Epistemic fragmentation poses a threat to the governance of online targeting

Silvia Milano, Brent D. Mittelstadt, Sandra Wachter, Christopher Russell

Abstract: Online targeting isolates individual consumers, causing what we call epistemic fragmentation. This phenomenon amplifies the harms of advertising and inflicts structural damage to the public forum. The two natural strategies to tackle the problem of regulating online targeted advertising, increasing consumer awareness and extending proactive monitoring, fail because even sophisticated individual consumers are vulnerable in isolation, and the contextual knowledge needed for effective proactive monitoring remains largely inaccessible to platforms and external regulators. The limitations of both consumer awareness and of proactive monitoring strategies can be attributed to their failure to address epistemic fragmentation. We call attention to a third possibility that we call a civic model of governance for online targeted advertising, which overcomes this problem, and describe four possible pathways to implement this model. Online targeted advertising fuelled by machine learning can lead to the isolation of individual consumers. This problem of ‘epistemic fragmentation’ cannot be tackled with current regulation strategies and a new, civic model of governance for advertising is needed.