And, indeed: it was. While the audience for the neutral ad was nearly evenly split, the researchers found that, on average, “Facebook delivers our ads with content from Democratic campaigns to over 65% users registered as Democrats, while delivering ads from Republican campaigns to under 40% users registered as Democrats, despite identical targeting parameters.” Targeting based on Facebook’s classification of users’ political leaning, instead of party registration, led to even more skewed results. Just as important, it cost much more to reach users across the political divide. For example, the study found that it cost 50 percent more to get a conservative voter to see Sanders content than Trump content.
“In traditional television or newspaper advertising, two political campaigns that have the same financial resources have an equal chance to reach the same audiences,” said Aleksandra Korolova, a computer scientist at USC and one of the study’s authors. “Whereas what we’ve showed in this work is that Facebook will charge the political campaigns differently depending on who they are and will deliver the ads to a subset of the users that they’re targeting according to what Facebook thinks is important—not according to what the political campaign may be trying to do.”
Facebook has downplayed the study. “Findings showing that ads about a presidential candidate are being delivered to people in their political party should not come as a surprise,” said a company spokesperson in an emailed statement. “Ads should be relevant to the people who see them. It’s always the case that campaigns can reach audiences they want with the right targeting, objective, and spend.”
But what if the “right” spend is more than a campaign can afford? The study suggests that Facebook charges a premium to reach audiences who aren’t already aligned with your message. That might not matter for a national campaign with tens millions of dollars to throw around. But local campaigns and less well funded candidates have to make hard choices about where to invest limited resources.
The company is right about one thing, however: to people who work in digital campaign world, the results were not exactly shocking. “I’m not surprised at all,” said Tatenda Musapatike, a former Facebook employee who is now senior campaign director at Acronym, progressive digital advocacy group. “I don’t think many people in the industry would be particularly surprised.”
Musapatike pointed out it’s rare for digital campaigns to even bother trying to persuade voters on the other side. Eric Wilson, a Republican digital strategist, agreed. But, he pointed out, that’s largely because strategists already know the platform rewards that approach. “People like to fault the campaigns for playing up the base voter, but I lay the blame at Facebook’s feet,” he said. “Because if you’re telling me that I can reach voters who agree with me for half the cost or a third of the cost of voters who disagree with me? I’m going to take that bet every day.”
It all comes down to Facebook’s desire to show users “relevant” ads. When you target an ad to a certain Facebook audience, you’re actually bidding against other advertisers in an auction for that group’s attention. And Facebook openly tells businesses that the platform will “subsidize relevant ads,” meaning an ad can win an auction even against higher bidders if the algorithm deems it more relevant to a given user. Why? Because to keep selling ads, Facebook needs to keep users on the platform.
“I talk about this all the time in my trainings for campaigns and operatives: Facebook’s objectives are not aligned with your campaign objectives,” said Wilson. “Facebook wants to make more money, and they make more money by getting people to spend more time on the site.” That, in turn, gives the platform an incentive to show users what they’re already interested in. That might seem benign when it comes to an ad for detergent, but it has different implications for democratic politics, which depends to some extent on the possibility of candidates getting their messages in front of people who aren’t already in their camp. And it raises the question of whether the platform gives an advantage to established politicians; an unknown candidate, after all, won’t show up in any user’s list of preexisting interests.
