Final Rating: 2/5
Note: The views and opinions in this review reflect those of the author alone and not of any other organization.
When people ask me what my day job is, I usually go with something along the lines of “You know those ads that follow you around the internet? That’s my fault, sorry.” I’ve worked in the ad tech industry for over a decade at this point, mostly on the publisher/sell-side (i.e. working for or on behalf of websites that are looking to make money through selling ad slots to advertisers aka the buy-side of the ad marketplace). For all the ills that digital advertising may have caused in society (as the subject of this review covers), I’m ever an optimist and do believe in the broader ability of a free and open internet to facilitate positive change in the world – be it letting me connect with Dakota to write these movie reviews, or literally meeting my future wife in the comments section of a blog about the MTV show America’s Best Dance Crew.
With that in mind – as someone who works in the industry and has that somewhat optimistic point of view, I knew that I had to be the one to review The Click Trap, directed by Peter Porta. Over the course of about 80 minutes in a number of talking head interviews with politicians and watchdog groups, we are shown the gamut of the worst that digital advertising enables/funds, including:
- Brands/Advertisers (the buy side) having their ads showing up on disinformation websites such as Breitbart or The Daily Mail by way of Google Ads, or on various fraudulent imitator sites.
- Social Media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter directing traffic to disinformation websites, which leads to the proliferation of such fake news sites displacing high quality news sites.
- Social media platform algorithms allowed for hateful groups and ideologies to proliferate and organize leading to events such as the January 6th insurrection and ethnic violence in Myanmar (also driven by Facebook’s Internet.org initiative to get a relatively unmoderated, Facebook centric version of the internet to developing countries).
- Data brokers selling your information online, including letting pro-life groups target people who visited Planned Parenthood.
- Digital ads allow scammers to reach vulnerable, relatively digital-illiterate users to steal their money.
As someone who’s been in the industry, I’m very aware of these problems, and I know a lot of my colleagues are as well – mostly because these also affect our ability to do our jobs effectively. I think that’s the first issue I have with this documentary – it broadly paints the industry as not really caring about these issues when we very much do.
While I can’t speak specifically to Facebook and Youtube’s algorithms, in the broader digital advertising space for example, in 2017 the ads.txt initiative was adopted by most major publications to prevent copycat sites from spoofing their sites to steal legitimate ad revenue. Likewise, the current talk of the industry is how to define “Made for Advertising” low quality websites that often deal with misinformation, so that the sell side advertisers can more efficiently block these non-brand safe sites from their buy lists and spend on more brand safe publishers.
Part of the broadness I think comes from the conflation of Google and Facebook as the entire industry (which without a doubt they are a big part of), with the broader ecosystem of other players. I also found it very curious that this documentary barely touched on TikTok which arguably has the most invasive data collection, having the functionality to track your keystrokes on other websites. But the conflation of social media platforms with the broader digital ad ecosystem felt like it painted with too broad a brush a convenient scapegoat for this issue, and as such they cover a lot of problems without truly exploring any of them beyond a surface level.
I would have loved to see a deeper exploration of for example the impact that moving to an ad supported model has had on the journalism industry and what can be done to support such sites in a potential media apocalypse (I strongly recommend listening to this podcast from the New York Time’s Ezra Klein on the Search Engine Podcast about this very topic). Similarly, a deeper dive into the impact the Facebook specific version of the internet had on third world countries on misinformation had would be more enlightening – for example, this would be an interesting film to pair with the Ramona S Diaz Sundance documentary And So It Begins about misinformation impacting the 2022 Filipino elections (which I reviewed here on Contra Zoom).
In any case, the documentary didn’t really paint a truly compelling narrative to give anyone in particular to latch onto – it was more a collection of subject matter experts being very alarmed at the state of the world. Again, this surface level approach isn’t bad in and of itself, but imagine instead a documentary following a politician working to get the specific legislation passed and enforced from beginning to end – that would be much more compelling beyond what functionally (and ironically) amounts to doom scrolling about the state of the online world.
This ties in to probably my biggest gripe as an industry professional with the film; a relative lack of a call to action for what should be done in order to resolve all of the above issues. They do talk about increased regulation, particularly on the European front (which I have personally worked on to make sure my websites are compliant). But they also acknowledge that these technologies are so entrenched and useful in our lives that going full Luddite and simply not using them isn’t a practical solution either.
The truth of the matter is that a lot of regulation is, and has been ongoing. I have yet to see a documentary or mainstream news outlet really cover in depth the details of the ongoing DOJ lawsuit of Google monopolizing the ad market from the sell side, the buy side and the technology used in the middle, something that anyone working in digital advertising had been talking about for years prior.
As someone on the inside, for better or worse changing an industry this large is slow moving. Google for example has started rolling back those tracking cookies on Chrome to comply with UK regulation from 2021, with a full rollback delayed for the third time just recently (and people have been talking about the coming death of the cookie for longer than I’ve been working in the industry).
Until we as a society untrain ourselves from expecting everything for free online, simply removing advertising and everything that comes with it from the internet would perhaps cause even more untold hard to the bright side of the internet, such as social media allowing for progressive activism to organize and be made aware of issues they need to talk about, or legitimate investigative journalism to combat fake news.
Overall, The Click Trap I think does an okay job at laying out a case that Big Tech’s use of advertising as the primary source of monetization has led to various social ills, especially for someone who outside of the industry may be hearing about these for the first time (though frankly I don’t think it should be a surprise to anyone online at this point). Where it falls short for me as an industry professional is getting really into the weeds with any one particular issue. Instead taking a relatively surface level approach and conflating the biggest players in the industry with the entire industry.
Likewise, as a film critic, I find it lacks any really compelling internal narrative structure, while also overlooking recent developments in the industry that at least work toward a society. And while I wouldn’t expect it to make the case that there is still good to come out of using an ad supported internet, at least recognizing developments in the industry working toward a solution to the issues would be nice.
Over the last decade, as I’ve worked in the ad-tech industry, I’ve lost a bit of the idealistic optimism I had going in about the ability of the internet to be a force for good as I’ve had to face the realities of how it can be abused, just like other tool humanity has created. I don’t use TikTok, and while I don’t use an ad blocker, I don’t fault those who do. While the concerns of the folks who appear in The Click Trap are valid, I also think beyond just regulating the industry to minimize the harm it can cause (because let’s be real, capitalism optimizes for profit but not for social good), working to deal with those who are using the tools to spread disinformation or hate speech or scamming outside of their use of ad tech is the real solution here.
The question the film never quite asks explicitly and also never quite answers is one I ponder all the time – how many terrible things does a technology have to enable before it outweighs the good said technology can provide? And how much are these issues the fault of the platform themselves, and how much is it of the users of the platforms? I’m perhaps (probably) biased due to working in the industry, but I’d like to think there are more good people out there fighting to fix the flaws than those who are working to exploit it.
The Click Trap was seen during the 2024 Hot Docs Film Festival. Thank you to Java Films for the screener. Check out our Hot Docs wrap up podcast.
