‘Who Targets Me’ tells you which political campaigns bought your data

A free browser extension collects crowdsourced data to see how ads show up in users social media feeds and who paid for them to be there

by Piper McDaniel | 26 Oct 2022

When Donald Trump won the presidential election in 2016, people were shocked: voters, media, pollsters and analysts alike didn’t see it coming. The victory that would go on to reshape U.S. politics and bring the nation to the current moment of democratic peril was regarded as the biggest political upset in modern U.S. politics. The shock waves were international; countries worldwide grappled with the reality of Americans electing a candidate whose extreme views validated existing bigotry and amplified it without apology.

The shock provoked self-examination throughout the entire apparatus that predicted, monitored and reported on politics: “How did we get it so wrong?” Among other lessons, the win was a tip-off that the vast arena of politics on social media wasn’t really understood — or regulated.

Sam Jeffers is among those responding to that global knowledge gap. In 2017, he co-founded Who Targets Me, a self-described “small group of activists” monitoring political advertising on social media and advocating for regulation. They tracked the impacts of political ads on social media in dozens of elections worldwide and used this information to inform regulatory policy.

“(It's) very, very easy to sort of misunderstand what is paid communication, what is organic communication or what’s political and what’s not political, and these sorts of things,” Jeffers said. “So we're studying these things to begin to understand the dynamics of it. And then to think about what seems to be the right regulatory responses.”

To do this, Who Targets Me launched a worldwide research project aiming to crowdsource individual ad data and use it to take the pulse of social media advertising. Their browser extension is free and, when downloaded, will compile the political ads and contribute them to the Who Targets Me database for real-time analysis. Those who participate will also receive a weekly update summarizing exactly what ads they saw and who paid for them.

The effort is a push for transparency around political advertising and other content, which has gone fairly unchecked, often fueling division, misinformation and political mistrust. Who Targets Me is actively involved in ongoing pushes for reform and helped secure recent changes to regulation in the U.K.

Campaigns for the U.S. 2022 midterms have already spent an estimated $6 billion, making this year’s midterms among the most expensive in history. Spending is anticipated to climb as high as $9 billion by election day.

Street Roots talked with Jeffers about campaign advertising and what researchers are seeing in the United States during midterm elections.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Piper McDaniel: What's the origin of this project? How did it come to be?

Sam Jeffers: Yeah, so we started way back in 2017. And the reason was there's been a bunch of quite unpredictable election results. So the (U.S.) election in 2016 didn't quite go the way people were expecting, and then obviously there was the Brexit referendum in the U.K. And obviously, lots of people asking questions about what is really happening on social media, what's happening with social media advertising? Each time those election results came out, the winners were saying, ‘Well, we were so smart on Facebook, and we spent so much money on Facebook to speak to people that you've never been able to reach before, and we turned out new voters and won these elections.’ So we built this piece of software, (a) browser extension that anyone could install, that would allow them to donate the ads they saw in kind of a crowdsourced database. And then we would try and explain what was going on in real-time — we would look out for bad practices within the policy violations on the Facebook side and generally try and explain this phenomenon better.

McDaniel: Since 2017, you've worked with dozens of elections. Can you explain what impact you've been able to have or what has gone on as you've been tracking these elections?

Jeffers: The goal of the project is somewhat to explain what is happening in mainstream campaigning. Campaigns tend to fundraise, which obviously you see a lot of that in the (United States), but you see that in other countries. They try to mobilize, so they’re either getting people to sort of volunteer or raise their hand in some way, or they're trying to persuade people to come out and vote, or at least not to go and vote for the other guy. We're just trying to explain, like, how people are using this stuff, how much they're spending on it, what types of audiences they're trying to reach with advertising, how much advertising people are actually seeing. I think sometimes we overestimate how much people are really reaching people with online advertising.

I suppose the biggest thing now ... that we have, you know, we have pressured and pushed companies like Facebook to improve the transparency of their tools: they now have ad libraries, they think more carefully about the policies that they run around elections, they built bigger teams and those sorts of things.

The pressure on private companies has been an important part of what we've been involved in over the last five years. That gradually bleeds into the government regulation thing now. In the U.S., that's been very slow and very difficult to achieve. Europe has just launched a whole bunch of landmark new digital regulation — advertising transparency more generally and then political advertising more specifically — and negotiating out the details of what does it look like for you to have proper advertising transparency? What guardrails do we want to put around these things?

McDaniel: In terms of work that you've been doing in the United States, can you tell me what you're involved in?

Jeffers: We have a current study, live right now, where we're working with a U.K.-based university, and it’s actually a comparative study of elections across five different countries across five different years. (It included the) 2020 (U.S.) presidential election. It’s gone through the German election last year. Now, obviously, we’re looking at the (U.S.) midterms, there’s an election in Poland, and we’ll finish off with the 2024 (U.S.) presidential election.

And the idea is that when (people) sign up, they’ll complete a survey that gives them options to talk about how they feel about politics right now; that's a very classic opinion polling type survey. You can sort of do a before and after. And you can say, well, people who saw these types of ads, did their opinions change over time? So we’re still kind of working through all the data and the details and trying to recruit people for the study. But the goal is to try and look at these ads and say, ‘How much did they actually matter?’ Around 2016-17, there was this idea, particularly (thought) by the winners, that these things (ads) are hugely influential. They change everything when it comes to political campaigns. The reality is much more modest than that. But they are an interesting way that campaigns express themselves, and we’re interested in their effectiveness.

