Targeted election ads hindering US democracy – Global Witness

Nov 04, 2020 News

Global Witness

By Kemol King

Kaieteur News – Online advertising has become increasingly popular in the past few years during elections campaigns. Guyanese received ad blasts during the General and Regional Elections, which concluded in August. The new phenomenon of targeted political advertisements has become an issue plaguing American elections too. The problem seems to be a lack of regulation.
Instead of putting out adverts, which are meant for the entire general public, electioneers are now utilizing this method which allows them to reach specific demographics.
Imagine advertisements placed on Facebook and made to reach persons from a certain income bracket, while evading the attention of another bracket. Imagine ads targeted only to folks of a certain race. Imagine ads targeted to meet just a few of your friends, but not to you. This is what has been happening in America on social media platforms like Facebook, and US voters in key states don’t seem comfortable with it.
Internationally respected anti-corruption watchdog, Global Witness said that new data has found that most voters who are regular social media users in key battleground states in the US would support a ban on online targeted political advertisements. A battleground state or a swing state is a US state in which the jury is still out on who would win that state in the Presidential election, as a opposed to red and blue states, which journalists and pundits have already determined will vote Republican and Democrat respectively.
The non-governmental organization (NGO) said that polling carried out on its behalf by data company, YouGov indicates that in the three swing states of Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, 68 percent of respondents think online advertisers should ensure political ads are viewable by everyone, and that only 15 percent think these ads should be targeted and only made available to certain groups. It is notable that the majority of persons who identified with both parties (68 percent Democrat, 63 percent Republican) would support a ban on online targeted political ads.
According to Global Witness, more than US$93M was spent on Facebook ads by the Donald Trump and Joe Biden campaigns during this election season.
The respondents to the YouGov poll returned a majority saying that they believed that they saw advertising on social media that was targeted at them because of their gender, location, age, race, previous voting record and personal data provided to social media sites. Furthermore, 31 percent of respondents said that they wanted to reduce the time spent on social media, with a little over half (52 percent) of that group citing false information as one of the reasons.
A simple majority (54 percent) of the respondents said they have seen ads on their social media, which call into question the integrity or validity of the US election and 19 percent of those said they could rarely or never identify who was funding the ads.
Global Witness said that the issue is particularly important when it comes to ads micro-targeted to a niche audience based on personal data accumulated by Facebook, as they can stir up division or cement prejudice.
The Head of the Digital Threats to Democracy campaign at Global Witness, Ava Lee, said that there is too little regulation of the operations of these platforms’ operations, in this regard.
“Big Tech has pervaded our lives to an astonishing degree.” Lee said. “Facebook has 2.7 billion monthly active users, and over 85% of people using search engines to go through Google. These platforms are the new public realms, where news is shared, friendships are formed and political movements rise and fall.”
She added, “The current situation cannot continue. It is undermining democracy, embedding division, and has the potential to disenfranchise swathes of the population. It is time for governments to regulate Big Tech and, as a starting point, ban the use of micro-targeting for political advertising.”

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