This Brilliant App Shows How Political Ads Are Targeted On Facebook
I’m really thrilled with a tool ProPublica just launched. After spending months collecting scraped Facebook data from volunteers, ProPublica can now figure which political ads are being targeted to which population segments on Facebook.
I spent about a half-hour toggling through different demographics; a 48-year-old liberal man from Fort Worth, Texas vs. a 24-year-old conservative woman, an 18-year-old liberal woman from Wisconsin compared to a 31-year-old woman with no clear political preference.
It’s interesting to see that the New York Civil Liberties Union targets the liberal version of myself (28 years old, male, living in New York, New York), but not the conservative version of myself.
The results I’ve come across so far are mild curiosities, but as election day nears it might be worth keeping an eye on how messages change.
ProPublica started this project as a bulwark against the anonymity of targeted Facebook ads. We now know that the Trump Campaign and Russian Operatives used Facebook ads to trash the news feeds of Democratic voter groups before the election.
“During the 2016 presidential campaign, President Donald Trump’s operatives bragged to the press that they tried to dissuade African Americans from voting by targeting them with Facebook posts titled “Hillary Thinks African Americans are Super Predators.”
No one saw these attacks coming, and it was far too late before any refutations were made public. Facebook makes scant data about how ads are targeted available to anyone outside the company (who can’t fork over millions for the favor— ahem, Cambridge Analytica).
The press heavily scrutinizes political ads that run on television, radio, billboards and in newsprint. News organizations and public advocacy groups have had no easy way to quickly recognize, analyze and warn the public about Facebook ads, until now.
One aspect of this project I really love is the engagement in data collection. Over 13,960 people downloaded the application that allows ProPublica to collect Facebook ads through their news feeds. These volunteers aren’t compensated or paid in any way. They are rewarded only with the knowledge that they are helping study the bathtub of misinformation and disinformation incipient to the 2016 election.
ProPublica uses the ads scraped through their browser extension to train a machine learning model that can, without human input, figure out whether or not an advertisement is political, whether or not it’s being targeted to conservatives or liberals, etc. The app’s creators published a brief methodology on how this works.
Now that the tool is up and running, it will be worth watching how different ads appear (and perhaps don’t appear) in varying news feeds as midterm elections approach. Just by providing readers with more information on the source of different political messages or news stories, we can change how those messages are perceived and integrated into political discourse.
I’m excited to see how journalists and the public use ProPublica’s new tool as midterm elections approach. Armed with newly minted access to Facebook targeted political ads, I’d be surprised if journalists and fact checkers don’t influence at least some close outcomes this election season.
