88 research outputs found
Before Blue Birds Became X-tinct: Understanding the Effect of Regime Change on Twitter's Advertising and Compliance of Advertising Policies
Social media platforms, including Twitter (now X), have policies in place to
maintain a safe and trustworthy advertising environment. However, the extent to
which these policies are adhered to and enforced remains a subject of interest
and concern. We present the first large-scale audit of advertising on Twitter
focusing on compliance with the platform's advertising policies, particularly
those related to political and adult content. We investigate the compliance of
advertisements on Twitter with the platform's stated policies and the impact of
recent acquisition on the advertising activity of the platform. By analyzing
34K advertisements from ~6M tweets, collected over six months, we find evidence
of widespread noncompliance with Twitter's political and adult content
advertising policies suggesting a lack of effective ad content moderation. We
also find that Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter had a noticeable impact on
the advertising landscape, with most existing advertisers either completely
stopping their advertising activity or reducing it. Major brands decreased
their advertising on Twitter, suggesting a negative immediate effect on the
platform's advertising revenue. Our findings underscore the importance of
external audits to monitor compliance and improve transparency in online
advertising
The Inventory is Dark and Full of Misinformation: Understanding the Abuse of Ad Inventory Pooling in the Ad-Tech Supply Chain
Ad-tech enables publishers to programmatically sell their ad inventory to
millions of demand partners through a complex supply chain. Bogus or low
quality publishers can exploit the opaque nature of the ad-tech to deceptively
monetize their ad inventory. In this paper, we investigate for the first time
how misinformation sites subvert the ad-tech transparency standards and pool
their ad inventory with unrelated sites to circumvent brand safety protections.
We find that a few major ad exchanges are disproportionately responsible for
the dark pools that are exploited by misinformation websites. We further find
evidence that dark pooling allows misinformation sites to deceptively sell
their ad inventory to reputable brands. We conclude with a discussion of
potential countermeasures such as better vetting of ad exchange partners,
adoption of new ad-tech transparency standards that enable end-to-end
validation of the ad-tech supply chain, as well as widespread deployment of
independent audits like ours.Comment: To appear at IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy (Oakland) 202
Blocking JavaScript without Breaking the Web: An Empirical Investigation
Modern websites heavily rely on JavaScript (JS) to implement legitimate
functionality as well as privacy-invasive advertising and tracking. Browser
extensions such as NoScript block any script not loaded by a trusted list of
endpoints, thus hoping to block privacy-invasive scripts while avoiding
breaking legitimate website functionality. In this paper, we investigate
whether blocking JS on the web is feasible without breaking legitimate
functionality. To this end, we conduct a large-scale measurement study of JS
blocking on 100K websites. We evaluate the effectiveness of different JS
blocking strategies in tracking prevention and functionality breakage. Our
evaluation relies on quantitative analysis of network requests and resource
loads as well as manual qualitative analysis of visual breakage. First, we show
that while blocking all scripts is quite effective at reducing tracking, it
significantly degrades functionality on approximately two-thirds of the tested
websites. Second, we show that selective blocking of a subset of scripts based
on a curated list achieves a better tradeoff. However, there remain
approximately 15% `mixed` scripts, which essentially merge tracking and
legitimate functionality and thus cannot be blocked without causing website
breakage. Finally, we show that fine-grained blocking of a subset of JS
methods, instead of scripts, reduces major breakage by 3.8 while
providing the same level of tracking prevention. Our work highlights the
promise and open challenges in fine-grained JS blocking for tracking prevention
without breaking the web
Impact of CEO Gender on Employee Turnover and Employee Returns
This purpose of this research was to investigate the impact of CEO gender on Employee Turnover and Returns for the year 2017 in 40 companies of Fortune 1000. This research adopted causal research design and quantitative research method. The collected data were examined by the independent sample t-test via SPSS software. The study found that CEO Gender has a significant impact on Returns per Employee in terms of profits. However, CEO Gender was not found to have any impact on Employee Turnover. The findings of the study suggest that gender of the CEO matters in giving rise to returns per employee through profit. The findings also suggested that despite gender impacts, underrepresentation of women in executive managerial positions are results of social perceptions and should be looked up to reduce gender gaps to increase organisational performance and productivity. This research also emphasises that organisational policies and practices could be implemented to encourage women into leadership positions and offer equal opportunities in terms of recruitment, pay and evaluation of performance to improve performance. Lastly, this is a pioneer research to evaluate CEO gender’s impact on Employee Turnover and Returns per Employee
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