Justin's Musings on Digital Literacy

Lit review: digital advertising ethics

April 14, 2025 / jsalinas

As I write this, the weather is a lot better than it was since I wrote my first post back in mid-February. So why not take a gander at some literature about digital advertising ethics in the great indoors?

Just as a reminder, the question that we’re posing is “is it really so bad for digital advertisers to have our data since it’s curated to our interests?”

Here are the conclusions we can draw based on a general literature review!

Conclusion #1: Advertising in general has always been ethically questionable

With its lack of regulation, internet advertising is like Times Square 24/7 😵‍💫
Photo by Andrae Ricketts on Unsplash

In an article for the Journal of Promotion Management, Faruk Tanyel, Elnora W. Stuart and Jan Griﬃn note that consumers have always had negative perceptions of advertising.

In particular, internet advertising has been compared to gigantic billboards on highways, and with no regulation for how ads can be placed and displayed (note that governments can regulate the content),¹ while consumers feel bombarded by these ads, advertisers feel motivated to create ads that are catchy and acceptable by their audiences.

Millennials, as the cohort who has lived through the most digital advertising in their lifetimes (internet advertising began in 1994), hold particular negative views on digital advertising, since they have also lived in the heyday of television advertising in their childhoods, then a time of cascading internet advertising as they enter into adulthood. Interestingly, they also are the cohort the most tolerant towards internet advertising, accepting it as part of their realities of being digital citizens.²

It’s this laissez-faire attitude that advertisers are able to penetrate and exploit by creating avenues for more addictive content and campaigns that approach the line of being ethically questionable, since there is no other alternative that has such incredible accuracy (and in most cases, also with precision) than advertising.

Conclusion #2: Digital advertising is incredibly effective

Many young people are getting nutrition advice (or maybe lack thereof) from their favourite influencers – which affect their dietary choices.
Photo by CDC on Unsplash

I bring up the point on accuracy again here. Charlene D. Elliott and Emily Truman from the University of Calgary note that food advertising on digital platforms amongst teenagers in Canada is incredibly accurate.

From being able to target specific genders of teenagers depending on what their platform of preference is, exploiting trends or using their favourite influencers to promote products from Starbucks, Skip the Dishes or Circle K, there have been studies that suggest that this relationship between teenagers and food advertising that food intake in this cohort increases along with these advertising campaigns.³

The federal government has identified a dramatic increase in childhood and youth obesity in the last 30 years. With internet advertising starting 31 years ago, I don’t suggest an explicit correlation between internet advertising and increased childhood obesity, but I also don’t believe that it is out of the question to suggest that this effectively accurate advertising is going to bring the number down anytime soon.⁴

Conclusion #3: Everyone has ethical responsibilities when it comes to digital advertising

Being in an election cycle means that we’ll be getting lots of conflicting information through digital platforms over the next two weeks. Just like with all advertising, misleading digital advertising has its consequences too.

Other countries have strict guidelines that regulate online advertising that originates from their country. The United Kingdom’s Advertising Standards Authority takes responsibility for policing ads to ensure their accuracy:

For the most part in Canada, advertising, including and especially those online, is an unregulated industry, meaning that neither the government nor advertisers have oversight over claims made in advertising. It’s what makes ads like this one I saw on Facebook this morning possible:

When I clicked on this ad (knowing it was probably fake, considering the incredibly partisan headline allegedly from the CBC and the poor photoshop job), the page looked like this:

This is a pretty convincing ad. If I wasn’t so vigilant, I would have thought it was actually the CBC, but take a look at the URL at the top of my screenshot… that doesn’t seem like a CBC URL. In fact, this entire page is an ad for a shady financial trading platform.

Yet despite that, no one except the consumer is responsible for this. Meta is complicit in allowing this ad to be published, this trading platform is equally unethical in their dealing of impersonating a reputable source.

In 2025, it might be hard to impose a sense of responsibility on corporations, but research in the area of digital marketing basically begs for governments and the advertising industry to create any sort of regulation and restore balance from the consumer to sift through what is true and what is not in an ad to creating honest, equitable claims that actually make advertising more tolerable.⁵

Faruk Tanyel, Elnora W. Stuart & Jan Griﬃn, “Have “Millennials” Embraced Digital Advertising as They Have Embraced Digital Media?,” Journal of Promotion Management 19, no. 5 (2013): 652-673, https://doi.org/10.1080/10496491.2013.829161. ↩︎
Ibid. ↩︎
Charlene D Elliott and Emily Truman, “Food marketing on digital platforms: what do teens see?,” Public Health Nutrition 27, no. 48 (2024): 1-9, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1368980024000235. ↩︎
Government of Canada, “Childhood obesity,” accessed April 14, 2025, https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/childhood-obesity/childhood-obesity.html. ↩︎
Sonia Dickinson-Delaporte, Kathleen Mortimer, Gayle Kerr, David S Waller, Alice Kendrick, “Power and responsibility: Advertising self-regulation and consumer protection in a digital world,” Journal of Consumer Affairs 54, no. 2 (2020): 675-699, https://doi.org/10.1111/joca.12295. ↩︎

Don't get over-informed. Photo by Phil Hearing on Unsplash

Could Cambridge Analytica happen here?

March 26, 2025 / jsalinas

I guess this course is hyper-relevant considering that it’s been fewer days than the number of fingers I have since a federal election has been called!

