Ethan Zuckerman
Pretty blown away by this paper from Piotr Sapiezynski and team at Northeastern and Princeton, presented at #CSCW2024: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3686917
For lots of good legal and moral reasons, Facebook doesn't allow advertisers to explicitly target ads to "White Republicans" or "Black Democrats"... but there are lots of ways to get around this through "proxies".
On the Use of Proxies in Political Ad Targeting | Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction

Detailed targeting of advertisements has long been one of the core offerings of online platforms. Unfortunately, malicious advertisers have frequently abused such targeting features, with results that range from violating civil rights laws to driving ...

Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
Nov 13, 2024 at 8:14pmWeb
Show threadEthan ZuckermanNov 13, 2024
As an example, Piotr shows recent ad buys by the Trump campaign in the last weeks of the 2024 election cycle: they targeted bow hunters, fox hunters, fans of Trace Adkins, Garth Brooks, NASCAR and Golf Magazine. You might think of this $10m ad buy as a proxy for white guys who might well lean Republican, a logical ad buy if you're trying to get people to donate to your campaign.
Show threadYanaNov 13, 2024
@ethanz One of my tinfoil hat theories is that the Southernization of rural areas is a manifestation of social media algorithms designed to make it easier for marketers to sell products. Ads are more effective the more homogeneous the population, so Meta and Google made the population more homogeneous.