The Politics of Targeted Political Advertising in American Elections

As of 2021, roughly half of the global population is active on social media, in stark contrast to just two decades ago, when even the concept of an online social network barely existed. With the meteoric rise of social media has come many concerns regarding privacy, data collection, uncontrolled propagation of false information, copyright, and countless others. Globally, but especially in the U.S., policymakers have been struggling to keep up with the rapidly growing industry and have been frequently accused of underregulating an industry that clearly has unprecedented influence over the American public. In this article I’ll be discussing ethics and policy regarding targeted advertising on social media, with a focus on the political consequences.

Although Facebook was not the first social media site, it quickly blew past its competition to the number one spot in the race for the most users worldwide, where it remains to this day. It was created at the beginning of 2004; by the end of that same year, Facebook had one million users and would only continue to skyrocket. By the 2016 election cycle season, Facebook had just shy of two billion users worldwide. By this point, many were already aware that tech giants such as Facebook had data on virtually everyone using their services, and were selling that data mostly for advertising…