We’ve heard a lot about foreign interference over the past couple of years, which brings me to one of the most notorious foreign interference and disinformation campaigns in modern times: Cambridge Analytica.

Crash course time!

The Cambridge Analytica logo. Reproduced under Fair Dealing

Cambridge Analytica is a British data marketing firm that tracked user data to curate advertising and online content strategies for their clients. These methods of its predecessorial company are attractive to conservative parties, most notably Republican Party presidential candidates in the US in 2016 and it was engaged as an advertising party for the Ted Cruz and Donald Trump campaigns.

A professor at the University of Cambridge part of Cambridge Analytica created an online quiz app on Facebook called “This is Your Digital Life” that appeared to be a harmless quiz app, but behind the scenes, users who accessed this app gave Cambridge Analytica access to their account data, including all of the activities they do – what they “like”, where they’re logging in from, what they’re commenting – and even that of their “friends” on Facebook.

Because of these practices, 87 million people now had their data in the hands of Cambridge Analytica, almost 0 of whom had any idea that their data was going to inform Donald Trump’s team how he was going to win the 2016 election.

But wait, what does this have to do with Canada?

The leaders of the major parties in the 2025 federal election: L-R, Mark Carney (Liberal), Pierre Poilievre (Conservative), Jagmeet Singh (New Democratic), Yves François-Blanchet (Bloc Québécois), Jonathan Pedneault (Green, co-leader with Elizabeth May).

Photo: The Canadian Press, reproduced under Fair Dealing

This scandal woke the entire world up to a dilemma of data harvesting ethics and targeted misinformation campaigns that that came along during the 2016 election campaign.

Canada is no stranger to foreign interference in its elections. We’ve had some suspicions of it since at least the 2019 federal election, so much so that the government investigated whether not it actually happened. The conclusion? Probably not, or at least probably not on a scale where it influenced entire elections like how Cambridge Analytica claimed it did.

But that also doesn’t mean we’re necessarily in the clear. There is a federal election coming up in a month, and Elections Canada is already taking precautions to mitigate the effects of potential foreign interference, which includes targeted misinformation attacks on key ridings that could influence the outcome of the election.

The threat of foreign interference is higher than ever in this election cycle specifically since one of the party leaders does not have their security clearance, exposing himself and their supporters to vulnerabilities that could put our national security at risk.

So, yes or no: will this happen in Canada?

Probably not….

But you never know what will happen.

Those whose data were stolen by Cambridge Analytica sure didn’t think it would have happened to them.

How can I protect myself from misinformation during the election cycle?

During an election cycle, it’s more important than ever to protect yourself from misinformation. As we’ve learned in a previous class, you can apply the SIFT model to weed out what you read as truth from falsehood.

To protect yourself from having your data being used for political gain, you can also activate settings in your browsers and devices to deny advertisers from using your data, just like I do in my Safari:

These settings aren’t typically on already, but it takes 4 quick clicks in order to ensure your data is safe and to give you another layer of protection from misinformation!

A safe rule of thumb: if it comes from an ad on a website, it probably isn’t news, but sensationalism. Be careful on your choice to click through: you never know where your data will end up.

My top 5 digital resources I’ve used at UVic, and why you should love them too

March 18, 2025 / jsalinas

For my last post for my reflections (crazy!), I wanted to throw it back to the mid-2010s when BuzzFeed listicles were all the rage.

I’ve also realized that almost all of my posts in this category have had some sort of negative tone to them, so in the spirit of week 7’s talk on curation and annotation software, I wanted to share with you some of my favourite digital resources I’ve used at UVic over the last 5 years I’ve been studying here, 3 of which on campus!

In no particular order…

1. The AV equipment at MacPherson Library

Image: University of Victoria Marketing + Communications

What it is: The MacPherson Library has tons of peripheral equipment to borrow to support your learning, like laptops, headphones, cameras, chargers, and calculators.

Why I love it: I’ve forgotten to bring my laptop or phone charger for as many times as I can count so it’s been an extreme convenience to borrow a charger for 3 hours at a time to get a quick charge.

As a Humanities student, I also haven’t owned a calculator since I was 16, but when it came time to use one for a final exam, the 1-day loans saved me from scribbling long division on my exam paper!

How to find it: Find all the equipment available for use on the library website, or talk to the friendly folks at the Ask Us desk at the MacPherson Library–Mearns Centre for Learning!

2. Criterion on Demand + Audio Cine Films

What it is: Criterion on Demand and Audio Cine Films are two databases that allow you to stream movies, whether for educational purposes or “educational purposes”.

Why I love it: Being a student is expensive and exhausting, and the last thing I want to do when I want to watch a movie is pay for a streaming subscription that I can’t afford, only to never use it because I’m always so busy.

Criterion on Demand has some great Canadian films in their repertoire – I highly recommend the Québécois film Matthias et Maxime (Xavier Dolan, 2019).

How to find it: You can access Criterion on Demand and Audio Cine Films for no extra cost through the library using your NetLink ID.

3. Zoom

What it is: Made popular during the COVID-19 pandemic, Zoom is a videoconferencing software aimed at the professional and higher education community.

Why I love it: As a first-year student in 2020, I actually don’t love Zoom (lol). But it definitely is convenient doing UVic business (like having a meeting with my course union or working in a Senate committee) under UVic’s Information Security Policy and Responsible Use of Information Technology Services Policy.

Not many students know that UVic’s Zoom license is also extended to students too! Not even students at the larger blue-coloured west coast Canadian university have access to a license, so you should take advantage of it here as much as you can!

