How Does Political Advertising Target Voters on Social Media?
17 May 2022
Speakers:
Dr Jenny Kennedy, RMIT University
Prof Daniel Angus, QUT
Listen on Anchor
Duration: 17:26

Jenny: Welcome to the automated decision making and society podcast. I’m Jenny Kennedy and today we’re talking about election advertising on online platforms.

As we countdown to the election, we’re seeing an increase in political advertising, not just on billboards and TV, but also online.  It’s even crept into online games and grinder. Dan Angus, researcher of digital communication from the ADM+S Centre has been working with his team to monitor political advertising practices online through the Australian Ad Observatory Project.

Welcome to the podcast Dan. Thanks for joining today.

Daniel: Thank you so much for having me.

Jenny: So what platforms are being used for political advertising?

Daniel: So pretty much every online platform around the major ones at least have some form of political, advertising and political content indeed on them.

The differentiation though is regarding sponsored content versus organic content, so if we just think through some of the major platforms that are around so, Facebook, Instagram, so they’re both part of meta both allow political advertising, as does Google in all of its products as well so You Tube, Google News, Google search all allow forms of political advertising.

Interestingly, Twitter bans political ads, as does Tiktok, and that’s it’s interesting because I mean a lot of the scope of political advertising has been shaped through recent political events.

So, what’s happened in the United States with the rise of Trump and a lot of misinformation, a lot of online targeting of political messages and a lot of pushback then against platforms and their role in allowing that political advertising on their platform.

So it’s interesting how some platforms have essentially abandoned that as a revenue stream, because I mean obviously underneath this platforms rely on a large part on advertising revenue to fund their service, right, so they you know they need the dollars coming in and political advertising provides millions of dollars in in potential revenue for the platform.

So there are some I guess that stick around in that environment to, you know, try and moderate it and keep it above board while others have abandoned it entirely.

Jenny: I want to ask you about the spending, but first can you just tell me a bit about more about the types of political advertising you’ve been seeing? Tell me like what are some of the obvious examples versus some of the more subtle ones?

Daniel: Yeah, so political ads vary in terms of the platforms themselves that they might appear on so it pretty much goes though with the territory of the platform you’re on the advertising is going to take on that form. So I’ll give an example that say on Instagram or Facebook, most of the political ads you’re going to see come in the form of an image with some text wrapped around it so they resemble what looks like a regular post on that platform the same as you might see someone giving a status update, of their morning breakfast or something like that on Instagram.

It will appear the same, but we’ll be wrapped in some kind of a boundary or barrier to say that and, and clearly demarcate that this is advertising of some form.

It won’t, though differentiate from other sponsored content so it will look and you know much like the same as any other kind of you know sponsored content on the platform, just that it’s political in nature.

Then you go to say platforms like YouTube and Google even through the Google Android app ecology – so this is online games and and kind of free apps you’re going to find a lot more video content. So on YouTube it’s often in the form of pre-roll and mid-roll ads that appear.

You know, while you’re trying to access other kinds of visual content on that platform, the kinds of messages you see on those platforms is interesting, so you know many will try to profile at a candidate level, so most candidates have their own pages and it’s through their own pages.

They set up the advertising content so they’ll operate a candidate page on one of those platforms, and then they’ll be using that as a basis for their sponsored content. And so using the platform affordances to then push that advertising through to particular audiences they’re interested in engaging with and then of course you’ll have the larger political parties and cells which all operate their own accounts, say a national or state based level, also pushing their own content out across a number of platforms.

Jenny: And for what you’ve seen, who’s spending the most on online advertising?

Daniel: Yeah, that’s a pretty easy one to answer without a question it’s the United Australia Party they’ve been absolutely funneling millions into advertising so we look at Google as just one example across all their various products and services we’ve got about $20 million that’s been dumped into Google alone since the start of the year in all forms of political advertising from all parties and interest groups. But then, if you just isolate UAP, they’re responsible for about 16 to $17 million of that spend alone.

So a significant you know chunk of that pie just for their own party. Now within that, if there’s limits in how we can break that spending down, but we do know that a significant amount of that funding is very much being directed into the Senate race in Queensland, where Clive Palmer certainly sees an opportunity to pick up there, one of those fifth or six seats that’s up for grabs beyond the major parties in in Queensland Senate race.

Jenny: We know social media advertising advertisers can target their messages to different groups based on age, gender, location or interests. From your research, can you see how people are being targeted and does this vary across platforms?

