Social Media And Politics

Craig Dwyer, co-founder of the Transparent Referendum Initiative, discusses targeted Facebook advertising ahead of the Irish constitutional referendum on abortion on May 25th. The TRI collects "dark" Facebook posts and is building an openly accessible database of targeted political ads. We discuss some of the major issues surrounding the referendum, the difficulties in discerning when a Facebook ad is "political," and targeted political advertising on other platforms like Google and Youtube. Link to ForaChange. The Medium post mentioned in the episode that shows how difficult it is to see who is paying for Facebook ads.