The IPA’s three-year campaign for political advertisers to stop micro-targeting social media users will go on, despite Meta’s recent announcement to limit targeting options.
Last week Meta (the parent company for Facebook and Instagram) said it will remove “sensitive” ad-targeting categories from 19 January.
Graham Mudd, vice-president product marketing, ads, said the company would remove “Detailed Targeting options” that relate to sensitive information Facebook users post about political causes, health issues, race or ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation.
Mudd said it decided to make these changes to “address feedback from civil rights experts, policymakers, and other stakeholders on the importance of preventing advertisers from abusing the targeting options we make available”.
However, Nigel Gwilliam, director of media affairs at the IPA, indicated that the advertising practitioner trade body’s campaign would continue because Meta’s move sounds “slightly different” to their concerns.
Gwilliam told Mediatel News: “In the absence of regulation, even self-regulation, political ads can say whatever they like, and via microtargeting they can be served in a largely opaque manner. This is why we have campaigned against microtargeted online political advertising since 2018.
“So while any reduction in microtargeting’s deployment in political advertising is welcome, this move sounds slightly different… It is limiting targeting by sensitive characteristics, including political affiliation, rather than limiting by type of advertiser. This may help reduce microtargeting by political advertisers but only indirectly.”
In response to the Cambridge Analytica data-breach scandal in 2018, the IPA called on the Electoral Commission and political advertisers to stop using micro-targeting for online political advertising.
At the time, the IPA said this was necessary “due to the absence of self-regulation on political advertising, which it believes can render ephemeral micro-targeted political advertising opaque and unaccountable”.
The IPA also called for all political advertising creative work to be listed for public display so that messaging is accountable for all members of the public to see.
