New report: Who (really) targets you? Facebook in Polish election campaigns

How does political microtargeting differ between the U.S. and Europe, given Europe’s more modest advertising budgets, stronger legal protections, and varied political cultures? Are we ready to name concrete problems with microtargeting and identify which ones can be solved by regulators? And last but not least: Who should be the focus of such regulation?

These were just some of the troubling questions raised by the Cambridge Analytica scandal that we set out to answer in our new report — Who (really) targets you. Facebook in Polish election campaigns. With the goal of fueling European policy debate around political microtargeting (especially in the light of the upcoming Digital Services Act), as well as providing concrete recommendatons, together with ePaństwo Foundation and Sotrender, we monitored and analysed political ads published on Facebook in the Polish parliamentary elections in October 2019.

We hope that this work be a meaningful contribution to the pool of research on the impact of PMT and the growing role of internet platforms in the game of political influence.

The project was funded by Civitates as part of the "Healthy Digital Public Sphere" programme.