Social media advertising suppresses voting in targeted communities, research shows

"Messages intended to suppress votes can be precisely delivered to particularly vulnerable and consequential groups of people via social media and keep millions of them from casting ballots, according to a new study that is the first to quantify the effect of this kind of microtargeting on voter turnout. A team led by a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison recruited more than 10,000 people across the United States-a group representative of the country's voting population-to install an app that"

"The study participants who saw the ads with vote-suppressing messages on Facebook were 1.9% less likely to actually vote in the election than people who did not see the ads, according to a study of the participants' voting behavior published recently in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. There were several types of targeted messages, but the most common suggested an election boycott would send the strongest message to politicians."

An example ad urged "Don't Go to Vote" and was later linked to Russian election interference and archived by the US House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (AD 3026). Messages intended to suppress votes were precisely delivered to vulnerable and consequential groups via social media, potentially preventing millions from casting ballots. A team recruited over 10,000 U.S. residents representative of the voting population to install an app that captured every ad viewed for six weeks before the November 2016 election. Participants who saw vote-suppressing Facebook ads were 1.9% less likely to vote. Ads commonly suggested election boycotts and used Facebook microtargeting to reach mostly nonwhite, voting-age people in contested states, who received four times as many vote-suppressing ads as their white neighbors.

Read at Phys