McDaniel: In terms of the ads that you're looking at, where are you looking?

Jeffers: We have, most of the time, looked at Facebook, and the reason for that is it's still the case that there’s probably 2 or 3 dollars spent on Facebook to every $1 spent elsewhere. It’s the biggest online platform for political advertising. Google and YouTube, particularly, are increasing. A lot of what you see on Google and YouTube is more of the kind of persuasion type advertising due to some restrictions they have around who you can target. But the reason why so much money gets spent on Facebook is because you can fundraise there much more successfully than some of the other online platforms.

I can basically upload a list of Democrats or Republicans (on Facebook) who I know have given money to a campaign in the past, and I can target those people with ads. That is very good for campaigns because it means I can probably generate more dollars in the future (and) spend those dollars on other types of advertising. American campaigns are so much more expensive and spendy than campaigns (in other nations). Facebook is incredibly useful for campaigns who have a fundraising mandate.

McDaniel: Could you explain to me the connection between a political campaign and a tech company?

Jeffers: Unfortunately, it's not very straightforward. So a few years ago, if I was an ad campaign, I would have been able to go to Facebook Ad Manager — which is where you buy the ads — upload my ads, and then be able to select ‘show this ad to people who are strong Democrats,’ right? And Facebook would have data that was like, ‘these people are strong Democrats,’ and you could literally buy that category. Approximately a year ago, Facebook pulled those targeting methods. So now you can't just go and buy that direct.

So what has happened in the meantime is that people (running ad campaigns) are basically buying data elsewhere. If you're an agency running ads for a Democrat or Republican candidate, you will go and buy the voter file of everyone who voted. And then, you will start augmenting it with other information from these data brokers and other companies. So you will effectively kind of add layers of information about voting.

What you're really looking for, probably, is people you think are likely to donate to Democratic or Republican causes; it's probably fundraising at this point. And then you’ll upload that list to Facebook, Facebook will match that list against people who have Facebook accounts, and then it will say ‘ok, I’ll show ads to that list of people.’ Facebook will do that. That's the most common model in the (United States) for how people get their ads in front of the people they want to get them in front of. They're not really using Facebook's behavioral options anymore because Facebook has pulled the most obvious ones.

And you know, the reality is that in the (United States) now, all that data is out there.

I was in D.C. the other week and spoke to some people working in an advertising agency buying ads for candidates, and they were basically like, ‘I can reach any American I want to. Any Democrat I want to. Anyone with a donation history that I want to. All that data is available, and they’ll just use it to support their campaign.

The role of Facebook in that is oddly limited in that you upload the ads to a system that just accepts your ads pretty much automatically. You upload a bunch of data to Facebook, you set the budget for your ads, you click ‘go,’ and Facebook will find the opportunity to show ads. The whole thing now almost involves no human interaction at all. Facebook will have a little team of people who are there to support you if you have issues (and) answer your question — but most of this is just happening entirely automatically, and Facebook is basically a piece of infrastructure.

McDaniel: You mentioned the ability to buy voter files or related information — who is holding this information and selling it? If I'm running a campaign, where would I go to buy information?

Jeffers: Yeah, I mean, there are companies out there who are selling these sorts of, you know, like, augmenting the voter file — you can basically just give them a list of people, and they will come back to you and will match this data against other data they hold. Maybe they're a credit scoring agency; you know, if you’ve ever seen how much data someone like Experian has about you — hundreds, tens of pages of data about everything you do, all your kind of consumer choices and all of these segments you fit in. A lot of this stuff is much more difficult to do, if not illegal to do outside the (United States). But effectively, all that data is for sale in one place or another in the (United States).

McDaniel: You mentioned you had some observations on midterms. What have you been seeing?

Jeffers: We’re spending most of our time looking at the Pennsylvania and Ohio Senate races. There’s some interesting candidates in those places. What I’ve observed, which I think is interesting, is Republicans in those two states. Republicans got very famous for their use of Facebook, right? And everyone's assumption (is) that Facebook is this place where the sort of Republican, Trumpish political culture thrives.

On the other hand, those candidates — in this case, it's Dr. Oz in Pennsylvania and JD Vance (in Ohio), they really aren’t spending and haven't been spending that much money on their advertising. They’ve been really outspent by their opponents in those races. And there is a kind of question mark about whether or not — because Trump is less of a factor on Facebook these days — whether that audience has gone away somewhere else. (Or whether) they're not getting the kind of response they would have expected, or whether somehow, you know, that fundraising appeals basically aren't working anymore with that audience.

They're not spending the money that you would expect in two states where they should have a very good chance of winning. Given how competitive and important (the races are), they appear to be underspending. It's kind of interesting, sort of a narrative violation, you know, like, why are these Republican campaigns not really on Facebook?

McDaniel: Or if they've gone elsewhere.

Jeffers: Yeah, (...) like if you're gonna give money to campaigns, the best place is to give money directly to the candidate, right? Have they just burned out their support base from a fundraising perspective? Are they no longer going into the platform to try and mobilize and motivate people in the same way or have these platforms died? Like, a perfectly good theory at this point (is) people still have Facebook accounts, they still maybe use Instagram a bit, but like, the actual number of people who are using Facebook day to day has just dropped off a cliff. And are you going to YouTube? Are you (Republican campaigns) going back to TV, like, you're just trying to use text messages and emails, whatever? Are some of the tools that were maybe useful two, three, four years ago now much less useful?

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