ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the relationship between our expectations for democracy, especially for the First Amendment’s guarantee of uncensored speech, and the realities of media institutions operating within a capitalist framework whose primary focus is on profit. This results in a clash between expectations for civil discourse and the realities of what attracts people’s attention, especially in the digital domain. The use of analytics and deployment of algorithms that make the decisions about the placement of ads is often at odds with the preferences advertisers themselves have about placement of their messages adjacent to compatible editorial content. This can result in advertisers’ messages being judged by target audiences based on a context that they do not choose, possibly resulting in rejection of the ads’ messages. It can also result in advertisers being assumed to be responsible for editorial comment they do not, in fact, endorse.
