When Ad Targeting Meets the 2020 Election 52
Discriminating in housing ads is against the law. Discriminating in campaign ads may not be against the law, but many Americans strongly believe that it is bad for democracy.53 The same targeted advertising systems that are used to target people based on their interests and affinities were used to manipulate voters in the 2016 and 2018 elections. Most egregious, voters who were thought to lean toward Democratic candidates were targeted with ads containing incorrect information about how, when, and where to vote.54 Facebook, Google, and Twitter now prohibit this kind of disinformation, but we don’t know how effectively the rule is enforced: none of these companies publish information about their processes for enforcing advertising rules or about the outcomes of those processes.55 At the scale that these platforms operate, fact-checking ad content is hard enough when the facts in question are indisputable, such as the date of an upcoming election. It’s even thornier when subjective claims about an opponent’s character or details of their policy proposals are in play. Empowering private companies to evaluate truth would be dangerously undemocratic, as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has himself argued.56 In the absence of laws restricting the content or the targeting of campaign ads, campaigns can easily inundate voters with ads peddling misleading claims on issues they care about, in an effort to sway their votes.
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