The advertising ecosystem has been progressively reshaped by computational advertising models facilitated and controlled by digital media platforms. Platform advertising operated by dominant players Meta (Facebook) and Alphabet (Google) have been heavily criticised for using data generated by users on and off the platforms to promote and target advertising for harmful and unhealthy products to vulnerable consumers and create unhealthy online information environments with opaque algorithms and machine learning. The operations and impacts of these systems remain difficult to observe and almost impossible to hold accountable.

The Australian Ad Observatory responds to this challenge by creating a methodological framework and research infrastructure integrating cultural, legal, media, and computational perspectives to enable the observation of computational advertising with a view to better understanding and monitoring and accountability of online advertising.

In this talk Christine Parker will describe how the Australian Ad Observatory works to enable scalable and participant-situated research, overcoming limitations posed by restricted platform access to computational advertising data. Using the Ad Observatory's work on gambling, alcohol, greenwashing, scam and unhealthy food advertising as examples, Christine will discuss possibilities and challenges for both state and civil society actors seeking to regulate, monitor, and hold accountable platforms and advertisers for their roles in creating unhealthy online advertising environments.

About the speaker

Professor Christine Parker is a Professor of Law at University of Melbourne, a Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision Making and Society (ADM+S) and a PhD graduate of the ANU program that later became RegNet. She teaches and researches on lawyers’ ethics, regulatory studies and corporate accountability. Professor Parker’s books include The Open Corporation: Business Self-Regulation and Democracy; Explaining Compliance: Business Responses to Regulation, and influential critical text, Inside Lawyers’ Ethics. Her recent work seeks to develop the concept of ecological regulation applied particularly to the food system and to the digital platform economy.

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This seminar presentation is a dual-delivery event. Registration is not required for in-person attendance as neither the ANU nor ACT Health conduct contact tracing.

If you require accessibility accommodations or a visitor Personal Emergency Evacuation Plan please email regnet.communications@anu.edu.au.

Image credit: Image of patchwork of small colourful social media ads with a blue line snaking through it, derived from project data, supplied by the speaker.