TY - GEN
T1 - Understanding the complexity of detecting political Ads
AU - Sosnovik, Vera
AU - Goga, Oana
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 ACM.
PY - 2021/6/3
Y1 - 2021/6/3
N2 - Online political advertising has grown significantly over the last few years. To monitor online sponsored political discourse, companies such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter have created public Ad Libraries collecting the political ads that run on their platforms. Currently, both policymakers and platforms are debating further restrictions on political advertising to deter misuses. This paper investigates whether we can reliably distinguish political ads from non-political ads. We take an empirical approach to analyze what kind of ads are deemed political by ordinary people and what kind of ads lead to disagreement. Our results show a significant disagreement between what ad platforms, ordinary people, and advertisers consider political and suggest that this disagreement mainly comes from diverging opinions on which ads address social issues. Overall our results imply that it is important to consider social issue ads as political, but they also complicate political advertising regulations.
AB - Online political advertising has grown significantly over the last few years. To monitor online sponsored political discourse, companies such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter have created public Ad Libraries collecting the political ads that run on their platforms. Currently, both policymakers and platforms are debating further restrictions on political advertising to deter misuses. This paper investigates whether we can reliably distinguish political ads from non-political ads. We take an empirical approach to analyze what kind of ads are deemed political by ordinary people and what kind of ads lead to disagreement. Our results show a significant disagreement between what ad platforms, ordinary people, and advertisers consider political and suggest that this disagreement mainly comes from diverging opinions on which ads address social issues. Overall our results imply that it is important to consider social issue ads as political, but they also complicate political advertising regulations.
U2 - 10.1145/3442381.3450049
DO - 10.1145/3442381.3450049
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85107927464
T3 - The Web Conference 2021 - Proceedings of the World Wide Web Conference, WWW 2021
SP - 2002
EP - 2013
BT - The Web Conference 2021 - Proceedings of the World Wide Web Conference, WWW 2021
PB - Association for Computing Machinery, Inc
T2 - 30th World Wide Web Conference, WWW 2021
Y2 - 19 April 2021 through 23 April 2021
ER -