What is microtargeting?
Microtargeting is political persuasion aimed at individuals instead of audiences: assemble a data profile of each voter, predict what will move them, and show each one a message the rest of the country never sees. The founding numbers are in a July 2019 Federal Trade Commission complaint. A Facebook personality app that roughly 250,000 to 270,000 users interacted with harvested profile data on 50 to 65 million people, and Cambridge Analytica matched the files to U.S. voter records and scored them for personality. A front page can be compared, argued with, and held up next to a rival's. An ad built for one person appears once, persuades or fails, and vanishes.
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This action seeks to hold Respondent responsible for its deceptive acts and practices to harvest personal information from Facebook users for political and commercial targeted advertising purposes.
A quiz for 270,000, a file on 65 million
The app was the GSRApp, known publicly as thisisyourdigitallife. It paid survey takers a few dollars to answer questions and log in with Facebook, then used a permission the platform granted developers at the time: access not only to the user who consented but to that user's friends, who never saw the app at all.
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the GSRApp harvested Facebook user profile data from approximately 250,000–270,000 Facebook users who directly interacted with the app, as well as 50–65 million of the “friends” in those users’ social networks.
For each person the harvest took the Facebook User ID, gender, birthdate, location, and the record of public pages they had liked; from the app's direct users it took the friends list too. The likes were the valuable part. Researchers at the University of Cambridge had shown that an algorithm reading them could score a person on the OCEAN psychometric scale: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. The FTC's complaint records the claim that made the data worth buying:
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their algorithm, which was more accurate for individuals who had more public Facebook page “likes,” could potentially predict an individual’s personality better than the person’s co-workers, friends, family, and even spouse.
The purpose was never in doubt. The complaint states that Cambridge Analytica intended to offer voter profiling, microtargeting, and other marketing services to U.S. campaigns, and that of the 50 to 65 million harvested friends, at least 30 million were identifiable U.S. consumers whose files could be matched to voter registration records.
The promise that unlocked the data
At the point where the survey asked for Facebook access, the screen made a promise:
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We want you to know that we will NOT download your name or any other identifiable information—we are interested in your demographics and likes.
It was false:
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Contrary to this representation, the GSRApp collected the Facebook User ID of those users who authorized it. A Facebook User ID is a persistent, unique identifier that connects individuals to their Facebook profiles.
And the complaint records why the sentence was written at all:
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Cambridge Analytica, Nix, and Kogan included this representation after finding that half of the survey participants initially refused to grant the GSRApp permission to collect their Facebook profile data.
Half the participants said no, so the operators wrote a privacy promise that was not true. Consent, in this system, was a conversion problem to be engineered around.
The ad only its target sees
A British parliamentary inquiry that heard 73 witnesses across 23 oral evidence sessions treated the same machinery as an election problem. The House of Commons committee's final report, published in February 2019, carried the UK elections regulator's description of what microtargeting removes from public view:
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Only the voter, the campaigner and the platform know who has been targeted with which messages. Only the company and the campaigner know why a voter was targeted and how much was spent on a particular campaign
Every earlier chapter of this encyclopedia describes bias you can inspect: a front page, a broadcast, a feed that at least renders on a screen someone else can compare. Microtargeting withdraws the message from that shared record. It is the paid twin of the filter bubble: the feed narrows what reaches you, and the targeted ad decides what is aimed at you. Propaganda at least had to publish; the whole country saw the same poster and could answer it. The committee's verdict on the rules governing this was blunt:
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Electoral law is not fit for purpose and needs to be changed to reflect changes in campaigning techniques, and the move from physical leaflets and billboards to online, microtargeted political campaigning.
The verdicts on the record
The committee's summary judgment on the company holding the data became the report's most quoted line:
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Companies like Facebook should not be allowed to behave like ‘digital gangsters’ in the online world, considering themselves to be ahead of and beyond the law.
The data itself proved hard to kill. After press reports in December 2015, Facebook demanded deletion, and the complaint records what that was worth:
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While Kogan and SCL Elections certified to Facebook that they had deleted the data obtained through the GSRApp, individuals or other entities still possess this data and/or data models based on this data.
The FTC charged three counts of deception and attached the order it believed should issue. The remedy reached past the data to the models trained on it:
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Delete or destroy all Covered Information collected from consumers through GSRApp, and any information or work product, including any algorithms ... that originated, in whole or in part, from this Covered Information.
By then Cambridge Analytica was already in bankruptcy; it filed in May 2018. What microtargeting adds to the story of media bias is a removal: the shared text. When every voter can be shown a different front page, there is no front page to compare, and comparison is the method this entire encyclopedia teaches. The next chapter is the law that decides who, if anyone, answers in court for what the feed shows.