The Guardian view on ad tech: a tangled web | Editorial

Martin Lewis is suing Facebook. The question is whether companies can be held responsible for the behaviour of their softwareMartin Lewis, the consumer advice and money-saving expert, is suing Facebook in a case that threatens the dominant business model of publishing on the internet. It raises in a very sharp form the question of responsibility for what appears on a user’s screen: is the owner of the site responsible for the content that appears there, even though no human eye may ever have seen it? Facebook and in fact all the ad-supported businesses on the internet maintain that they are platforms, not publishers. Their responsibility extends only to content they know about. Is this enough? Should they also be responsible for content they might reasonably anticipate?Facebook’s defence is that it has taken down individual adverts as they are reported; Lewis counter charges that they are soon, predictably, replaced with almost identical ones. It does appear odd that Facebook, which is extremely keen on facial recognition and can label the people in friends’ photograph feed with sometimes disconcerting accuracy, is apparently unable to recognise the face of a television personality made as recognisable as possible or to kill automatically any ad in which it appears. In a similar way, YouTube, owned by Google, is far more successful at keeping pornography off the site than it is at keeping off incitements to hatred or bullying. All that really frightens them is the thought... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'

[ The Guardian | 2018-04-23 00:00:00 UTC ]

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