Now that AT&T and Time Warner's merger was approved by the department of justice, will confirmation bias slip even more into traditional advertising channels?
AT&T-Time Warner- What It Means for Your Advertising
Summary: The DOJ approved AT&T's $85B takeover bid for Time Warner. Over the past year, AT&T has been building out an ad and analytics units that they claim will do for automated advertising for premium video and advertising like how social media revolutionized digital advertising. Their goal is to be more precise with targeted advertising.
Opinion: I spoke about this a few months back when the merger was announced. While I like the idea of seeing ad content that is more relevant to me, my concern arose when thinking about confirmation bias in this setting. For example, I lean left politically. With this deal, I imagine I would be served more content that is left leaning. However, I like to know how people who lean to the right politically are considering views to better educate myself. With targeted traditional advertising, I would have make a concerted effort to seek out that info still. It is that much more effort I (or anyone) would have to put into learning from an opposing view, which may further confirmation bias.
Summary: Snapchat has launched a developer platform. Using its APIs, developers can integrate Snap's login, create Bitmoji avatars into their keyboards, display public Our Stories and Snap Map content, and generate branded stickers with referral links users can share back inside Snapchat. Initial partners include Tinder (allowing users to bring Bitmojis into chats) and others. Their biggest selling point is privacy on the Kit, not allowing anyone to share social graphs with apps, to prevent a Cambridge Analytica mishap.
Opinion: Snap has a window of privacy advantage over Facebook right now, and it's good they are capitalizing on it. User privacy, especially on this platform which originated based on stories disappearing within 24-hours (things you don't want others to see for long), is especially key.
Summary: In an effort to be more transparent and educate people about data collection, Google has highlighted features of Why This Ad and Ad Settings, where users can turn off targeted ads to them. These have existed for some time, but many people haven't seen how it exists.
Opinion: Transparency and communication always help with user trust instead of people coming to their own conclusions on how their data is being used.
