Clandestino or Rifugiato?Anti-immigration Facebook Ad Targeting in Italy✱

Abstract

Monitoring advertising around controversial issues is an important step in ensuring accountability and transparency of political processes. To that end, we use the Facebook Ads Library to collect 2312 migration-related advertising campaigns in Italy over one year. Our pro-and anti-immigration classifier (F1=0.85) reveals a partisan divide among the major Italian political parties, with antiimmigration ads accounting for nearly 15M impressions. Although composing 47.6% of all migration-related ads, anti-immigration ones receive 65.2% of impressions. We estimate that about two thirds of all captured campaigns use some kind of demographic targeting by location, gender, or age. We find sharp divides by age and gender: for instance, anti-immigration ads from major parties are 17% more likely to be seen by a male user than a female. Unlike pro-migration parties, we find that anti-immigration ones reach a similar demographic to their own voters. However their audience change with topic: an ad from anti-immigration parties is 24% more likely to be seen by a male user when the ad speaks about migration, than if it does not. Furthermore, the viewership of such campaigns tends to follow the volume of mainstream news around immigration, supporting the theory that political advertisers try to "ride the wave" of current news. We conclude with policy implications for political communication: since the Facebook Ads Library does not allow to distinguish between advertisers intentions and algorithmic targeting, we argue that more details should be shared by platforms regarding the targeting configuration of socio-political campaigns. * In Italian, "clandestino" means "clandestine" and "rifugiato" means "refugee".† After the first author, the author names are in alphabetical order.

The Thin Ideology of Populist Advertising on Facebook during the 2019 EU Elections

“…We only find 3 ads published by French parties, which were all published after the end of the election on May 26; this fact corroborates our decision to exclude the country 7. Data from ParlGov 8. Here we report the number of single parties, rather than coalitions 9.…”

“…For example, Koc-Michalska et al [24] show that interactivity is important, and responsive party posts on Facebooks are significantly more likely to be shared, liked, and commented on by users. The audience targeting has also been studied, in the case of anti-immigration advertising in Italy, finding that the political parties promoting anti-immigration messages reach voters similar in age and gender to their voter base [8,9].…”

“…The final list of countries is: Germany, United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, and Poland.For each country, we collect all the parties which participated in the 2019 EU elections in May 23-26, and additionally match the same criteria as the PopuList: at least one seat or at least 2% of votes in a national election 7. The resulting list contains 46 parties, out of which 17 are in the PopuList 8. For each party, we manually identify its main Facebook page and the one of its leader(s) 9.…”

“…For each ad we retrieve the publication date, the end time of the ad campaign, the text of the ad, the number of impressions (i.e., the number of users who saw the ad, given as a range), the cost of the campaign (again as a range), and the demographic of the audience reached by the ad: gender (male, female, or unknown) and age (in 7 buckets). Following previous literature[8], for values that come in a range (cost and impressions) we take the average of the endpoints of the range, and for open-ended ranges we take the known closed endpoint.By combining these two data sources (PopuList and Facebook ads), we can visualize the most frequent combinations of tags present in political advertisement in Figure1. The most common tag is eurosceptic(16) followed by populist(14), however the latter accrues a larger number of impressions overall.…”

Cruising Queer HCI on the DL: A Literature Review of LGBTQ+ People in HCI

“…These works speak to the ways queer people are seen as immoral and, therefore, silenced by government internet filters [21] and librarians filtering our "sensitive or controversial" book topics from homophobic publics [113]. We found two papers describing LGBTQ+ Wikipedia articles as controversial [114,134] and another two mentioning LGBTQ+ topics in the context of political ads on Facebook [33,147]. In one of these papers, the authors discuss both LGBTQ+ and veteran communities gathering advertisements mistakenly removed by Facebook because they were election-related, which was used to motivate an ad audit [147].…”