Blog 6 — The Propaganda Machine
Propaganda Machine, Online Advertising is Chapter 4 of Cathy O’Neil’s book Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. This chapter builds upon the idea that scale, opaqueness, and damage are elements needed to create a WMD.
For-profit colleges charging exuberant rates prey on the isolated individual who don’t have a support system, don’t feel like their life is going anywhere, and don’t have the skills to plan for their future. Government regulation comes to the rescue during the Obama years, dismantling a for-profit machine called Corinthian College. This system relied heavily on federal student loans. Obama’s administration blocked access to these loans, causing Corinthian College to file for bankruptcy.
The nefarious leverage gained by exploiting private college applicants allows institutions to sharpen their knives before sealing the deal. There is no transparency to what data is being collected when applying for these so-called schools. Well-meaning applicants have no idea how their lives are being manipulated. Among the get rich quick schemes lay the get a degree fast scheme. If you pay us money, we will solve ALL your problems.
Like the venture capitalist, most of these models overlook justification in the name of profits. Where do for-profit colleges get their data from? Google and Facebook of course. Among other social media platforms, Google and Facebook accumulate billions for being able to provide meticulous, private data.
Marketing campaigns resemble fishing, casting out multiple lines with different baits determined by your zip code and online activity. The results are finetuned to catch as many fish as possible. Accelerated thanks to instant arrival of data, these promotional services “can zero in on the most effective messages and come closer to reaching the glittering promise of all advertising: to reach a prospect at the right time.” Machine learning optimizes these models, creating a new wave in performance due to petabytes of data.
Concluding with the damage done — debt — O’Neil found that “the outstanding debt for students at the bankrupt Corinthian Colleges amounted to $3.5 billion. Almost all of it was backed by taxpayers and will never be repaid.” Regulators must back new laws to govern the market of personal data. It shouldn’t be free and open. The sooner we wait, the more engrained these models become.