How to find it: Access Zoom through your NetLink ID at uvic.zoom.us!

4. Online Academic Community

What it is: The OAC is UVic’s built-in WordPress solution.

Why I love it: I’ve been able to create blogs that support my learning, like a digital portfolio as my final for an ENGL class back in second year. I also contributed to the former MyUVic Life blog that supports prospective students in their journey in considering applying to UVic.

It also takes the guesswork out of creating a WordPress blog, and of course, it’s also governed by UVic’s relevant technology use policies.

How to find it: You can learn how to create a blog within the OAC at onlineacademiccommunity.uvic.ca.

5. Microsoft 365

What it is: M365 offers a suite of powerful web apps like your classic Office apps (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) and as well as your @uvic.ca email address through Outlook.

Why I love it: Microsoft Word is the standard for word processing but it costs almost $200 for a perpetual personal license or more than $100 a year for a personal yearly license. This way, we’re able to get it at no extra cost.

I use my @uvic.ca email for my university business (Senate, emailing my instructors) and it makes it look more professional than sending things from my personal email address.

How to find it: You can see all the M365 apps you have access by logging in to office.com using [YourNetLinkID]@uvic.ca.

Honourable mention: The Chicago Manual of Style, Online Edition

The University of Chicago, where “Chicago style” (no not the pizza) was invented.
Image: Crimson Education

What it is: “Chicago style” is not only a type of pizza, but it’s also the standard for humanities and social sciences publications in North America.

With our evolving understanding of copyright ethics and information processing, the way we cite and format our papers changes over time. The online edition of the Chicago Manual of Style lets me use the most up-to-date conventions of citations (including information generated from artificial intelligence!)

Why I love it: I actually prefer to cite my sources by hand rather than use a citation generator because it allows me to use the most current guidelines with a smaller margin of error than online citation generators.

A hardcover version of the Chicago Manual costs almost $100 and will become outdated in due time once University of Chicago publishes its 19th edition. Yet another way to save money!

How to find it: You can access the Chicago Manual of Style through the library using your NetLink ID here!

Listen, if the kids are going to be on their phones all the time (even in our failed attempts to get them to listen up), they might as well be responsible about them, right? Photo by Sherwin Ker on Unsplash

Young digital citizens

March 14, 2025 / jsalinas

As I write this, it will have been about two and a half weeks since getting accepted into my Bachelor of Education program. And though I am pumped for what’s to come, I recognize that becoming an educator means that I will eventually begin to model responsible digital literacy.

As an educator, I’ll be expected to teach and model BC’s Digital Literacy Framework to shape my students into future good digital citizens.

With the expectation comes an equally important responsibility for me to model that framework in my own life. If I as a teacher am supposed to be the epitome of the expectations of society and culture, how am I translating that into my own life?

Googling myself

First impressions matter: what are the first things that come up when you look up your name on Google? None of these are me, by the way. (Screenshot from Google, reproduced under Fair Dealing)

At the beginning of the semester, we were asked to do a sort of “self-audit” on our digital footprint by Googling ourselves. It’s pretty clear these days that your digital footprint, though perhaps separate from your professional competencies, have become one and the same.

So in my self-audit, I wanted to see if what the information online I find about me would or could be potentially concerning if I were looking for a job as a teacher in the future.

Firstly, it appears that I am not the only person named “Justin Salinas”. I also share it with a viral baker that even competed on a Netflix show, a former drummer of a heavy metal band, and a resident of Oregon accused of stalking and charged with drug possession and domestic violence.

Secondly, the first two things that pop up on Google that are related to the Justin Salinas that is writing this blog post are my LinkedIn profile and a bio that I wrote when I ran for student senator at UVic.

These two pieces of data on me were written under the impression that this would reach a public audience, especially my LinkedIn profile. It gives a pretty in-depth look into who I am, yet I find it to be professional and in good taste. I am not particularly shy about my employment and educational experience. I don’t think these are a matter of privacy or reputation, but a question of relevancy for those who stumble upon them.

Thirdly, the two other social media accounts that show up when you type my name in are my Instagram and my Threads. My Instagram is public, but I set it as such so that people who I may know are able to easily identify me (so I don’t get confused with the baker or the drummer or a suspect).

I think I curate my Instagram account in a tasteful way since I have a wide range of followers across the multiple facets of my life. In that way, I don’t really have any concerns when it comes to potentially offensive content, but I do recognize the curiosity of my future students who may not recognize professional boundaries. I will be locking my Instagram account down in the near future as a courtesy to myself and to my future students.

Remember Threads? It was (is?) Meta’s response to Twitter, which gained popularity for a short time right after Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter. I used it in its short heyday but then deleted the app while having my data still accessible.

There is one post on there that I am not particularly proud of: it’s a picture of me exaggeratedly eating poutine at my old job (at a federally-regulated employer).

This is the actual photo. It’s just me eating cheese.

It’s far from the line of questioning whether I would be able to carry out my duties as a teacher, but it is a bit silly and can bring into question how serious I take my employment. (The picture will probably be deleted soon)

Elsagate

CONTENT WARNING: There are references and representations of an anti-Semitic figure in this section.

As a future educator, not only do I have to embody the expectations myself, but I also have to share with my future students the importance of discerning productive versus harmful content.

Harmful content typically isn’t explicit: think of the “alt-right” pipeline, where extremist views from previously un-radicalized people (usually young teenage boys) subtly and gradually begin to express right-wing extremism.

