Tech Science Seminar: What Political Ads Are Targeting Americans Online in 2018?

Speaker: Jinyan Zang (Harvard) Part of the Technology Science weekly seminar series. Digital media, whether it's misinformation campaigns or targeted political advertising, played a significant role in the 2016 U.S. elections. What is happening now with the midterms in 2018? I collected more than 1 million digital political ads from more than 25,000 advertisers who are campaigns, corporations, interest groups, and other political actors targeting Americans on Facebook's and Google's ad platforms. This data is part of the Political Ads Library, which is an online tool for journalists, researchers, and the public to learn about what kinds of political ads are being run, how much advertisers are spending, who they are targeting, and much more. I also discuss how the self-regulatory efforts at transparency by Facebook and Google to disclose political activity on their platforms fall short of the requirements of the bipartisan Honest Ads Act proposed in October 2017 by Sen. Klobuchar (D), Sen. Warner (D), and the late Sen. McCain (R). Speaker: Jinyan Zang is a PhD Candidate in Government at Harvard University and a 2017 recipient of the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans. He is an experienced researcher on consumer protection, data security, digital election technologies, and privacy issues as a Research Fellow at the Federal Trade Commission and a Research Analyst at Harvard University’s Data Privacy Lab and at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science. He graduated cum laude in 2013 from Harvard College with a B.A. in Economics.