Abstract

Political advertising on social media heavily capitalizes on the fact that citizens leave behind data traces through their online behaviors. Even though this allows parties to target citizens based on their age, gender, or even specific interests, there is often a mismatch between the parties and the individuals’ party preferences. This study investigates how different degrees of targeting disclosures (demographic/location-based targeting disclosure versus preference-based targeting disclosure) and the political fit of targeted ads (high fit versus low fit) affect participants’ party evaluation and online privacy behaviors. Two dimensions of persuasion knowledge, perceived manipulative intent (PMI) and targeting knowledge (TK), act as mediators. Results from an online experiment (N = 430) reveal that the degree of targeting disclosure did not activate these dimensions. However, high political fit of the ads led to lower PMI and higher TK. In addition, political fit improved party evaluations via PMI and TK and reduced privacy behaviors via PMI. We conclude that citizens do not activate their defense mechanisms against targeted ads when the targeting comes from a favored party.

摘要

社交媒体上的政治广告大量利用了公民通过他们的在线行为留下数据痕迹的事实。尽管这允许政党根据公民的年龄、性别甚至特定兴趣来针对公民，但政党与个人的政党偏好之间经常存在不匹配。本研究调查不同程度的目标披露（基于人口/位置的目标披露与基于偏好的目标披露）和目标广告的政治契合度（高契合与低契合）如何影响参与者的政党评价和在线隐私行为。说服知识的两个维度，感知操纵意图（PMI）和目标知识（TK），充当中介。在线实验的结果（N = 430）揭示了目标披露的程度并没有激活这些维度。然而，广告的高度政治契合度导致较低的 PMI 和较高的 TK。此外，政治契合度通过 PMI 和 TK 改善了政党评估，并通过 PMI 减少了隐私行为。我们得出的结论是，当目标来自受青睐的一方时，公民不会启动针对目标广告的防御机制。