Elsagate was a scandal that involved YouTube’s family-oriented content preferences. By creators circumventing the website’s content blocking settings, researchers at Cornell University describe the phenomenon as such:

Disney characters, superheroes and other popular childhood characters are depicted in disturbing scenes such as stealing alcohol, hurting each other, drinking from toilets, eating poop, drinking urine, smearing feces on people’s faces, sexual and violent situations… Elsagate videos are a way of getting young children accustomed to sexual and disturbing content so pedophiles can groom them more easily.¹

A more mild example of this (if you can believe it) is the following video, an “adaptation” of the classic nursery rhyme “Five Little Monkeys Jumping On The Bed”, but instead of monkeys, it’s Hitler:

“Five little hitlers jumping on the bed”, uploaded by Mitch, June 25, 2019. Reproduced under Fair Dealing. NB: this is not the original video, this is a mirror of the original that was allegedly removed from YouTube.

Equating Hitler with the silly monkeys can mean for young malleable brains that perhaps Hitler has the same whimsical character as the monkeys, and draw empathy towards him in the same way.

Competencies in the BC Digital Literacy Framework include the ability to “judge the validity of content found on the Internet, how to find appropriate material, and what sources can be trusted” by the time students are in grade 5.

So if by grade 5, students don’t question why they’ve never heard *that* version of “Five Little Monkeys Jumping On The Bed,” then perhaps we’re entering into a new age of an illiteracy crisis.

Ishikawa, Akari, Edson Bollis, and Sandra Avila. “Combating the Elsagate Phenomenon: Deep Learning Architectures for Disturbing Cartoons,” 2019. doi:10.48550/arxiv.1904.08910. ↩︎

Who am I on the internet, if not for a bunch of characters (mostly 1s and 0s) on a screen?

Is anything sacred anymore?

March 12, 2025 / jsalinas

The first clip I found on YouTube under the search “funny ring doorbell videos” was a compilation of 20 “funny” moments caught by the world’s favourite and most well-known doorbell camera: a Halloween animatronic scaring an Amazon driver, people falling down the stairs, or stumbling around the neighbourhood after having one too many drinks.

Video embed from YouTube, reproduced under Fair Dealing

Can you even believe that there is a syndicated TV show hosted by Wanda Sykes called Ring Nation that broadcasts these intimate moments on national television?

Image: Prime Video. Reproduced under Fair Dealing

This got me thinking: is anything sacred anymore? If we’re letting these devices have access to one of the last remaining spaces of privacy, our homes, then what does that mean for our relationship with technology, and more importantly, our relationship with each other?

This week, Dr. Bonnie Stewart of the University of Windsor talked about datafication, or the concept of data as our commodity. And while I’ll talk about that here, I also wanted to hone in on Ring and the Nextdoor app as an example of the symptoms of datafication in the real world.

Dr. Stewart gave the example of how the social network formerly known as Twitter consolidates the data entered into it and gives it directly to its owners, the most notable one being accused of using a Nazi salute at a political rally. This underlines that importance of reading the Terms of Service (as boring as it can be) to see what moments like those captured on your doorbell camera can be used for.

Privacy concerns with Ring

In its *Privacy Not Included consumer guide, internet watchdog Mozilla expresses its concerns with the Amazon Ring Doorbell, which include (but are not limited to):

Amazon’s history of storing data on unencrypted servers
Law enforcement accessing Ring recordings without warrants
Diverse practices around the world that make Ring incompatible with privacy laws
Unclear data retention practices (meaning even if you don’t want your recordings saved in Amazon’s servers, you might not be able to get them deleted)

I think it’s also worth mentioning that Ring is an Amazon product as of 2018. This makes it one of many ways that Amazon has access to your data, on top of:

MGM Studios
GoodReads
Twitch
Kindle
Whole Foods Market
Echo (Alexa)
IMDB
Pharmacy services (in the US)
And of course, Amazon.com and its Prime services

These are some very large properties that (together) have access to tons of your data.

On one hand, seamlessly migrating between the properties is very convenient: logging a book into GoodReads might curate your recommendations on Amazon or through Kindle or Audible. Or maybe instead of buying NeoCitran from Amazon.com, you can upload an antibiotic prescription to its pharmacy subsidiary and get it sent to you with your Prime One-Day Shipping.

But on the other hand, creating a complete profile about you: your likes and dislikes, your health history, your address, phone number, gender – what your home looks like… understanding the shady history that Amazon has had with data protection and retention would make me think twice about buying a Ring doorbell without reflecting on the consequences this may have.

If the information gets into the wrong hands, my identity could potentially be stolen; some of my most intimate moments may be leaked or published onto the internet; this information could be used against me in committing crimes. Just like how the internet provides me limitless opportunities for content creation and publication, there are also limitless bad actors that will spare no opportunity to replicate and use my identity without me knowing.

Jeff Bezos and the Washington Post

As the owner of the respected news outlet the Washington Post, Jeff Bezos, the former president and CEO of Amazon and its current executive chairman recently published a note saying that its opinion column will be built “in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets“.

It is not surprising that Mr. Bezos, as an entrepreneur, would like to highlight the free market as a priority in the media. What is concerning, however, is that the owner of one of the US’s newspapers of record can flip a switch and change its priorities seemingly in an instant. This runs the risk of setting a dangerous precedent in journalistic integrity, if it is apparently this easy for its owners to have editorial control over the viewpoints of the paper.

