Some really good journalism came out of this project.
https://themarkup.org/news/2021/04/13/how-facebooks-ad-syste...
Not surprising Facebook wanted to kneecap them. Them claiming privacy concerns is just... peak hypocrisy.
https://themarkup.org/news/2021/04/13/how-facebooks-ad-syste...
Not surprising Facebook wanted to kneecap them. Them claiming privacy concerns is just... peak hypocrisy.
They're technically not wrong. They're just prioritizing client privacy, not product/cattle privacy.
Paradoxically, people being more informed about different messages can also drive polarization. To recycle the article's example of Exxon telling liberals 'we're becoming more green' and conservatives 'hands off our pipelines' (my paraphrases), if a liberal sees the conservative-targeted message they will likely think 'Exxon is greenwashing its dirty business' while in the reverse case a conservative may think 'woke virtue signalling at its worst.'
Every ad campaign is like a bet on on attention that could pay off but could also backfire if it's too far adrift from the truth or public perceptions/attitudes about your firm/sector (eg if you're a serious company like an accountancy firm, don't try to do funny ads because finance people don't want to hire clowns). Running campaigns where the audience is systematically split and segmented mitigates those risks to some extent, but also runs the risk of eroding the public trust completely once there's a broad awareness that all corporate communications are targeted.
To be honest, I'm somewhat surprised we haven't yet seen corporations put out different press releases to different parts of the media catering to different political orientations. You could probably send different press releases to, say, Newsmax and the Huffington Post and it would be a while before readers of one became aware of the different source material in the other.