Name: Holly Baumann

Social Justice Group: 2022-2023, Technology: Online Radicalization

Date of Fieldwork: January 24, 2023

Name of Organization and person (people) with whom you met and their title(s):

Type of Fieldwork: Interview

What I did and what I learned about my topic, activism, social justice work or civil and human rights work from this fieldwork?[:: :

On Tuesday, January 24th at 2:00, me and my group had a called with Denise Zaraya and Andrew King who work at IAS (Integral Ad Science). IAS is a company that analyses advertising on the internet, and checks to see if its appropriate and safe.

In our interview with them, they taught us a bit of how the system works, and why it is useful. We talked a bit about current events, like how Elon Musk just bought twitter, and how he discovered how many bots there were. To lessen the amount of these bots, he introduced a subscription plan. Besides that, we talked about how on social media platforms, there is a massive amount of bots and false advertisements, thats purpose is to cause a stir to get more engagement. When we asked them why these bots are even there, they responded by saying that the main reason is to make money.

Andrew and Denise gave us a lot of information about how they censor certain ads online, and why it is helpful.