Cash is King.
Introduction
In today's digital world, every click, search, and scroll contributes to an algorithm developed directly by us for us. Companies and platforms constantly collect, analyze, and personalize content based on the data we give out every day, shaping our online experiences in ways that are not always easy to see. This project investigates the impact of web tracking by assuming a new persona that is different from the way I would normally go about my day on social media. With this new persona, I hope to disrupt my existing algorithms and observe how quickly the content given to me changes and what new, unfamiliar content pops up. Through collecting screengrabs of advertisements and web propaganda, I hope to understand the broader implications of data mining, personalization, and digital privacy by using my regular everyday content as a control group to see the similarities and differences. With the use of personal experiences online, media literacy concepts, and course readings used throughout this semester, I hope to gain a deeper understanding of how our information is spread, consumed, and how it influences the security of our lives.
My Baseline
When looking at my digital footprint, I chose to look at the two social media I use most: Instagram and YouTube. I felt like these two different platforms would be good to look at because of the different forms of content, but the fact that they have a similar number of ads. YouTube is majority videos, and Instagram is a combination of the two, with pictures and short-form videos. When looking at my YouTube, the majority of the content is story-based, for example, murder mysteries or other scary stories. There is also a lot of music content on there, as I use YouTube a lot when I have to make longer drives or am falling asleep. When looking at Instagram, my feed consists of posts from friends and family, but mostly sports content such as golf, snowboarding, and fishing. I tend to use Instagram more consistently throughout the day, whereas YouTube is normally at specific times. The similarity between the two platforms is that I get a lot of music-based content on each, the difference is that Instagram gives me more familiar content as I follow more individuals that I know personally. In terms of the advertisements that I get when on these social media platforms, YouTube tends to give me more vague advertisements compared to Instagram, where they are a lot more personal. For example, YouTube gives me advertisements on ways to work out, politics, the military, and food/restaurants. Instagram, being more personal, gives me ads about big concerts coming up near me, useful daily items like sunglasses, sports, and clothes.
The Lottery Winner
Money is one of the biggest attention grabbers on the internet today. Many "Banks, large retail companies, and health insurance providers have also seen the opportunity to collect and profit from the information their customers are volunteering to share" (Huges, 2018). For my experiment, I would like to pose as a person who just won the lottery and is seeking out help, such as financial advisors and big flashy things to buy, like a nice house or car. To do this, I made a new Gmail account and an Instagram account with my new persona, Aaron Westbury. I noticed when making this email, I could fake everything except my phone number, in order to prove I wasn't a robot. On these platforms, I followed people advising on ways to use that money, like making high-end investments or opening accounts for the future, to hopefully see some results of a new algorithm. Scroll to see my results and analysis!
YouTube
Straight off the bat, after opening up YouTube, I got a pop-up from YouTube itself offering an AI-generated username and password. I found this interesting as I had not even clicked a button on the YouTube page to get a user to sign in, normally, you can access YouTube as a guest without having to make an account. I decided my first search would be “what to do if you win the lottery,” to which a list of videos regarding my search popped up, leading with an ad about lottery winning strategies. After noticing that, I clicked the first recommended video on my page, and an ad for a business that helps you start your own LLC called “Bizee” played. The instant effects of an obvious algorithm shocked me. I knew that I would start getting ads related to my topic soon, but in the first search. That is a little alarming.
I continued to search for a while on similar topics such as “lottery help”, “financial advice for lottery winners”, “smart ways to invest your money”, and even some more vague topics like “cool cars” or “real estate”. I also subscribed to a couple of accounts that give financial advice. When searching for the more vague topics, I noticed that YouTube would fill my search from something like “cool cars” to “cool cars for cheap”. The cheap part was intriguing to me as I was posing like I had money, but it was made since that would throw a monetary term in rather than something like “cool cars that go fast”. When I finally went back to the home page after searching, I noticed that most of my feed had similar videos to what I searched for. However, after scrolling down, I saw a recommendation for footage of a Charlotte Catholic baseball game, a high school in the Charlotte, NC area. I never watch baseball, even on my personal accounts, and I’m not from Charlotte, so this was eye-catching for me. I had never put in any information about my location when making my email or YouTube account so they must have vaguely tracked my IP address in order to give me a recommendation somewhat close to my area.
To make my Instagram account, I had to enter an email address, my name, date of birth, and password. I used the birthday 03/17/98 in case the date had an effect on my content. I wanted to seem young and eager to spend money after just receiving a large sum from the lottery. With that, I was in and now had the username “westburyaccounts”. To start off, I followed a couple of the recommended accounts, which were just a bunch of big celebrities, but they were all in various professions. For example, Cristiano Ronaldo and Bernie Sanders, two completely different people. After that, I started to look up and follow some financial advisors that I found when browsing on YouTube. I interacted with and liked some of their content, still not noticing much of a change in the basic, very broad content on my For You page. For some odd reason, I was getting a heavy amount of content from India, which confused me quite a bit. Normally, when I scroll on the reels section, my recommended feedback changes pretty quickly, but I think with a lack of true person-to-person communication like commenting or DMing, it was harder to extract data from me. It took around an hour and a half of scrolling, liking, and following accounts to start to see some results. I started to get a lot of content revolving around motivation and lifestyle goals, mostly quotes. This was the biggest standout to me in terms of a noticeable algorithm change.
Conclusion
This experiment revealed just how swiftly and deeply algorithms respond to changes in our behavior as a user, and how our digital personas, whether authentic or fabricated, are constantly being shaped and reshaped by the data we share. The massive difference between my original accounts and my new “lottery winner” persona highlighted how fluid and responsive these algorithms are. For example, how instant the effects were of the algorithm on YouTube, especially when a simple search like “what to do if you win the lottery” immediately triggered targeted content and ads, showing how little input it takes to affect our digital footprint. On Instagram, though slower to adjust, the motivational quotes and videos I soon got on my feed demonstrated how platforms build a psychological profile built on our inferred desires, finding things that we want before we even know it ourselves. The fact that I received location-specific content, like a video about “Charlotte Catholics baseball,” despite never adding my personal location, gives evidence of the extent of passive surveillance online. This reminded me of a quote from The Electronic Panopticon: “Our thoughts, once safely hidden in our heads, have started to be revealed by digital technology” (Richards, 2015). As I posed as someone newly wealthy, the platforms didn’t just reflect my new persona, they encouraged and deepened it. Ultimately, this project emphasized the need for stronger digital literacy, privacy awareness, and what Richards calls “intellectual privacy”, as our online environments are not just tailored to us; they are slowly steering us.