Boosting people's ability to detect microtargeted advertising

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) 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.

Automated summary

Online platforms provide advertisers with the ability to target recipients' personal vulnerabilities by tailoring different messages for the same thing. A simple intervention prompting participants to reflect on their own personality traits can boost their ability to accurately identify targeted ads, showing potential for increasing user autonomy and transparency on platforms.