by Amanda Seitz | The Associated Press
WASHINGTON – Facebook’s parent company Meta said a few months before the US midterm election it will begin publicly revealing more about how advertisers target people with political ads.
The announcement comes after years of criticism that social media platforms are too overt about how campaigns, special interest groups and politicians use the platform to target small pockets of people with polarizing, divisive or misleading messages. We do.
Meta, which also owns Instagram, said in July it would begin releasing details about the demographics and audience interests it targeted with ads running on its two primary social networks. The company will also share how much advertisers spent attempting to target people in certain states.
Jeff King wrote in a statement posted to Meta, “By providing advertiser targeting criteria for analysis and reporting on running ads about social issues, elections and politics, we help people reach potential voters on our technologies.” Hope to help you better understand the practices used for Website.
The new details could shed more light on how politicians spread misleading or controversial political messages among certain groups of people. For example, advocacy groups and Democrats have argued for years that deceptive political ads are taking a toll on the Facebook feeds of the Spanish-speaking population.
The information will be displayed in the Facebook Ad Library, a public database that already shows how much companies, politicians or campaigns spend on each ad that runs on Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp. Currently, one can see how much a page has spent running ads and analyze the age, gender, and states or countries the ad is shown in.
Meta said in a statement that this information will be available in 242 countries when a social issue, political or election advertisement is run.
Meta collected $86 billion in revenue during 2020, the last major US election year, thanks to its granular ad targeting system. Facebook’s advertising system is so customizable that advertisers can target one in a billion users on the platform if they wish.
In its announcement Monday, Meta said it will provide researchers with new details that show the interest categories that advertisers selected when trying to target people on the platform.
