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Category: Project

Description: To inform and organize potential voters, political campaigns are increasingly resorting to tailored advertising using social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. These platforms claim to allow advertisers to target ads to the most "relevant" audience for a political campaign including by inferring interests and political affiliations. However, previous research has demonstrated that targeting may not perform as envisioned since ad delivery algorithms, not just the intentions of the advertiser, play an important role in deciding who sees which ad. Some very recent research indeed finds that the Facebook (now Meta) ad delivery algorithm is steering ads towards certain audiences without the explicit intention or knowledge of the advertiser themselves. Ali et al. (2019) find that ads that ran at the same time, with the custom same audience, and the same budget can be heavily skewed along gendered and racial stereotypes. In the realm of political advertising, researchers have also found that ads are more likely to be delivered to ideologically congruent audiences (Ali et al., 2021). Moreover, Ali et al. (2021) find evidence for an increased cost for reaching ideologically incongruent audiences: for example, when placing a liberal ad to a liberal audience they had to pay 21 Dollars per 1000 reached users, whereas a conservative ad delivered to a liberal audience cost almost twice as much with 40 Dollars per 1000 users. Studies that investigate the skew of ad algorithms in the realm of politics have focused on the United States and to our knowledge, there has been no similar effort to uncover whether and to which degree ad algorithms are influencing online political ad delivery in a European multi-party context. To fill this gap in the literature we plan to investigate whether skews in ad delivery occur in the European context and we will focus in particular on the Dutch case. 21-PCJ-14261