POLITICS
Background 🏛
We wanted to explore how the data brokerage industry cashes in on political advertising. Since, 2008, online political advertising has become increasingly important, with political campaigns spending tens of billions of dollars each year to push political ads. What do theses data brokers who collaborate with political campaigns know about you? According to the Washington Post, RNC allegedly has 3000 data points on every US voter
(https://www.statista.com/statistics/736971/social-media-ad-spend-usa/#:~:text=Every%20year%20billions%20of%20dollars,and%20applications%20on%20social%20media.)
Study Questions ❓
We wanted to answer:
How do differences in personal characteristics (Race, Age, Gender) affect the type of political targeted advertising?
Is there an attempt to sway a user away from their affiliation, or do advertisers simply serve to build on existing political leanings?
Experiment 🧪
To run experiments, we use a modified version of AdFisher to create and automate accounts specific to onw of five points on the political spectrum. We then observe advertisements and categorize them by type. Our data and tools can bes found below.
GitHub - hansonc2/info-flow-experiments: Run information flow experiments on the Web
Results 📈
-Moderate Liberal.png)
-Moderate Conservative.png)
-Far Conservative.png)
-Far Conservative.png)
-Far Liberal.png)
-Far Conservative_bar.png)
-Moderate Conservative_bar.png)
-Far Liberal_bar.png)
-Far Conservative_bar.png)
-Moderate Conservative.png)
-Moderate Conservative_bar.png)
-Moderate Liberal_bar.png)
-Far Liberal.png)
-Moderate Liberal.png)
-Far Liberal_bar.png)
-Far Conservative.png)
-Far Liberal.png)
-Moderate Liberal_bar.png)
-Far Liberal_bar.png)
-Far Conservative_bar.png)
