Past Federal Elections Commission Chair and current Commissioner Ellen Weintraub has publicly denounced “micro-targeting”, the use of social media to craft highly specialized messages for niche audiences. A Yahoo Finance post quotes her as saying that “‘If the platform circulated these ads to a broader base of viewers and listeners, those other folks would be able to critique the ads and there would be a fairer exchange and a more robust debate of our politics.’”
Of the tech giants, Facebook comes in for Weintraub’s most pointed criticism because it still engages in the practice, though it has recently begun to allow users greater control over political ads and made them more transparent. (Google limits micro-targeting of political ads to zip codes, while Twitter has banned them altogether.)
To counter micro-targeting, Weintraub favors industry self-regulation rather than government intervention.
Another antidote to micro-targeting is obviously to provide more varied content–and a way to reflect on and discuss it. That’s our mission at EnCiv.
