IGF 2021 WS #165
Impacts of microtargeting: how to save the democratic whole?

Organizer 1: Giovanni De Gregorio, University of Oxford
Organizer 2: Davide Zecca, Bocconi University
Organizer 3: Licia Cianci, University G. D'Annunzio
Organizer 4: Graziella Romeo, Bocconi University; Cost GDHR Network
Organizer 5: Elisa Bertolini, Bocconi University
Organizer 6: Matthias C. Kettemann, Leibniz-Institut für Medienforschung; Hans-Bredow-Institut (HBI); Cost GDHR Network

Speaker 1: Kazuhiro Maeshima, Civil Society, Asia-Pacific Group
Speaker 2: Netina Tan, Civil Society, Asia-Pacific Group
Speaker 3: Clara Iglesias Keller, Civil Society, Latin American and Caribbean Group (GRULAC)
Speaker 4: Paige Morrow, Intergovernmental Organization, Western European and Others Group (WEOG)

Moderator

Giovanni De Gregorio, Civil Society, Western European and Others Group (WEOG)

Online Moderator

Davide Zecca, Civil Society, Western European and Others Group (WEOG)

Rapporteur

Licia Cianci, Civil Society, Western European and Others Group (WEOG)

Format

Panel - Auditorium - 90 Min

Policy Question(s)

Content moderation and human rights compliance: How to ensure that government regulation, self-regulation and co-regulation approaches to content moderation are compliant with human rights frameworks, are transparent and accountable, and enable a safe, united and inclusive Internet?
Protecting consumer rights: What regulatory approaches are/could be effective in upholding consumer rights, offering adequate remedies for rights violations, and eliminating unfair and deceptive practices from the part of Internet companies?
Additional Policy Questions Information: How can political advertisement be regulated in order not to contribute to the spread of disputed and baseless facts or misleading information?
Should content moderation decisions depend on governmental regulation or exclusively on the platforms’ terms and policies?

Topics that will be discussed by the speakers in brief presentations aimed at fostering a lively discussion among the speakers themselves and the audience encompass: 1. Describing the technical functioning of political micro-targeting. 2. How political micro-targeting tools affect democratic processes and viable remedies. 3. The extent to which practices of political surveillance by platforms handed over to political parties affect users’ individual rights such as political self-determination, their freedom to receive unbiased information and their right to privacy and data protection. 4. The extent to which data mining activities by Internet intermediaries has made it possible to customize political content so that it is tailored to each user/voter? 5. Given the potential effects of political microtargeting, do the platforms’ exercise of these powers justify stricter limitations? 6. Should platforms be allowed to target users with messages based on algorithmic profilation?

SDGs



Targets: The phenomenon of political microtargeting requires different actors working together. Multi-stakeholder partnerships will be important to contribute to mobilize and share knowledge, expertise and technologies to support the achievement of the sustainable development goals in all countries.

Description:

Communication, discussion and debate nowadays increasingly take place online. It is even more so in the midst of a pandemic that has halted usual gatherings and has reduced the chances to meet in order to compare views on a wide array of topics. The public opinion, whose existence is reckoned as the backbone of a fully-working modern democracy, is extremely dependent on the content and discussions that are sparked from posts onto social networking platforms, whose users have an enhanced chance of becoming agenda-setters with an incomparable audience to other means of communication. Monitoring users’ behaviors through the collection and processing of their data has quickly gained attractiveness in various fields and became appealing also for modern political campaigns to the extent that they are moving to a data driven paradigm which enables them to tailor, with an algorithmic precision, micro-targeted messages to individual voters. Targeting voters online relies on a preliminary process of collecting a huge amount of data in light of which users(-voters) are divided into segments through the processing of such data and the extraction of information. Through sophisticated algorithms, it is possible to tailor accurate profiles to sell to political parties, which can efficiently create customized contents and communicate them with the most effective campaign method. The enormous proliferation of predictive tools to classify users and the extent to which such techniques are used for political purposes pose numerous questions not only on individual rights, but also on the integrity of the democratic process as a whole, also in light of the tight link and dependance of its functioning from any specific electoral system. The scope of this phenomenon requires a serious rethinking also of collateral aspects such as the voter analytic strategies’ role in modern elections, the democratic responsibilities of private actors, the transparency of political advertising, the spread of disinformation and its hetero-directed allocation. Moreover, the fact that hosting providers are private enterprises intrinsically undermines the authenticity of the discussions taking place, as the content shown to each user depends on the algorithm underlying the platform. The content moderation policies adopted by the intermediaries are not the result of deliberation following public debate, thereby amplifying the phenomena of disinformation and polarization through the exclusion of contents that are not in line with the user’s preferences. Political micro-targeting allows campaigns to reach those segments of the electorate that habitually use social media to the extent that the phenomenon can also positively address the problem of the disaffection of citizens from politics, resulting in an increase of voter turnout or in strengthening the public discourse. The widespread impact of such practice requires the possibility to collect a huge amount of data and its political exploitation are elements with which not only governments, but also civil society, private actors and informational players will increasingly have to confront.
The workshop avails of the expertise developed by some members of the Global Digital Human Rights Network, whose objective is to explore whether international human rights law is sufficiently detailed to enable governments and private online companies to understand their respective obligations vis-à-vis human rights protection online. The program has published its first working paper in December 2020 (Viral Information: How States and Platforms Deal with Covid-19-related Disinformation: an Exploratory Study of 20 Countries).

Expected Outcomes

In light of the focus of the present workshop, due consideration will be given to a practical approach with the aim of finding shared solutions. The session will help identify the most important policy considerations and legal constraints that hinder the regulation, limitation and moderation of political micro-targeting, attempting to hypothesize feasible avenues to offer an acceptable compromise and balancing between the rights of users and the community as a whole with those of platforms and political parties. One of the main difficulties in public regulation of political microtargeting is that law-makers are not sufficiently knowledgeable about the technical mechanisms underlying the phenomenon, which makes it unlikely that they provide a well-designed and workable framework in this regard. While resorting to measures that imply a certain extent of cooperation between the regulator and private actors is desirable, relying upon transparency obligations only is subject to the risk of incompliance by market operators and might not be effective enough if the public opinion is
unable to grasp the meaning of the data that is made available. The conclusions and recommendations of the workshop – as stemmed from the participants’ involvement and their interactions with speakers – will be memorialized by the rapporteur of the workshop and subsequently published through IGF with the aim to promote and manage advocacy initiatives around the world.

Questions from online participants will be encouraged while speakers are delivering their speeches, so that the online moderator is able to collect them and submit to the speaker once she/he has spoken. On-site participants will be able to ask questions following all the speeches: this choice is aimed at ensuring that all speakers are allocated equal time and that the discussion following the speakers' speeches involves all the panel.

Online Participation



Usage of IGF Official Tool.