Congress to disclose Facebook’s Russian ads
SAN FRANCISCO – The House Intelligence Committee is preparing to release to the public the 3,000 ads the Russian- based Internet Research Agency bought on Facebook as part of its coordinated disinformation campaign to sway the electorate, information that may help explain how voters were duped and which campaign benefited.
The unprecedented disclosures bring to the forefront questions some of Facebook’s 2 billion monthly users may have about computer algorithms that underwrite what ad is shown to which user: Why was I shown one ad and not another? Did I see any Russian ads, and could I have known?
The largely automated ad system has turned the 13- year- old Facebook into one of theworld’s most valuable companies by allowing businesses, from small entrepreneurs to large chains, to show specific ads to finely sliced groups of users.
How do Facebook ads target users?
In the days when print, radio and television were the only games in town, advertisers selected the publication or TV show they wanted to advertise in and perhaps the specific section or program. For a national publication or show, they might be able to specify a certain area of the country, but that was about the extent of it.
Ads on Facebook are several orders of magnitude more specific. The company constantly collects information about its users, including age, gender, education and income level, job title, relationship status, hobbies, political leanings, favorite TV shows and movies, what kind of car they drive and what kinds of products they buy. In addition, Facebook tracks the pages users like, the ads they click on and the sites they browse.
Someof the information is collected directly by Facebook, some of it is purchased from data broker companies that use public records and buying behavior to learn about you.
Facebook then uses that information to decide to whom to show a specific ad. If you clicked on an InstaPot ad, you might be shown ads for other types of pressure cookers, or more generically, cooking. If your interests were the Bible, faith or Christianity, you could have been shown an ad placed by the Russians showing Jesus and Satan arm wrestling, with the caption, “Satan: If I win Clinton wins! Jesus: Not if I can help it! Press ‘ Like’ to help Jesus win!”
What’s the difference between a post and an ad? Not much, sometimes.
When an organization posts something on its Facebook page, its Facebook friends see it as simply content that appears in their News Feeds. The organization also has the option of “boosting” the posting by paying to have it seen by people who are not friends of the page. In that case, their posting gets a “Sponsored” note on it, so the people whose News Feeds it appears in know that it’s an ad.
The same is true if someone buys an ad on Facebook: The “Sponsored” note will be attached to the content. But there’s a catch. If someone who sees that ad, or that boosted post, decides to share it, the “Sponsored” tag no longer appears because it’s no longer a paid ad.