Political ads are not a new phenomenon. Microtargeted political ads (MPAs) are. Fundamentally, both are electioneering tools seeking to market a politician to voters. However, while political campaigns have become an intrinsic component of a fledgeling democracy, MPAs have been strongly criticized as ominous instruments, designed and deployed only to subvert democratic participation across the globe. 

Let’s understand where the criticizers of MPAs are largely coming from.

MPAs earned a horrible reputation when the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal broke out in 2018 leading to serious aspersions on the integrity of Donald Trump’s election campaign that had led to his startling victory in the 2016 United States presidential election. Personal data of millions of Facebook users were collected via a personality quiz app and unauthorizedly sold by Aleksandr Kogan (who was then a data science researcher at the University of Cambridge) to Cambridge Analytica (Trump’s digital campaign manager) who used these data to develop psychographic profiles of American voters and micro-target these voters with fake news that tended to amplify their political predispositions in favour of Trump’s candidacy.

These scandalous revelations may tempt you to sweepingly conclude that MPAs are inherently antithetic to democratic ideals. But, are MPAs really so ominous?

Let’s forget politics and think about markets for a moment. Consumers learn about products and services in the market through ads. Ads enable consumers to make better purchase decisions suiting their needs and purchasing power. Hence, advertising enhances the prospects of consumer welfare and market efficiency. Microtargeted ads, designed by using large sets of consumer data, only amplify these prospects by enabling sellers to advertise their products and services with the right messaging to the right consumer. Hence, microtargeting is matchmaking done extremely well. There isn’t anything inherently unethical or ominous with sellers using microtargeted ads to sell their goods and services to consumers to improve their bottom line. 

However, just like un-microtargeted ads in the physical world, microtargeted ads can become ominous when they carry lies about the products or services they seek to sell. When consumers are misled with lies that typically attempt to oversell products or services, consumers suffer, and markets are bound to become inefficient. When these lies are microtargeted, they are obviously more likely to cause damage to consumers and markets. Microtargeted ads become ominous also when the underlying consumer data has been collected and analyzed without consumer knowledge, i.e., without due regard to consumer informational privacy. 

Now, let’s get back to politics. There is a strong similarity between politics and markets. Whether it’s a seller in the market pitching their product or service to consumers, or a politician pitching their candidacy to voters, both essentially engage in the act of selling, and ads are instruments through which they sell. Voters in a democracy learn about political candidates and their ideas and agendas through political ads. Hence, political ads pave the way for healthy political discourses on topical issues of public importance, emboldening democratic participation. 

MPAs, designed by using large sets of voter data, enable political candidates to secure political support from voters who are likely to connect with their ideas and agendas. Is that inherently unethical or ominous? If anything, one could argue that it’s just modern-day political campaigning enabling voters to increasingly engage with issues they find to be the most pertinent and pressing in the public realm — not quite an undesirable element in any healthy democracy.

That said, MPAs, just like microtargeted product or service ads, can become ominous when they seek to mask facts and sell lies about political candidates and their agendas and ideas to voters. MPAs perpetrating lies are bound to corrupt voter judgment. MPAs become ominous also when the underlying voter data has been collected and analyzed without voter knowledge, i.e., without due regard to voter informational autonomy. 

MPAs that were exposed in the 2018 Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal had two primary faults: (a) they undermined the informational autonomy of American voters as they were designed by collecting and analyzing the data of millions of American voters without their informed consent; and (b) they tended to corrupt the political judgment of microtargeted American voters by bombarding them with fake news. Such a flagrant demonstration of unethical and ominous use of MPAs would be a credible threat to the conduct of free and fair elections anywhere in the world.

Relationships built on lies and concealments are bound to wither away — whether these relationships are between sellers and consumers, or political candidates and their electorate. If MPAs in political campaigns are designed and deployed ethically, i.e., if MPAs could be mandated to refrain from attempts to undermine voter informational autonomy and corrupt voter judgment, they are likely to cease much of their threatening influence on democratic participation across the globe. And what’s more, allowing ethical use of MPAs in political campaigning may well open the door for voters to become more political. However, that’s moot.