An Analysis of United States Online Political Advertising Transparency
An Analysis of United States Online Political Advertising Transparency
复制标题
美国网络政治广告透明度分析
DOI：
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发表时间：
2019
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Damon McCoy
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Laura Edelson;Shikhar Sakhuja;Ratan Dey;Damon McCoy
2018年夏天，Facebook、谷歌和Twitter制定了政策，并实施了透明的档案，其中包括在其平台上播放的美国政治广告。通过我们对130多万个带有政治内容的广告的分析，我们展示了不同类型的政治广告商如何利用Facebook、谷歌和Twitter的广告平台传播美国政治信息。我们发现，这些档案中包含政治内容的广告总共产生了86.7亿至338亿次印象，赞助商在包含美国政治内容的广告上花费了超过3亿美元。
我们能够在这些平台上提高对政治广告商的理解。我们还发现，准营利性媒体公司的大量广告似乎是为了创建欺骗性的在线社区而存在的，这些社区专注于传播政治信息，而不是直接创造利润。这类群体的广告是一个相对较新的现象，由于与传统广告平台相比，监管要求较低，在线平台上的广告似乎正在蓬勃发展。
通过我们收集和分析这些数据的尝试，我们发现存在许多限制和弱点，使得有可能故意或意外地欺骗和绕过这些透明度档案的当前实施。我们就如何使这些档案变得更强大和更有用提出了几点建议。总体而言，Facebook、谷歌和Twitter的这些努力提高了其平台上诚实的、在某些情况下可能不诚实的广告商的政治广告透明度。我们感谢这些公司的员工，他们建立了这些档案，并继续改进它们。
During the summer of 2018, Facebook, Google, and Twitter created policies and implemented transparent archives that include U.S. political advertisements which ran on their platforms. Through our analysis of over 1.3 million ads with political content, we show how different types of political advertisers are disseminating U.S. political messages using Facebook, Google, and Twitter's advertising platforms. We find that in total, ads with political content included in these archives have generated between 8.67 billion - 33.8 billion impressions and that sponsors have spent over $300 million USD on advertising with U.S. political content.
We are able to improve our understanding of political advertisers on these platforms. We have also discovered a significant amount of advertising by quasi for-profit media companies that appeared to exist for the sole purpose of creating deceptive online communities focused on spreading political messaging and not for directly generating profits. Advertising by such groups is a relatively recent phenomenon, and appears to be thriving on online platforms due to the lower regulatory requirements compared to traditional advertising platforms.
We have found through our attempts to collect and analyze this data that there are many limitations and weaknesses that enable intentional or accidental deception and bypassing of the current implementations of these transparency archives. We provide several suggestions for how these archives could be made more robust and useful. Overall, these efforts by Facebook, Google, and Twitter have improved political advertising transparency of honest and, in some cases, possibly dishonest advertisers on their platforms. We thank the people at these companies who have built these archives and continue to improve them.