Online targeting isolates individual consumers, causing what we call epistemic fragmentation. This phenomenon amplifies the harms of advertising and inflicts structural damage to the public forum. The two natural strategies to tackle the problem of regulating online targeted advertising, increasing consumer awareness and extending proactive monitoring, fail because even sophisticated individual consumers are vulnerable in isolation, and the contextual knowledge needed for effective proactive monitoring remains largely inaccessible to platforms and external regulators. The limitations of both consumer awareness and of proactive monitoring strategies can be attributed to their failure to address epistemic fragmentation. We call attention to a third possibility that we call a civic model of governance for online targeted advertising, which overcomes this problem, and describe four possible pathways to implement this model.

在线定位将个人消费者隔离开来，导致我们所谓的认知碎片化。这种现象放大了广告的危害，并对公共论坛造成了结构性破坏。解决在线定向广告监管、提高消费者意识和扩展主动监控问题的两种自然策略失败了，因为即使是老练的个人消费者也很容易受到孤立，而有效主动监控所需的上下文知识在很大程度上仍无法为平台和外部监管机构所获取. 消费者意识和主动监控策略的局限性可归因于它们未能解决认知碎片化问题。我们提请注意第三种可能性，即我们称之为在线定向广告的公民治理模式，