I Always Feel Like Somebody's Watching Me? U.S. Public Attitudes to Microtargeting

• In Event: Election Campaign Strategies

Abstract

This paper will measure and analyse U.S. citizens understanding of, and reactions to, political micro-targeting during the 2020 Presidential election. Specifically, we will examine levels of awareness and concern among voters toward campaigns’ use of their online and offline personal data during elections, and their behavioural reactions and responses to such usage. Such an investigation is both timely and important. The 2016 Presidential campaign saw concerns about the misuse of citizens’ personal data and manipulation of online advertising rise to the fore with the Cambridge Analytica scandal and Senate Intelligence Committee report confirming foreign interference on Facebook and Twitter. At the same time campaigns show no sign of slowing down in their efforts to collect, link and analyze the increasing volumes of voter data that digital platforms increasingly generate. Studies that systematically seek to understand how the public perceive and respond to these new ‘data-driven’ techniques in the U.S. and elsewhere are increasing, but are still quite limited. The evidence that exists indicates that a majority of the public typically disapprove of political micro-targeting, although Americans appear to be somewhat more accepting of it than their European counterparts (Kozyreva et al. 2020). In addition, it appears that despite having concerns, the vast majority of citizens are unaware of the range of data that platforms such as Facebook hold on them and many do not take simple steps to protect their privacy (Pew Report ‘Facebook Algorithms and Personal Data’ 2019). Such findings suggest a discrepancy exists between the concerns individuals have about data-driven campaign practices, and the extent to which these concerns inform their behaviour, or increase their understanding about how their own data is used online.
This paper seeks to unpack and investigate these findings further, to provide a richer and more detailed profile of U.S. citizens’ relationship with political micro-targeting. We do so using data from a specially commissioned YouGov survey conducted in the final weeks of the U.S. Presidential campaign. The survey measured citizens’ orientations to campaigns’ use of voters’ personal data and political micro-targeting in three dimensions: knowledge, attitudes (supportive, accepting or critical) and behavioural responses. The goals of the analysis are three fold: first to provide an in-depth profile of U.S. voters’ relationship with this more data-intensive mode of campaigning; second, to use statistical techniques to understand what predicts varying levels of awareness, concern and behavioural responses of micro-targeting at the individual level and how far this variance has political consequences in terms of levels of trust in institutions, democratic satisfaction, vote intention and also positions on key issues or support for conspiracy theories? In a third and final step results of our analysis will be used to construct a series of generic voter profiles or ‘types’ in relation to micro-targeting from the ‘know-nothings’ to ‘fully aware’. By empirically defining and conceptualising these types we aim to provide a clearer aggregate picture of current levels of voter literacy with regard to micro-targeting in the U.S. This classificatory schema can be used as a benchmark for over time analysis and applied in other countries, thereby enabling more direct comparative research on this topic.

Authors

• Rachel K. Gibson, University of Manchester

• Kate Dommett, University of Sheffield

• Esmeralda V. Bon, University of Manchester