It’s a problem that can occur in any field. In the run up to the 2008 financial crisis, banks paid bonuses to traders and salesmen based on their recent profits. This encouraged trading strategies that would reap benefits in the short-term, with little regard for the future. Metrics have even shaped literature. When Alexandre Dumas first wrote The Three Musketeers in serialised form, his publisher paid him by the line. Dumas therefore added the servant character Grimaud, who spoke in short sentences, to stretch out the text (then killed him off when the publisher said that short lines didn’t count).[75]
Relying on measurements like clicks or likes can give a misleading impression of how people are truly behaving. During 2007–8, over 1.1 million people joined the ‘Save Darfur’ cause on Facebook, which aimed to raise money and attention in response to the conflict in Sudan. A few of the new members donated and recruited others, but most did nothing. Of the people who joined, only 28 per cent recruited someone else, and a mere 0.2 per cent donated.[76]
Despite these measurement issues, there has been a growing focus on making stories clickable and shareable. Such packaging can be highly effective. When researchers at Columbia University and the French National Institute looked at mainstream news articles mentioned by Twitter users, they found that almost 60 per cent of the links were never clicked on.[77] But this didn’t stop some of the stories spreading: users shared thousands of posts featuring one of these never-clicked-on links. Evidently, many of us are happier to share something than to read it.
Perhaps it’s not that surprising, given that certain types of behaviour require more effort than others. Dean Eckles, a former data scientist at Facebook, points out that it doesn’t take much to get people to interact with social media in simple ways. ‘That’s a behaviour that’s relatively easy to produce,’ he said.[78] ‘The behaviour we’re talking about is whether your friends like or comment on the post.’ Because people don’t have to put much effort into performing such actions, it’s much easier to get them to act. ‘It’s a light touch nudge for an easy to accomplish, low-cost behaviour.’
This creates a challenge for marketers. An advertising campaign might generate a lot of likes and clicks, but this isn’t quite the behaviour they’re interested in. They don’t just want people to interact with their content; they eventually want people to buy their product or believe in their message. Just as people with more followers won’t necessarily generate larger cascades, content that’s more clickable or shareable won’t automatically generate more revenue or advocacy.
When we’re faced with a new disease outbreak, there are generally two things we want to know. What are the main routes of transmission? And which of these routes should we target to control the infection? Marketers face a similar task when designing a campaign. First, they need to know the ways someone can be exposed to a message; then they need to decide which of these routes to target. The difference, of course, is that whereas health agencies spend money to block the crucial paths of transmission, advertising agencies put money into expanding them.
Ultimately, it’s a question of cost-effectiveness. Whether we’re dealing with a disease outbreak or marketing campaign, we want to find the best way to allocate a limited budget. The problem is that historically it’s not always been clear which path leads to which outcome. ‘Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half,’ as marketing pioneer John Wanamaker supposedly once said. [79]
Modern marketing has tried to tackle this problem by linking the ads people see to the actions they take afterwards. In recent years, most major websites have employed ad tracking; if companies advertise on them, they know if we saw the ads as well as whether we browsed or bought anything afterwards. Likewise, if we take an interest in their product, a company can follow us around the internet, showing us more ads.[80]
When we click on a website link, we often become the subject of a high-speed bidding war. Within about 0.03 seconds, the website server will gather all the information they have about us and send it to its ad provider. The provider then shows this information to a group of automated traders acting on behalf of advertisers. After another 0.07 seconds, the traders will have bid for the right to show us an advert. The ad provider selects the winning bid and sends the advert to our browser, which slots the advert into the webpage as it loads on the screen.[81]
People don’t always realise that websites work in this way. In March 2013, the UK Labour party tweeted a link to a new press release criticising then Education Secretary Michael Gove. One Conservative MP responded by tweeting about the choice of advert on Labour’s website. ‘I know Labour are short of cash but having an invitation to “Date Arab girls” at top of your press release?’ he wrote. Unfortunately for the MP, other users pointed out that the Labour page featured targeted advertising: the offer on display was likely to depend on a user’s specific online activity.[82]
Some of the most advanced tracking has cropped up in places we might least expect it. To investigate the extent of online targeting, journalism researcher Jonathan Albright spent early 2017 visiting over a hundred extreme propaganda websites, the sort of places that are full of conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, and far-right political views. Most of the websites
