TY - GEN
T1 - Exploring Political Ad Libraries for Online Advertising Transparency
T2 - 11th International Conference on Social Media and Society: Diverse Voices - Promises and Perils of Social Media for Diversity, SMSociety 2020
AU - Medina Serrano, Juan Carlos
AU - Papakyriakopoulos, Orestis
AU - Hegelich, Simon
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 ACM.
PY - 2020/7/22
Y1 - 2020/7/22
N2 - This study investigates the possibilities and limits presented by the newly created ad libraries from Facebook and Google to analyze online political campaigns. We selected Germany as a case study and focused on the months leading up to the 2019 elections to the European Parliament. We identified the political actors that were active advertisers, compared their spending, and contrasted the number of ad impressions with user engagement on their organic online content. From the political ads, we extracted the unique ads and manually analyzed a subsample of them. Furthermore, we explored regional and demographic distributions of users reached by the advertisements and used them as a proxy for the advertisers' targeting strategies. We also compared the success of the ad campaigns on boosted Facebook posts. We found that even though all the major German political parties engaged in online ad campaigns, they kept their attempts at microtargeting to a minimum. Although their Facebook-sponsored posts were more successful than normal posts, we did not find statistical significance for all the political parties. Interestingly, we noticed that the distribution of users reached by the right-wing party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) diverges from that of the other parties. Finally, we discuss further challenges for enhancing transparency in online advertising.
AB - This study investigates the possibilities and limits presented by the newly created ad libraries from Facebook and Google to analyze online political campaigns. We selected Germany as a case study and focused on the months leading up to the 2019 elections to the European Parliament. We identified the political actors that were active advertisers, compared their spending, and contrasted the number of ad impressions with user engagement on their organic online content. From the political ads, we extracted the unique ads and manually analyzed a subsample of them. Furthermore, we explored regional and demographic distributions of users reached by the advertisements and used them as a proxy for the advertisers' targeting strategies. We also compared the success of the ad campaigns on boosted Facebook posts. We found that even though all the major German political parties engaged in online ad campaigns, they kept their attempts at microtargeting to a minimum. Although their Facebook-sponsored posts were more successful than normal posts, we did not find statistical significance for all the political parties. Interestingly, we noticed that the distribution of users reached by the right-wing party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) diverges from that of the other parties. Finally, we discuss further challenges for enhancing transparency in online advertising.
KW - European elections
KW - Facebook
KW - Google
KW - ad libraries
KW - political campaigns
KW - social media
KW - transparency
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85088103061&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/3400806.3400820
DO - 10.1145/3400806.3400820
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85088103061
T3 - ACM International Conference Proceeding Series
SP - 111
EP - 121
BT - 11th International Conference on Social Media and Society
A2 - Gruzd, Anatoliy
A2 - Mai, Philip
A2 - Recuero, Raquel
A2 - Hernandez-Garcia, Angel
A2 - Sian Lee, Chei
A2 - Cook, James
A2 - Hodson, Jaigris
A2 - McEwan, Bree
A2 - Hopke, Jill
PB - Association for Computing Machinery
Y2 - 22 July 2020 through 24 July 2020
ER -