Secondly, the idea of “personal liberty” has been identified as a dogwhistle for far-right organizers, the likes of whom supported the Freedom Convoy on Parliament Hill in 2022 and the January 6 insurrection on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC in 2021.

True personal liberty would be the fair and unbiased representation of diverse viewpoints. What Mr. Bezos is describing may once again undermine the journalistic integrity of the Post: why would he emphasize “personal liberty” if the representation of these viewpoints wasn’t already part of the Post‘s agenda already? This leads me to believe that Mr. Bezos isn’t actually for “liberty” for all – he means “freedom” from what society at large has accepted as correct.

I bring up Mr. Bezos and the Post because it adds another layer into the idea of the ethics of datafication: who are we sending our money, data, and power to? The more money and data we have in properties that people like Mr. Bezos profits from means that the power he has to apparently begin chiseling away at the Washington Post‘s journalistic integrity.

“Guess Who: Advertisement Edition”

March 2, 2025 / jsalinas

Note: all materials are reproduced under Fair Dealing

In order to understand my own perspective on targeted ads, I wanted to see how targeted ads perceive me.

About a month ago, I deleted almost 10 years of ad data on my personal Meta account because I was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with my information being processed in the United States, especially considering the precarious state of Canada-US political and economic relations. I’m also pretty conscious about denying permissions for ad tracking across websites and apps.

All of this, however, does not necessarily mean that ads don’t appear at all or that my preferences are being respected.

The ads

In the past month since deleting my ad data, my Meta account data states that I have interacted with (clicked on) 34 ads on my Facebook account. 54 companies have used my Meta accounts (one personal Facebook, one personal Instagram, and one professional Instagram) to influence their targeted ad campaigns.

Here are the 34 ads I’ve apparently been clicking on while I’ve been on Facebook over the past month. You can right click an ad and open it in a new tab to read it fully:

These are the 54 companies that have used my Facebook information to inform their ads over the past 3 years:

Tangerine
AirBnB
Porter Airlines
Playnow.com
Canva
Mark Carney (campaign for Liberal Party leader)
The Crocodile Seattle
Provident Entertainment
Bricknell’s Men’s Products
Sony Music Entertainment
RightNow Media
Pattison Food Group
Elevation Church
BMO Financial Group
Amazon.com
Coach
GrubHub
Jackbox Games

Canadian Tire
Envision Financial
Virgin Plus
KOHO
Wise
Williams Sonoma
Scene+
Square
Coast Capital Savings
Live Nation
Staples
Wealthsimple
Uber
Grab
Neo Financial
Old Navy
ASOS
Groupon

Remitbee
Linktree
GoodRx
Meta for Business
LinkedIn
Ancestry.com
Equitable Bank
Callia Flowers
Premier Productions
Remitly
Etsy
RIU Hotels & Resorts
Le Choix du Président
DoorDash
Showcase
Drive with Lyft
Ticketmaster
Cineplex

The challenge

We have 88 datapoints of who I am based on my normal interactions with advertising content on a service I use every single day.

Since I already know myself very well, and because targeted ads are based on patterns and algorithms that aren’t usually accessible publicly, I’m going to provide these datapoints to the mightiest algorithm I have available: ChatGPT.

I’m going to ask it to guess the following 10 pieces of demographic information about me that many advertisers use to inform their ad campaigns:

Age
Gender
Location
Occupation
3 to 5 hobbies/interests
Income range
Ethnicity
Political affiliation
Marital status
Religion
Any other inferences on my demographics based on the datapoints?

The challenges I anticipate are that the 34 ads were not targeted to me based on any of these demographics, these were just the ones I happened to interact with, and the list of the 54 companies are just company names and not actually ads themselves so they aren’t based on ad content.

Before you proceed!

Take a look at some of, if not all of the dataset. Try to jot down a list and compare it to what ChatGPT suggests I am and what the truths are!

The findings

The algorithm has spoken, and here is what it guessed:

Age: 25-40
Gender: Male
Location: Greater Vancouver
Occupation: professional OR student in finance, education, or technology
Hobbies and interests:
- Finance and investing
- Education and personal development
- Travel
- Tech & Creativity
- Community & Social Causes
Income: $50,000-$80,000
Ethnicity: visible minority
Political affiliation: Liberal or progressive-leaning
Marital status: single or in a relationship, no kids
Religion: Possibly Christian or faith-inclined, but open-minded

Surprisingly, it got only three of its guesses wrong:

Age: I’m actually 22
Hobbies and interests: I’m not interested in finance, especially not in investing
Income: I make $20,000 to $30,000 a year (since I’m just a student)

You can read the full analysis ChatGPT made, including the justifications for each of its answers here.

What this means

Even though ChatGPT got almost everything correct, that does not mean that ChatGPT is the algorithm that Meta uses for its advertisement strategies.

It does suggest that if I allow it to be the case, I am a lot more predictable than I think, and algorithms are processors of patterns about ourselves that we miss in all of our humanness.

Based on these patterns, we can even make more specific predictions like how I’m not only a Christian, but I’m an open-minded Christian towards other religions. It’s fun to make a demographic profile and all, but these even more targeted answers can reveal stuff about ourselves that we might not be comfortable with or things we might not even be aware of.

This is a lot of information and accuracy for a limited amount of data. This is only advertising data, not data on the user-generated content I interact with or any information that I’ve given up about myself. How much more specific of a profile can we get if we consider my entire online footprint holistically?

