Boosting people’s ability to detect microtargeted advertising
Abstract Online platforms’ data give advertisers the ability to “microtarget” recipients’ personal vulnerabilities by tailoring different messages for the same thing, such as a product or political candidate. One possible response is to raise awareness for and resilience against such manipulative st...
Enregistré dans:
| Auteurs principaux: | , , , , , |
|---|---|
| Format: | article |
| Langue: | EN |
| Publié: |
Nature Portfolio
2021
|
| Sujets: | |
| Accès en ligne: | https://doaj.org/article/b4034c4620f5486ab2edd2e3a1844998 |
| Tags: |
Ajouter un tag
Pas de tags, Soyez le premier à ajouter un tag!
|
| Résumé: | Abstract Online platforms’ data give advertisers the ability to “microtarget” recipients’ personal vulnerabilities by tailoring different messages for the same thing, such as a product or political candidate. One possible response is to raise awareness for and resilience against such manipulative strategies through psychological inoculation. Two online experiments (total $$N= 828$$ N = 828 ) demonstrated that a short, simple intervention prompting participants to reflect on an attribute of their own personality—by completing a short personality questionnaire—boosted their ability to accurately identify ads that were targeted at them by up to 26 percentage points. Accuracy increased even without personalized feedback, but merely providing a description of the targeted personality dimension did not improve accuracy. We argue that such a “boosting approach,” which here aims to improve people’s competence to detect manipulative strategies themselves, should be part of a policy mix aiming to increase platforms’ transparency and user autonomy. |
|---|