Proceedings of The International Social Sciences Conference
Year: 2024
DOI:
[PDF]
Micro-Targeting Political Ads in Turkiye
Aysel Demirci
ABSTRACT:
During elections in Turkiye, reaching voters via online platforms have taken an important part of the election campaigns in recent years. One of the strategies employed by the candidates is so-called micro-targeting. It involves collecting people’s data primarily from online platforms, processing and analysing specific patterns, and making predictions about specific voter’s behaviour and political interest. This follows directing tailored political campaign adds to targeted individuals on social media platforms. For example, two neighbours in the same apartment are made exposed to different political ads and campaigns and they do not even know what political campaign is shown to each other. The voters do not know that their accounts have specifically been selected for targeting based on their past data. The ultimate purpose of such practice is to affect and divert people’s vote for the benefit of the political candidate or party using these methods. There is potential in political micro-targeting that it enhances political engagement and the communication with potential voters for political parties and movements. On the contrary, it can undermine our democracy when it is misused to disinform or manipulate voters to some extent. There is a global movement to regulate political ads and political micro-targeting (PMT) in particular. The current regulation approaches for PMT include rules for shaping PMT, transparency obligations, user consent, partial restrictions, and total ban. However, most jurisdictions still lack appropriate regulations to address PMT, and Türkiye is no exception. The existing regulations in Türkiye have not been adequately adjusted to the online media landscape, where political ads can be tailored to individuals, and algorithms prioritize content that is likely to keep users engaged on social media platforms. As PMT typically involves the processing of personal data, such rules can be rooted in data protection regulation. Data protection laws have an important role to play in limiting the processing of personal data and requiring practices to be designed in a manner that balances and protects public privacy and freedom of political expression. This study therefore simply asks whether data protection rules in the context of micro-targeted political campaign adverts are strong enough to maintain fair, free and trustworthy elections.
keywords: Micro-targeting, advertisement, political campaign, free and fair elections, data protection