In what ways can these patterns be helpful? Or for a malicious purpose?

What’s the cart, where’s the horse? Academic integrity and artificial intelligence

February 28, 2025 / jsalinas

My post on artificial intelligence in the context of academic integrity this week looks a bit different! I created a video in the style of the “Subway Surfers TikTok story time” trend, where the screen recording of gameplay is below the main content in an effort to keep the viewer’s attention.

I admit that this isn’t the most adrenaline-inducing topic, so it’s a bit of a thought experiment for me to see if it works!

The info on UVic’s response to artificial intelligence can be found starting on page 212 of this Senate document.

Transcript of the video for reference:

Artificial intelligence and academic integrity: one of the most exciting innovations of our lifetime and one of the lamest parts about the university experience (and good alliteration!)

I know, I know, we might not want to talk about it, but it’s becoming more and more of our reality, so we have to at least consider the relationship between the two – specifically about UVic’s response to AI and academic integrity.

In the UVic calendar, academic integrity is defined as “honesty, trust, fairness, respect, and responsibility” for our work. Examples of academic integrity violations include plagiarism, unauthorized use of an editor, cheating.

But like many of our other policies, this isn’t as future proof as we want it to be, and our perceptions of academic integrity can and have changed over the years.

Just like here at UVic: in 2023, the Office of the Vice-President Academic and Provost released a statement that said UVic as an institution commits to integrating AI tools in a “responsible, ethical and equitable manner that enhances learning and teaching as appropriate”.

Words like that: responsibility, ethics, equity, they kind of sound like our academic integrity statement. And that’s basically the stance of many Canadian universities. It’s undeniable that AI is going to surpass the exploration phase and jump into the application phase quickly. It’s probably already happening around your personal network as we speak; so why not capitalize on that opportunity to show people how to use it with integrity?

UVic hasn’t given black and white guidance as to what the expectations are when it comes to generative AI, and that’s kind of the point. Not because we’re still understanding how it works – come on, we’re a research university, but what the ethics are in all of this. Instructors can’t use AI to mark student work because it lacks human subjectivity, but maybe we can use it to help us translate a work that’s only available in Chinese.

Sitting at the crossroads of intelligence and artificialness, generative AI has the benefits of “human” and computer, but also it has the same flaws as both, in a way, it’s kind of double the opportunity for flaws that we can walk into as just human. So we can kind of look at it like a Google of sorts: scraping the internet, with the awareness that it might not be correct, or it might be outdated, or it might be biased in its interpretations.

When the onus of understanding artificial intelligence’s place in the context of academic integrity rests on the student lest they be the ones to suffer the consequences, I think our general confusion comes not from our misunderstanding of artificial intelligence, but our misunderstanding of academic integrity policy.

Think about it: instructors say “academic integrity, academic integrity” like a broken record and I get it – the integrity of student work can be a reflection of the integrity of an instructor’s teaching or the university’s reputation. But students are skipping through the academic integrity pledges on Brightspace like it’s the TOS of some random internet account.

And if I asked one of my classmates to name me the 7 categories of academic integrity violations in the calendar, chances are they probably wouldn’t be able to answer them. Chances are, you wouldn’t be able to answer them too, because there aren’t 7, there are 6. But you believed me, right?

Generative AI gives universities the unique and timely opportunity to look at their academic integrity strategies and begin to future proof them. If in 2025 we are acknowledging the existence of AI and the potential it has, then we need to codify that in our policies. And if we’re going to commit to decolonization as a university, it’s also time for us to understand that our power doesn’t only come from policy, but it comes from community.

What we need from the generative AI debate isn’t more bureaucracy, it’s more support for students in a confusing time when misinformation and distrust of the experts are second nature to research. The debate isn’t just on ChatGPT. It’s about the people; about the past, the present, and the future of our university’s values and DNA.

Targeted ads as content

February 21, 2025 / jsalinas

I’ve stumbled upon a genre of videos on YouTube where people purposefully engage with targeted ads on social media and review the products, usually in a humorous tone.

This got me thinking: what message do these types of videos say about our relationship with targeted ads: both in the way that these videos portray them, and the fact that they are used as content?

Video 1: Safiya Nygaard (consuming ads)

“I Bought The First 5 Things TikTok Ads Recommended To Me” by Safiya Nygaard (published December 7, 2021)

Beauty and lifestyle creator Safiya Nygaard’s video bought the first five products that were targeted to her through TikTok ads:

Butterfly pea loose-leaf tea
Pizza Hut tracksuit
Refurbished electronics bundle
Personal earwax camera and extractor
Wireless automatic curling iron

The first half of the video was her establishing her methodology, but more importantly, trying to contextualize it through statements like this:

“Though I wouldn’t say that buying returned electronics fits perfectly into my interests, we have been [making content about] an Amazon return store (like a liquidation store), and I have liked/saved a few videos on this topic for use in our YouTube video: so maybe that’s why TikTok think that I am into deal-tok.”

I don’t buy a lot of hair irons, but I do interact with beauty content a lot, so I feel like this is a decently well-targeted ad. In general, TikTok seems to be full of hair curling hack products, and I am someone who really has no idea how to do my own hair, so the idea of a self-curling iron appeals to me.

