Do political ads on Facebook influence our votes? The State wants to find out

With the South Carolina Democratic presidential primary only two weeks away, you can expect to see more and more political ads from candidates and other interest groups trying to reach you and sway your vote.

But little information is publicly available to explain why or how those messaging campaigns targeted you.

The State wants to get answers.

That’s why we’re partnering with Quartz to track political advertising targeting you on your Facebook page.

Here’s how you can help.

The Facebook Political Ad Collector is a browser plugin originally created by a team at ProPublica, a nonprofit investigative journalism organization. The plugin allows Facebook users to send political ads that appear in their feeds straight to us automatically. Installing the plugin is easy. Simply click Chrome or Firefox, then add the free plugin to your browser.

Before you ask, let us answer a question you likely have: No, the plugin does not collect any of your personal identifying information. We only collect info on why a Facebook user was targeted with a particular political ad, using information included in the ad itself. No names, no photos, no “Likes.”

We’re also only interested in looking at political advertising, which you can help us identify. You can let us know when Facebook isn’t identifying ads as political through the plugin.

What kind of stories can we write?

For example, journalists at Quartz were able to see that ads from President Donald Trump were targeting people who like HBO, Audi cars or law enforcement. How did the campaign target those groups specifically? According to Quartz, “Facebook assigns people to those segments based on their online activity.”

We’ll also be able to see if some campaigns are targeting specific demographics, such as women or minorities, across the state and, more importantly, see what kind of messages they are sharing with those audiences specifically.

Check out this New York Times analysis of similar data from campaigns.

So why do we want to know this information about South Carolina residents?

The media landscape is changing rapidly, and special interest groups – some known, others elusive – have many ways to communicate to us, the public, to try to shape our attitudes.

At The State, we believe that the more we know about who is trying to influence the public and how, the better off we are.

You can learn more about ProPublica’s project here.

This story was originally published February 14, 2020 at 5:21 PM with the headline "Do political ads on Facebook influence our votes? The State wants to find out."