Political campaigns increasingly rely on Facebook for reaching their constituents, particularly through ad targeting. Facebook’s business model is premised on a promise to connect advertisers with the “right” users: those likely to click, download, engage, purchase. The company pursues this promise (in part) by algorithmically inferring users’ interests from their data and providing advertisers with a means of targeting users by their inferred interests. In this study, we explore for whom this interest classification system works in order to build on conversations in critical data studies about the ways such systems produce knowledge about the world rooted in power structures. We critically analyze the classification system from a variety of empirical vantage points—via user data; Facebook documentation, training, and patents; and Facebook’s tools for advertisers—and through theoretical concepts from a variety of domains. In this, we focus on the ways the classification system shapes possibilities for political representation and voice, particularly for people of color, women, and LGBTQ+ people. We argue that this “big data-driven” classification system should be read as political: it articulates a stance not only on what issues are or are not important in the U.S. public sphere, but also on who is considered a significant enough public to be adequately accounted for.

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Young voters, including college students, turnout less than older citizens-particularly in non-presidential elections. We examine two promising intervention strategies in the 2018 midterm elections: information cues and social pressure. Additionally, we consider whether voting information and social pressure to vote spread to others through social ties. Using a large-scale field experiment involving sections of a university-wide first-year writing seminar, we examine whether informational and social pressure presentations are effective strategies for increasing college student voter turnout. Furthermore, by linking each student in our study to their roommates, we assess whether there were spillover effects from the interventions. Though the treatments did not alone affect turnout, we find positive effects from classroom treatments among first-year students who were registered to vote prior to the presentations. Additionally, we find positive peer spillover effects for turnout from the social pressure treatment when the roommate of the treated student was previously registered to vote.