What struck me about this is the uncertainty. As a content creator, I would presume that Nygaard is not a stranger to internet algorithms, yet I observed that she was not able to justify the reason why she got the items that she did with certainty. Nygaard attempted to connect the ads with her work habits, content consumption habits, and even launched the app multiple times during the day to see if that would make a difference. It is striking how elusive the “almighty algorithm” can be.

The second half of the video was about the products themselves. Two moments stuck out to me:

The alleged low quality of these products

All of the items seemed to have some sort of quality issue: the Pizza Hut tracksuit was a poor quality, the earwax extractor didn’t extract as much as expected, the butterfly pea tea smelled poorly.

Vague or unknown vendors

The names of all the vendors in the video: Pizza Hut, What The Box, Bee Gone Wax, SUMMERSKN, Harney & Sons. Other than the first and last brand on that list, these brands are pretty elusive. In fact, the three other brands no longer have an online presence, which Nygaard predicted were actually dropshipping fronts.

What Nygaard’s video about targeted ads tells us is that targeted ads are opportunistic: companies or individuals hop on fads perhaps without making due diligence of their actions in order to make a quick buck and disappear – a pathos and ethos appeal.

Video 2: Danny Gonzalez (creating ads)

“I Spent $20,000 Advertising On YouTube And Now Everyone Hates Me” by Danny Gonzalez (published August 2, 2019)

Danny Gonzalez is a commentary YouTuber. The above video is part of a series called “BadAds” where he analyzes outrageous mobile game ads on social media; this video in particular has him creating three separate Google Ads on YouTube utilizing three of the advertising techniques he identified during earlier editions of this series.

Gonzalez’s perspective of creating Google Ads is unique and unprecedented on this scale, where many digital creators, especially those without external investment or capital, don’t typically use pre-rolls to advertise their niches, let alone to show their audiences the process of creating a campaign. The frustrations of creating these campaigns comes through in the billing issues, which makes me understand the work that goes into the process of these campaigns.

Speaking of these billing issues, it’s very interesting to understand the value that our attention has. At one point, Gonzalez reveals that an investment of $2,222.22 guarantees him between 570,000 to 1,700,000 views, at the cost of $0.01 to $0.03 a view to capture our attention for at least 5-15 seconds.

If we do the math correctly, our time is technically worth more: the BC minimum wage will be $17.85/hr on June 1, 2025, which comes out to $0.02 to $0.07 per view for the same amount of time. What do you think this could reveal about the value we hold to advertisers?

Of course, these two videos do not capture the entire story about our relationship with ads between the consumer, the creator, and the agency. But it is an interesting thought experiment to reflect on why we believe the world of targeted ads is so elusive that it would make for good content (Nygaard’s video has 8.1 million views; Gonzalez’s has 16.5 million).

Take 4: The SIFT Method and Misinformation

February 14, 2025 / jsalinas

Did you know that once upon a time, “fake news” was seen as a good thing?

Before 2016, the concept of “fake news” was associated with comedians like Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and John Oliver under the auspices of satire.

According to Lynn Schofield Clark and Jill Dierberg (resource available only to UVic affiliates), scholars at the University of Denver, not only was satirical fake news seen as a net good to society for the way that it would captivate an audience that would not have otherwise engaged with topics such as religion (in the case of Clark & Dierberg), but the balance between information and outrageous representation was so masterful and successful that it is considered an art form in and of itself.

Of course, these days, “fake news” is associated with a particular U.S. president that has its roots in Christian fundamentalism and distorts what people accept as truth so much that it can be difficult for people to figure out what is a true fact versus what is an alternative fact, according to UVic English professor Christopher Douglas.

One model that can help us figure out how to filter what is objective and alternate truth is the SIFT model. Let’s do it together using an article I found online:

Reproduced under Fair Dealing. Information about the source of this article is available upon request.

I found an article that appears to claim that UVic and UBC are exclusively hiring black instructors. Using the SIFT method, we can figure out if this is true or not.

S: Stop 🛑

Take a moment to reflect on how you’re feeling while reading this article. Usually, you solidify formulate an opinion on an article by the end of it, after understanding the entire context of it. If you’re immediately feeling strongly about an article’s content within the first few lines, that could be a red flag.

Some example of this in the article is the emotionally charged and exclusionary language:

“hiring professors based on race”
“take part in race-based hiring”
“mandating that new professor hires be black“

I: Investigate 🔎

Time to bring out that FBI cyberstalker in you: if you feel as if something is “off” or if you’re reading from a source you don’t normally hear about, try poking around the website or Google the source to see what types of coverage they offer.

In my quick research, here’s what I found about the article’s authors and source:

Google describes the article’s site as “delivering conservative perspectives and criticizing the Liberal government’s policies under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau”
One of the two authors of this article is an undergraduate student that doesn’t have any other work or educational experience related to journalism on their LinkedIn profile other than this site
The other contributors on this site include:
- A campaign communicator for the Conservative Party of Canada and the former Wildrose Party in Alberta (which later became the United Conservative Party)
- A former writer for a right-wing news source
- A writer that is described as Muslim, but called for the government to ban the hijab and to close all mosques after a Jihadist attack in Quebec
This site is not a member of organizations like the Canadian Association of Broadcasters or a registered journalism organization according to the Canada Revenue Agency
There is no other mention of them online by other organizations. The only references to it online are from themselves.

(Note: just because this site has a large amount of self-described conservatives does not mean they are untruthful; the problem begins when their political opinions seep into their seemingly “professional” news coverage, which can be seen in this article.)