Daniel: We can see some things, but there is a limit to how much we can see and observe in terms of that political transparency. So who is seeing an ad? How much is being spent on an ad and other forms of targeting information.

So some platforms provide transparency tools. They come in the form of what they call dashboards, so both meta provide these tools as well as Google to allow us to look into the kinds of ads that are being placed and some limited information about the ads themselves.

So when I say limited information a concrete example is Geo targeting, so we know on Facebook for example, that you can Geo target an ad down to a very specific location so it’s suburb level really, but within the dashboard and transparency tools they provide they only allow you to see up to the state level where an ad might have been placed.

And why this is a lack of transparency is that we know that in political contest there is a high degree of variation in terms of political messaging across they just city to to urban areas and and out to the regions and rural areas and so it means that you can have parties within electoral campaigns tailoring messages.

A classic one or at the moment is around climate change where say in regional areas they might be promoting a message or going very quiet on climate promoting things like you know the resource and fossil fuel industry, whereas in the city they they’re claiming their green credentials and using that kind of messaging to try and woo over the kind of inner city votes, a practical case of this in this particular election that we’ve seen is the coalition who are very much doing this.  There is a series of ads that they’ve put out in both their kind of city seats and their outer suburban and regional seats that list a five point plan. So what are the five things they’re kind of going strong on. The fifth point in that ad, in the inner city areas is on their green credentials. So, climate change, specifically mentioning that as a concept.

But then in those regional and rural areas, their fifth point is not climate change, its defence, so they’re tailoring their message to those different areas. However, we only find that information and, uh, guessing that they’re targeting those to those areas by virtue of the fact that it’s the local candidates that are placing the ads, and we assume that they are targeting.

We can’t know for sure because all that Facebook provide is that state based aggregation information. So yeah, there is a fundamental limit to what they do and not to kind of harp on about this. The idea here is that the ADM+S research we’re doing at the moment is trying to bring some more of that transparency to bear on this question.  So our Ad Observatory project, for example, is trying to gather ads at the point of consumption so this is on people own devices, to try and backfill some of that information, the platforms don’t provide us and provide that observe ability around.  Yeah, So what kind of information are being used and leveraged to target information and and sponsorship out to those particular people.

Jenny: How effective do you think targeted advertising Is on election results.

Daniel: There’s many questions around the effectiveness in general of advertising on election outcomes.

I think the way to think about this as a as a question as a point, it’s not so much about advertising or any kind of content influencing the vote of one person rather than its ability to frame and set an agenda within the media and within us, you know, within our say barbecue conversations on the weekend.

So as we’re being exposed particular messaging its natural that we’re going to pick up on that messaging as a point of conversation with our peers, our friends, and our families, and I think that’s what we need to turn through with particularly when it comes to mis- and dis-information that we see through this advertising and other forms of organic content is how much of that is permeating through into those national conversations.

So yeah, I think differently around effectiveness in terms of swaying a vote rather than Its effect at swaying a national conversation and in that respect I think yes, it is incredibly effective, and if it wasn’t doing that we wouldn’t be seeing the millions of dollars being funneled into it by the major parties and indeed some of these are, you know, minor protest parties as well.

Jenny: Tell us more about the ad observatory project, how is it helping you find out this kind of information.

Daniel: Yeah, so the added server tree is a plug in. It plugs into a normal browser so something like Chrome, Firefox, Edge and you can download it and install it yourself at home. It works on the laptop or a desktop computer. Once it’s installed it detects any sponsored content on Facebook.

So as you load up Facebook, it gathers any point of content that you encounter and only the sponsored content. With that sponsored content it then adds some of your demographic details through it that you provided willingly so you can provide no demographic details or a full account of demographics or basic things like an age range, education level, income level, political preference, these kinds of things, and with those two pieces of information, the ad and the demo information, they enter a database stats that we control and that we can then use to look for these patterns at a macro scale so we can start to fill in that missing detail, particularly around issues like political ads.

But it’s so much more than that, beyond politics around other things, like say financial products or regulated products such as alcohol and tobacco. So to see how those are also being targeted towards individuals and where we might see, say practices where there is preferential targeting happening into particular say you know protected categories. So for example people in a low SEO area getting targeted with a particular financial advice which you know might not be the best advice and products for them in that area.

So yeah, the hope is that we can use the tool to observe this and to hold it to account essentially

Jenny: Great, so that’s where you anticipate the Ad Observatory work going beyond the election and the political advertising work that you’re doing right now.

