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4-3.pptxBusiness Ethics Summer 2022 (1) Week 4, Lecture 3
Chaeyoung Paek
In today’s class…
We’ll look at Daniel Susser, Beate Roessler, and Helen Nissenbaum’s argument about how online advertising manipulates the audience.
There will be an in-class activity for this class.
Online Advertising & Manipulation
In “Technology, autonomy, and manipulation,” Susser, Roessler, and Nissenbaum provide their definition of online manipulation, explain the harms of online manipulation, and then provide some potential solutions.
They argue that (online) manipulation harms people in a distinctive way: it violates their autonomy.
Cf. O’Neil pointed out that targeted online ads are harmful because they can potentially harm so many people so effectively.
What is manipulation?
To manipulate A is to intentionally and covertly influence A’s decision-making, by targeting and exploiting their decision-making vulnerabilities.
(ex) Making your significant other drive for you + Crying
Manipulation is hidden influence; it should be differentiated from influencing others’ decision-making processes explicitly.
What is manipulation?
Two forthright forms of influence:
Persuasion: To persuade A is to attempt to influence A by offering reasons that A can think and evaluate.
(ex) Making your significant other drive for you + Explain why they should drive
2. Coercion: To coerce A to X is to influence A by constraining A’s options so that only rational option for A would be to X.
(ex) Making your significant other drive for you + Gun to their head
What is manipulation?
The distinct harm of manipulation is that it violates our capacity for self-authorship.
It undermines our ability and right to determine how and why we ought to live.
Explicitly influencing others’ decision-making processes does not harm people in this way.
(ex) Coercion: harmful as well, but does not undermine one’s self-authorship.
Cf. Deception, in this sense, is a special kind of manipulation.
To deceive A is to covertly influence A by planting false beliefs.
What is manipulation?
Influencing someone to X is not always bad by itself; for instance, not all cases of “nudging” are manipulative.
(Thaler & Sunstein) To nudge A is to intentionally alter A’s decision-making context (their “choice architecture”) in order to influence A’s decision-making outcome.
(ex) Placing healthier foods at eye level and less healthy foods below or above
Some cases of nudging intend to correct cognitive biases & not so covert; these are not cases of manipulation.
(ex) Adding nutritional labels on grocery items
Online Manipulation
Online manipulation = the use of information technology to covertly influence another person’s decision-making, by targeting and exploiting decision-making vulnerabilities.
Online manipulation often make use of cognitive biases and individual-specific vulnerabilities.
Cognitive bias: common, systematic errors in human reasoning
(ex) Anchoring, confirmation bias, framing effects
Online Manipulation
Online manipulation often make use of cognitive biases and individual-specific vulnerabilities.
Digital platforms detect and read each user’s behavior pattern; then they configure themselves with that information to continue to learn about them.
(ex) Facebook strategy document about the ability to detect when teenage users are feeling insecure
By using cognitive biases and individual-specific vulnerabilities, advertisers on online platforms can manipulate the users very effectively.
The Harm of Online Manipulation
Q. But as the authors admit, not all cases of influencing other people are harmful; so what’s so wrong about online manipulation?
It violates its target’s autonomy.
Autonomy = an individual’s capacity to make meaningfully independent decisions.
(ex) What you’ll do after you graduate UMass
(Susser et al.) Autonomy is the foundation of liberal democratic societies; without autonomy, we cannot value our capacity to collectively self-govern.
The Harm of Online Manipulation
2 ways that online manipulation violates autonomy:
It can lead people to act toward ends they haven’t chosen; and
It can lead people to act for reasons not authentically their own.
The Harm of Online Manipulation
Online manipulation can lead people to act toward ends they haven’t chosen.
In online ads, advertisers can construct decision-making environments that work for them, not for the audience.
(ex) Countdown clocks/Promoting new, expensive items first
All ads do this to some extent; but online ads can be really covert in making the customers forget their own purposes.
The Harm of Online Manipulation
2. Online manipulation can lead people to act for reasons not authentically their own.
Many online ads are on social networking platforms.
This has the effect of making the platform users conflate the reason why they want certain things.
(ex) Chat about what to eat + restaurant ad
Native advertising also intends to covertly deceive the audience; they might think that they’re reading honest reviews and making rational choices, but their reasoning is not really based on honest reviews!
The Harm of Online Manipulation
By violating autonomy in these two ways, online manipulation…
threatens our competency to deliberate about our options, form intentions about them, and act on the basis of those intentions; and
challenges our capacity to reflect on and endorse our reasons for acting as authentically on our own.
threatens democracy as well.
The Harm of Online Manipulation
Q. But maybe there could be “good online manipulation”; perhaps online ads could target and manipulate people with unhealthy lifestyle to change their behaviors. What’s the harm in that?
Even though manipulation may help its target achieve their own goal, manipulation is still harmful.
The fundamental harm of manipulation is to the process of decision-making, not its outcomes.
What makes A to do X should be transparent to A; if A is manipulated into doing X, then A ends up being alienated from their own action and reasoning.
Potential Solutions
Q. If online manipulation is that harmful, what should we do to mitigate its harm?
Curtail digital surveillance.
Enormous data, which is made available by digital surveillance, is what makes online manipulation possible.
So, curtailing digital surveillance would cut online manipulation by its source.
(ex) Federal privacy protection legislation
Potential Solutions
2. Problematise personalization.
Data collectors (big online platforms, e.g., Facebook, Google, etc.) often argue that they need to gather a lot of information in order to personalize their services to each user.
But it’s clear that personalization does more harm than good.
(ex) Dynamic pricing
We should be more aware that personalization could be harmful & reject lazy arguments based on the benefits of personalization.
Potential Solutions
3. Promote awareness and understanding.
Since the most harmful aspect of manipulation is that it is covert, increased awareness is the key to the solution.
For instance, simply notifying people about how they gather and use private information by sending the privacy notice is not enough.
We should demand that online platforms make their decision-process more explainable, transparent, and accountable.
Potential Solutions
4. Attend to context.
But we should keep in mind that what counts as manipulation and how harmful we find each case of manipulation depends on social contexts.
For instance, it would be not effective to demand all countries to take the exact same measures against online platforms.
And even in one society, online manipulation regarding certain issues may be treated differently than the others.
(ex) Political issues vs. Local restaurant pop-up ads
Exercise: Some remaining thoughts
Go to the course Blackboard page and click “4-3 In-class Activity” under the lecture video.
Click “Create thread” and fill in your answers; click “submit” at the end.
This should take about 5-7 minutes; come back to the lecture video after you submit your response.
Since this activity take place on a discussion forum, you’ll be able to see others’ responses & comment on them. (No need to comment on others’ responses if you don’t want to.)
For the next class…
We’ll keep talking about advertising and whether advertising really manipulate us for the first lecture of Week 5.
Then we’ll move on to a new topic: exploitation and the ethics of sweatshop labor.
For the next class, read Andrew Johnson, “A New Take on Deceptive Advertising” (Skip section III; some parts of section IV omitted).