F: Find better coverage 🗞️

It never hurts to find evidence of what you find online. Either what you believe will be confirmed, or you’ll be corrected in what you initially thought before.

Find coverage for the same story in other outlets of the “mainstream media”: the reason why they’re mainstream is because of their reputations and usually because of their accountability structures. Cross-reference them from the article you originally found.

I found two articles (only two!) on other sites from around the same time that this article was published that talked about either the same or similar topic:

“UVic job posting for Black candidates only draws backlash” by Roxanne Egan-Elliott of the Times Colonist
“Black Faculty Cohort Hiring Initiative to recruit more Black scholars to UBC” by Julian Forst of the Ubyssey

Based on the two articles, there are some semantic differences between them:

The original article says that “some may find the practice [of equity-based hiring] racist and discriminatory”.
- The Times Colonist article notes that much of the backlash on the social media site formerly known as Twitter are from users in the United States.
The original article states that the equity-based hiring practices are an “agenda”, which can potentially suggest that these practices are either politically charged or are arbitrary.
- The Times Colonist article states that UVic’s practices come from the university’s equity action plan.
- The Ubyssey article notes that equity-based hiring practices for black individuals are based on UBC’s commitment to the Scarborough Charter.
The original article declared UBC’s belief that “ecology is racist”.
- The Ubyssey article includes the following quote: “The more we diversify our professoriate, the more we broaden and deepen the impact of the knowledges we create and disseminate through research [and the] curriculum.”

T: Trace it back 🗺️

Put those first-year academic research skills to work by finding primary sources. In the case of this article, what do UVic and UBC say about their equity-based hiring practices? What is their intention, and is it working?

UVic

According to UVic’s data, there is a 6% gap between the proportion of visible minorities with professional backgrounds in Victoria and the amount of faculty and librarians of visible minorities at UVic.

The Equity Action Plan, which includes targeting specific under-represented demographics was constructed under the framework set by the BC Office of the Human Rights Commissioner, which is accountable to the Human Rights Code of British Columbia.

Demographic targeting was not only justified by the data and the law, but also anecdotally by UVic staff members, who desired increased diversity in staffing levels at UVic.

UBC

UBC’s data shows a 6.3% gap between the same proportions in Greater Vancouver.

Their Employment Equity Plan is part of a greater Strategic Equity and Anti-Racism Framework. Just like UVic, UBC’s Employment Equity plan is framed by the standards of the Human Rights Tribunal. Their employment equity actions are also created upon the basis of the Scarborough Charter, an anti-black racism framework for Canadian universities, of which both UVic and UBC are signatories.

Well, what now?

Based on the research we’ve done, what can we conclude about this article? We know that it’s full of emotionally charged language designed to get a reaction out of us, that the writers have direct ties with exclusively one side of the political spectrum, that other mainstream news sites with publicly available accountability structures either aren’t reporting on this or contradict the original article’s claims, and that the primary sources state that the actions taken are justified by the books, by the numbers, and by the people.

I think it’s pretty safe to say that the original article is mostly a shock piece or otherwise non-newsworthy article.

Yet the formatting of this site and the article are both very believable, which is all the more reason why media literacy and communications are such important skills to have in the 21st century.

You can learn about the SIFT method and other methods to investigate potential misinformation from this site at the University of Chicago.

Copyright: The Grey Law?

February 11, 2025 / jsalinas

Jaywalking, littering, the “California Stop“… if I had to guess, I’d say that you’ve probably broken at least one of these laws this year already!

For those who are curious: jaywalking is illegal in BC under the Motor Vehicle Act, sec. 179(2); littering is illegal in BC under the Litter Act, sec. 3; and the rolling stop is illegal in BC under the Motor Vehicle Act, sec. 186.

But I think that one of the most easily broken laws has everything to do with copyright. In the days before Netflix and YouTube and GenAI, breaking copyright looked something like bootleg copies of movies, which usually came with an FBI pre-roll ad that looked something like this:

An FBI anti-piracy warning screen. (Reproduced under fair dealing by LogoRedux50)

I cited the sections in which those other “pesky” laws are illegal in BC. Copyright law, however, isn’t as straightforward as “don’t do this” or “don’t do that”. If it was, then UVic wouldn’t need its own Copyright Office!

In my personal experience, copyright law seems to find the most tension when it comes to university textbooks and literature. As a French major, it was difficult at times for the bookstore to secure copies of required texts in French, even recently published Canadian works!

Out of necessity, we were able to secure one copy of the book and then created multiple photocopies of the entire book at Zap (while no one who worked there was looking); but according to both UVic policy and copyright law, we would have exceeded our copyright restrictions by 90%.

But if the laws are so stringent that notices like these are on our photocopiers around campus, yet methods like photocopying whole books and accessing textbooks off of “those sites” (if you know, you know) are so widespread, why hasn’t this been a larger conversation?

Of course, this hasn’t been without its attempts: from constantly pumping out newer editions of the same textbook which limits second-hand purchasing to creating digital-only modules under the guise of “innovation” in the textbook industry, it seems like companies are trying their hardest to monopolize the system.

Perhaps that’s the problem. Maybe it’s an open secret that students and instructors alike are skirting these laws both in the interest of survival and to send a message to the publishers that they’re able to read between the lines: that the “innovation” is actually greed.

At the end of the day, copyright is important for independent artists and creators to ensure that their hard work isn’t stolen by those who have nothing to lose, yet the system has time and time again favoured those who had nothing to lose in the first place.