How Secret Algorithms Are Crushing Conservative Media

What happens is that one company's algorithm scans your article for content. It then shares those results with various other algos looking for smart places to place their company's ads. If your content matches up with an advertiser's target audience, the algos enter a brief (milliseconds) negotiation over the price, ads are placed on your column, and you make a little advertising money.

But algos are dumb. The can scan my perfectly innocuous column about knittingbots, and even though the content is actually rather dry social issues, decide that what I'm actually peddling is smut. PJM decided to demonetize the knittingbot article to avoid running afoul of the algorithms, which could affect the entire site. The net result is that my knittingbot column is generating lots of traffic, but it's actually costing my company money to host it.

You know I don't write that kind of stuff, and you know that PJMedia doesn't publish that kind of stuff. And yet we, and other companies just like us, lose money every single day because of this digital defamation.

We've also been forced to a place where we can't discuss important social, legal, and technological issues without having to use ridiculous euphemisms like "knittingbots." Not, that is, if we want to stay in business.

It's fraud, too. Algos are representing my work and PJM's publication as something they're not, in ways that hurt us financially, and presumably to the benefit of just-as-clean sites that haven't been red-flagged. While I can't prove anything, due to the ad algos being both opaque and invisible (you can't see it working), I somehow doubt that the major, left-wing publications get the same red-flag treatment. The New York Times has published a number of pieces about knittingbots dating back to 2007, but it's a safe bet that the ad networks haven't tagged the entire nytimes.com domain with the ruinous red flag.

What to do? Proving defamation is nearly impossible in this country, especially the digital variety. Antitrust is fraught with risk, too. A few weeks ago I wrote a piece ("Hotel Googlefornia") concluding "Break. Them. Up.," but even so I continue to go back and forth on the issue. As I snarked on Facebook the other day:

https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/how-secret-algorithms-are-crushing-conservative-media/