Daniel: Yeah, absolutely. The idea here is that the political campaigns provide a flashpoint for us, where we’re hyper aware of what’s happening with ads.  That certainly ads are a part of our everyday platform experience and we know very little about those advertising ecologies other than what those platforms provide out.

Now to go back to those transparency dashboards, it’s interesting here that for politics and issues we get some information, it’s not a lot, but it is some, so there’s other categories I’ve been talking about for financial products and regulated categories we get nothing. We get the ad if you’re lucky to go there at the time the ad is running as soon as the ads are not running anymore, they cease to exist on those transparency tools, so you can’t use this as a historical archive to go back and collect old ads.

Nor can you use it to, you know, gather any other information about reach about where it was seen, so there’s none of that transparency of data available on any other ad category outside of politics, and that’s a real problem.

Jenny: So how is the ad observatory project helping you find out this kind of information?

Daniel: So the point here being that I think the ad observatory project is very much an experiment in showing how we can perform platform observability without the need for the platforms themselves to provide tooling or consent for us to do so.

So, the idea being is putting power back in the hands of the users of these platforms to collect data essentially about their own experiences and then share that data in a way which is anonymous that allows us to build a greater understanding of how those platforms, tailor user experiences, and that’s incredibly valuable to answer these questions around, you know indeed how are ads being placed and targeted? Are we finding that there are potentially deceptive practices happening where minority categories are being targeted with, you know, financial products and advice which you know might raise eyebrows or you know in fact be illegal.

So, it’s those kinds of things we’re hoping to use the platform for is a way of essentially looking back at the platforms themselves when they’re not providing us with the tools we need or that basic observe ability.

Jenny: Tell us more about why it’s so important that we monitor advertising more generally, but specifically political advertising online.

Daniel: Yeah, so in the past with you know all forms of content so not just advertising but general media we had a sense of shared watching so you know when you’re opening up a newspaper, you understood that you’re reading the same newspaper as a person next to you on the train, on your way to work.  When you turn on the television at night, you’re watching the same kinds of programs as everybody else in Australia on that same, you know time time slot. With personalised media and and the rise of these digital media platforms we’ve now got incredibly personalised media environments.

As part of that, we also have advertising as a large part of that experience as well and like the content that we’re consuming, our advertising is increasingly personalized and the way it’s delivered to us is is incredibly unique for us as an Individual. Why it’s Important to have a sense of you know a shared understanding of what is out there is that it’s just important to know the pulse of the nation.

What are the kinds of content that people are consuming, how does that feed into our shared understanding and and sensibilities or around current events in the world when you’re covering an election campaign as a journalist, say how do you know what are the most resonant themes for the constituencies out there that you’re meant to be serving.

So, these are really important questions for us  you know, a society is to know you know what’s out there, what is being talked about discussed at any time and so yes, I think the projects were embarking on not just the ad observatory, but other projects that take a similar kind of data donation approach like the Australian search experience. are ways of getting back that sense of shared understanding of what is out there. How do we understand how content is being shaped?

What content is being preferenced within a broad sample of Australians you know, feeds on their home devices and that is important I think for us as a society.

Jenny: I think you’ve given us a great insight into just how valuable and critical that ad observatory project is, what can listeners do to get involved in the project?

Daniel: So they can navigate to our website and go to the link that’s fairly prominent on the home page which says ad observatory – The Australian at observatory.

Once there, there’s some very clear instructions they can follow to install the plug-in to provide that consent that we insist upon so they know the kinds of data we are collecting and then from there, once it’s installed, just go about their daily kind of media activities so you know, jump on Facebook when they normally would, and let it do its work of collecting that sponsored content.

The tool itself I should say, provides users with a really valuable insight as well, so it’s not just that it’s kind of their passive in the background, you can use the tool itself and provide some basic interfaces so you can see the ads that you’ve seen.  You can use it to try and understand yeah, what are you being targeted with.

So from that perspective I think it’s really useful and some of our users have mentioned that they find that aspect really quite informative to know the kinds of ads that they are being targeted with, so they themselves can understand better how their experiences are being shaped.

Jenny: Hopefully listeners will get involved. Thank you so much for talking with us today, Dan.

Daniel: No worries at all and thank you to all the listeners out there if you’re considering downloading the plugin, it’s a huge help to watch then and our research community to understand you know your experience with these digital media platforms

Jenny: You’ve been listening to a podcast from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. For more information on the centre go to admscentre.org.au