Google, Facebook and Amazon will all be focuses of antitrust cases in the year ahead, but a Trump administration will take a different approach to antitrust enforcement than Biden’s has.
“In the past, we’ve studied social media ads as if they’re just like a billboard or a print magazine ad when they’re not,” said advertising professor Matthew Pittman. “You’re seeing an ad from any number of sources.”
Several factors have pushed up the cost of ads during the pandemic. Even so, many small businesses don’t have much of a choice but to keep advertising.
A complaint to the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission alleges that these algorithms may be recreating hiring biases — unintentionally, in some cases, but still illegally.
Irish regulators fined the social media company about $275 million after an investigation found that it failed to prevent unauthorized access to half a billion Facebook users’ personal information.