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Experimental Paper on Social Media and Democracy in European Journal of Political Economy
Due to technological innovation, news platforms such as Google News and all social media platforms have detailed information about their users. They sell access to highly targeted groups of users (=voters) to all kinds of political interest groups, including political parties but also many groups whose stated or true objectives are not transparent to users.
In technical terms, via such platforms political interest groups can (i) microtarget news based on individual-level voter data and (ii) obfuscate their identities, which can be exploited to spread disinformation. Together with Freek van Gils and Wieland Müller, we experimentally study the implementation of two proposed policy interventions aiming to counter the negative effects of microtargeting and voter obfuscation in the lab. By varying the media environments by which senders/political interest groups can send messages to receivers/voters, we find that mandatory disclosure of interests, with or without a microtargeting ban, increases the effciency of aggregate voter decision-making. However, only the combination of disclosure of interests and a microtargeting ban mitigates sender influence in this stylized voting environment. The implementation of a microtargeting ban without disclosure requirements has adverse effects.
The paper titled “Microtargeting and Voters’ Unawareness: Experimental Results” will appear in the European Journal of Political Economy.
Video talk: From Economic Power to Political Power
My recent working paper, “From Economic Power to Political Power” (joint with Ivan Khomyanin) meets significant interest among several audiences as seven scheduled talks within 5 months suggest. Here is a 60-minute video (incl. Q&A) of the presentation at the Centre for Competition Policy at the University of East Anglia.
“Microtargeting, Voters’ Unawareness, and Democracy” to be published in Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization
Together with Wieland Müller and Freek van Gils, I have studied the consequences of digitization and datafication for democratic elections since early 2016. Inspired by news resports right after the Brexit referendum and the U.S. Presidential elections 2016, which claimed that those votes had been influenced, if not tilted, by misinformation spread via social media, we first asked whether and how this is possible theoretically. Notably, our thinking went, if voters do not trust election outcomes anymore, they may also lose trust in democracy as a political system in the first place. Indeed, there is a strong decline of public trust over the past 20 years, which at least correlates with the rise of social media, the main source of political information for many voters (proving causality is more difficult).
Now, this first paper, titled “Microtargeting, Voters’ Unawareness, and Democracy,” is forthcoming in the Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization. There, we study how two recent technological developments have raised concerns about threats to democracy because of their potential to distort election outcomes: (a) data-driven voter research enabling political microtargeting, and (b) growing news consumption via social media and news aggregators that obfuscate the origin of news items, leading to voters’ unawareness about a news sender’s identity. We provide a theoretical framework in which we can analyze the effects that microtargeting by political interest groups and unawareness have on election outcomes in comparison to “conventional” news reporting. We show which voter groups suffer from which technological development, (a) or (b). While both microtargeting and unawareness have negative effects on voter welfare, we show that only unawareness can flip an election. Our model framework allows the theory-based discussion of policy proposals, such as to ban microtargeting or to require news platforms to signal the political orientation of a news item’s originator.
The second paper of this co-author team, which is described here and features a large lab experiment testing the theory empirically, is still in the reviewing process.
Jens Prüfer 