Online media, per Peter Porta’s feature The Click Trap, is the domain of the second largest digital economy since the dawn of the usable Internet: Digital advertising—the framework that enables large tech corporations to monetize content creation. What the film showcases is a clandestine industry worth nearly $400 billion, and a complex web of deceitful practices sponsoring democratic upheaval and misleading content on an international scale.

Since its advent in the late 1990s, digital advertising has become a lucrative and predatory industry, and unregulated content has become the norm in certain mainstream digital spaces. The lack of moderation and policy controls around these ads have lead to online forums and social media awash with disinformation and hate speech, and has even fostered a sub-industry of scamming that preys on the most vulnerable in our societies. 

“I think that the disinformation crisis is one of the greatest threats to humanity right now,” Digital activist Rewan Al-Haddad says in the film. “This is a crisis where we are suddenly seeing journalistic standards decline in power and revenue, and disinformation rise.” 

With the decline of public engagement with well-researched and facts-based journalism, digital advertising has become reliant on “clickbait,” low quality content that farms engagement through provocative, vague language. The Click Trap provides an apt analysis of the internet’s monetization architecture, despite the myth of a free-to-access internet. 

The pitfalls of an unregulated and unmoderated internet are glaringly apparent in this documentary, as the film details the development of digital advertising networks like Google AdSense, which enables web publishers to generate revenue from content with devoted ad space. These networks rely on an extremely competitive betting system, where advertisers compete for consumer attention and cater to individuals based on their digital footprint and  demographic data. 

The lack of regulation and controls around digital ad space, where digital ads are shown, and who is generating revenue as a result of this laissez-faire approach have created  a logistical nightmare for all parties involved, especially big tech companies like Meta and Google.

The Click Trap illustrates the darker side of this monetized content, and provides multiple case studies into how digital advertising encourages and enables bad faith actors to generate revenue from larger corporations like Spotify and Amazon, who allow for the indiscriminate use of their brand imagery to maximize their advertising reach. 

While Google AdSense has controls for “brand safety” and Meta has a swath of policies around sponsored content moderation, journalists and digital content activists featured in this film cast doubt on these purported priorities through investigations proving otherwise. 

A glaring example includes Global Witness’s report on Facebook’s ability to detect hate speech during the 2022 Kenyan elections, and found that despite claims of increased moderation on Facebook around regional election cycles, investigators were still able to post sponsored content with hate speech or calls for violence. 

This remains especially topical in light of Meta’s recent decision to change its policies around its content filters, and once again calls into question the efficacy of these moderating measures. 

In this film’s focus on legislation like the European Union’s Digital Services Act, we see similar big tech companies throwing their weight around to soften the blow of their neglect, pouring millions in resources into those key markets to lobby against restrictions. The profit incentive still wins out, and large online platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram still come out on top, despite enabling disinformation and hate speech with tangible, real world ramifications.

I find The Click Trap is incredibly successful at urging its viewers to examine their own practices of consumption and consider their own digital identity as seen through the lexicon of digital advertising demographics. 

The film’s presentation of data brokering, an equally unregulated business of collecting data points based on online behaviours, and the sale of that demographic information to advertisers provides jarring insight into what is generally framed to be a harmless practice. The boundaries of digital privacy and identity erode as online experiences become more hyper-individualized, and the true intentions of “big tech” become all the more apparent. 

While what is presented in this documentary is nothing new for those in journalism and the business of producing accurate information, I appreciate what The Click Trap sets out to do to address the growing issues around digital media illiteracy. 

This documentary begins to address a complicated industry based on the economy of attention and its currency of engagement, and I hope to see more critical interventions from journalists and activists on this pressing issue. 

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ReFrame Film Festival will screen The Click Trap on January 26th 2025 at 3:00pm at Market Hall. Tickets can be found here for the in-person screening, with virtual passes for the film available here from January 27th to February 2nd. 

‍ReFrame is also holding a virtual workshop with ProPublica journalist Craig Silverman based on themes presented in The Click Trap on January 29th at 7:00pm. Tickets and further details are available here.