Social media political ads: a reading list

Senator Blumenthal shows a widely circulated tweet from the 2016 US presidential election showing comedian Aziz Ansari holding a Photoshopped sign claiming Americans could vote from home, during the Senate Judiciary subcommittee questioning of social media executives in 2017 see: https://www.wired.com/story/congress-asks-tech-to-face-hard-truths-about-russian-meddling/

So we at Team TRI have become slightly obsessive followers of new reports and stories on online political ads, and we thought we would pull together a reading list of the stuff we have found interesting.

This list will evolve and grow over time — let us know what we are missing and we will add to it. Tweet at us or drop a link in a comment below.

Cool projects to keep an eye on:

• The Computational Propaganda Institute at the Oxford Internet Institute
• Privacy International’s Data and Elections project
• WhoTargetsMe plugin
• ProPublica’s Political Ad Monitoring Tool

On regulation:

• Irish Times (Dec 5th 2017) “New Bill proposes action against fake social media accounts”
• NPR (Oct 19th 2017) “What you need to know about the Honest Ads Act”

What You Need To Know About The Honest Ads Act

Irish new stories that caught our eye:

• Irish Times (Feb 14th 2018) “Kathy Sheridan: Ireland was ahead of the curve on hacking”
• The Journal (Feb 14th 2018) “Do you know where the adverts on your phone about the Eighth Amendment are coming from?”

International news stories:

• Wired (Feb 12th 2018) “Inside the two years that shook Facebook — and the world
• New York Times (Feb 13th 2018) “Fake News and Bots May Be Worrisome, but Their Political Power Is Overblown”
• Privacy International (April 13th 2017) “Cambridge Analytica explained: data and elections”
• The Guardian (Oct 24th 2017) “Revealed: how Australians are targeted with political advertising on Facebook”
• Wired (Mar 24th 2016) “Youtube: the unsung juggernaut of this election season”
• The Observer (May 7th 2017) “The great British Brexit robbery: how our democracy was hijacked”
• New York Times (Oct 31st 2017) “These are the ads Russia bought on Facebook in 2016”
• New Statesman (May 10th 2017) “Will dark ads swing the 2017 Election?”
• Vice (Jan 28th 2017) “The data that turned the world upside down”
• Wired (Sept 20th 2017) “The real trouble with Trump’s “dark post” political ads”

And finally, some humour

Because life is too important to be taken seriously

• New Yorker Daily Shouts “Choose Your Own Advertising Experience”

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/first_post.png