Facebook’s ‘transparency’ efforts hide key reasons for showing ads
Despite Facebook’s claims it’s improving the transparency of its advertising, the social media service’s explanations of its targeting criteria are still obscure and misleading says Oana Goga, a research scientist at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), in this cross-posting from The Conversation.
Facebook’s advertising platform was not built to help social media users understand who was targeting them with messages, or why. It is an extremely powerful system, which lets advertisers target specific users according to a detailed range of attributes. For example, in 2017, there were 3,100 people in Facebook’s database who lived in Idaho, were in long-distance relationships and were thinking about buying a minivan.
That ability to microtarget specific messages at very particular groups of people can, however, let dishonest advertisers discriminate against minority groups or spread politically divisive misinformation.
