work? Why is it that the ad ecosystem gets so little public attention, even as it undergirds the internet as we know it? And what\u2019s the connection between online ads and content moderation?
It\u2019s the Lawfare Podcast, September 16: The Broken Rube Goldberg Machine of Online Advertising
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