Who Targets Me plugin sheds light on political campaigning online
Who sees which political adverts on Facebook, and why? A plugin created by British organisation Who Targets Me tells you about the ads you're seeing yourself while also supporting research into political targeting. "We don't yet know much about this form of political campaigning."
Over the last ten years, a new form of political campaigning has emerged: targeted political advertising via social media. "The political ads that I see are different from the ones that you see," says John Chadfield of Who Targets Me. "That has implications for democracy: we aren't all getting the same information." Targeting enables a political party to run thousands of ads at the same time and to promise different things to different people, without one group knowing what the next has been told. What's more, it's often unclear who is behind a political advert or why it has appeared in your feed.
Who Targets Me develops tools and research methods that shed light on the use of targeted, paid political advertising on Facebook. The organisation was set up in 2017 in response to the Cambridge Analytica scandal – the incident that first highlighted the scale of personalised advertising use for political purposes. "We don't yet know much about this form of political campaigning," says Chadfield. Because Facebook is fairly secretive about operational matters, Who Targets Me decided to investigate.
With that aim in mind, the organisation has developed a browser plugin that volunteers can use to donate data about their Facebook advertising. Versions are available for Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Edge. The plugin gathers the targeted Facebook ads shown to you and forwards details to Who Targets Me. The info is cross-referenced with a list of political advertisers and you get feedback on who is paying to have you see their ads. For example, "You're seeing this ad for Joe Biden because you follow the Washington Post."
The plugin has now been installed more than fifty thousand times by volunteers in 108 countries. That's enabled upward of sixteen million ads to be gathered, with about ten thousand people a week sending data to Who Targets Me. "It goes in waves," explains Chadfield. "In the run-up to an election, the number of users increases, then it drops off again." The plugin can be uninstalled at any time and the data you've shared is automatically deleted on request.
First and foremost, Who Targets Me aims to make internet users better informed. "Facebook is an extremely influential platform, and its users have little insight into the machinations behind their feeds," says Chadfield. "We want to help them understand what's happening on Facebook in terms of political advertising."
Who Targets Me also hopes to encourage further research into this topic. So, for example, the organisation has set up Notify, an automated e-mail service where the user gets a daily list of all the adverts a given party has put out that day. "We developed Notify for journalists who want to stay up-to-date with what the candidates they're covering are doing with Facebook ads," says Chadfield. "We provide the data, and the journalists write stories for a wider audience. Those stories have the added benefit of increasing our profile, leading to more plugin downloads." Chadfield says that Notify's users include politicians keen to keep an eye on their rivals' campaigns. "That's not something we were expecting, but we don't have a problem with it."
In response to mounting public pressure, Facebook itself has increased the transparency of its activities by launching the Facebook Ad Library in 2019. The library contains all the ads that have appeared on the platform, in searchable form. "It's a big step forwards," says Chadfield. "In terms of transparency regarding its personalised adverts, Facebook is now better than Google." He adds that Facebook could still do a lot more, however. Who Targets Me recently published a blog listing all the improvements they want to see.
According to Chadfield, the US election is the mother of all political battles. And that's reflected in the use of personalised advertising. In the last election, the candidates spent 217 million dollars on Facebook and Instagram ads, more than twice the figure for 2016. Who Targets Me collected more than half a million political Facebook ads during the campaign, publishing the associated data on a single website in searchable form. The work was done in collaboration with the University of Manchester's DiCED project and Syracuse University's Illuminating 2020 project.
"Biden and Trump spent about the same as each other on Facebook ads, but Trump managed to reach far more people," says Chadfield. The number of 'shares' – how often someone liked your ad enough to share it with friends – is an interesting variable in an election, he explains. In the last week before the vote, Trump's campaign team was spending about $7.50 per share, and Biden's team $13.00. Chadfield points to the controversial nature of many Trump ads as driving interaction and thus visibility. It was also striking that Trump's team was constantly asking for money, often with bizarre and unfounded claims, including the claim that a donation would be increased 500 or 800-fold.
Chadfield is nevertheless careful not to overstate the significance of targeted political ads. "We don't have any evidence that Facebook ads are decisive in election campaigns," he says. During the US elections, the targeting choices were unsurprising: Biden targeted Facebook users who had liked Barack Obama, for example, while Trump looked for support from those who had liked the pro-gun NRA. "Both were looking to mobilise their core support, which is the normal approach. Personalised campaigns undoubtedly create filter bubbles, but you also see that a lot of things are the same."
Next, Who Targets Me is turning its attention to the March 2021 Dutch parliamentary elections. Notify is already available in Dutch, and information about the plugin is translated as well. For the Dutch elections, Who Targets Me is collaborating with a research team at the University of Amsterdam and together with Dutch media partners, they’ll tell Dutch voters about the plugin.
Recent research into the use of personalised political Facebook ads in the Dutch context found that there was little transparency regarding the strategies employed by political parties in the Netherlands. (For more information about the research, see this article). "The only way to clarify what's happening is to collect information," says Chadfield. "Targeted political advertising is a rapidly developing field, and it's vital to keep a close eye on how it's developing."
Fancy installing the plugin? Get it Whotargets.me.
SIDN Fund and Adessium Foundation awarded this project a grant following a joint call 'Public Values in a Digital Society' in 2019. Read more about the theme of Public Values in a Digital Society (in Dutch).