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"In one case, a government campaign aimed at helping young people off benefits was targeted at Facebook users with interests including "afro-textured hair" and the "West Indies cricket team". Other campaigns have targeted LGBTQ+ content at people interested in "genderqueer" issues and the TV show RuPaul's Drag Race; council support services at people interested in "hijabs" and "Islamic dietary requirements"; and an appeal for witnesses to a murder in Manchester aimed at people interested in "hip-hop", "rapping", Kim Kardashian and Usain Bolt. The "microtargeting" is revealed in analysis of more than 12,000 ads which ran on Facebook and Instagram between late 2020 and 2023. Supplied to UK academics by Facebook's parent company Meta, and shared with the Observer, the data gives an insight into the use of targeted advertising by the state based on profiling by the world's biggest social media company. In 2021, Facebook announced a ban on targeting based on race, religion and sexual orientation amid concerns about discrimination, which led to the removal of several interest categories that had been used by advertisers to reach and exclude minority groups."

"We now know targeted Facebook advertising played a big role in 2015's general election. The Conservatives spent £1.2m on Facebook advertising in 2015 - and it paid off with a majority, albeit a small one. It is understood both them and Labour plan on spending similar amounts on Facebook advertising. "

"With news that the 15 million Twitter users in the UK can now be targeted at individual postcode levels, the micro-blogging platform is selling its advertising opportunities as ultra-geographically precise, and therefore ultra-cost effective. "The key benefit of geo-targeting is that it enables advertisers, or in this case political parties, the ability to reach users in specific regions, metropolitan areas and now postcodes," Twitter said in a blog post. "

"Facebook enables advertisers to promote content to nearly 900,000 people interested in "vaccine controversies", the Guardian has found. Other groups of people that advertisers can pay to reach on Facebook include those interested in "Dr Tenpenny on Vaccines", which refers to anti-vaccine activist Sherri Tenpenny, and "informed consent", which is language that anti-vaccine propagandists have adopted to fight vaccination laws."

"The 61-year-old British computer scientist described how political advertising has become a sophisticated and targeted industry, drawing on enormous pools of personal data on Facebook and Google. This means that campaigns create precisely targeted ads for individuals - as many as 50,000 variations each day on Facebook during the 2016 US election, he said."

"It has led to a proliferation of fake news and clickbait. It has fuelled surveillance capitalism and normalised pervasive tracking and data-mining. If we want to do something about the proliferation of misinformation and erosion of trust in traditional institutions, it is not enough to regulate or factcheck political adverts. We need to crack down on the use of personal information for all targeted advertising. Otherwise democracy will continue to erode, one highly optimised click at a time."

"The CCPA exempted many forms of targeted advertising, essentially permitting the collection and sharing of personal user data without consent-precisely the activity the law was intended to eliminate. CCPA also left enforcement solely to the already overburdened state attorney general, a concession that caused an ongoing rift between two of its authors, Mary Stone Ross and Alastair Mactaggart. (Mactaggart coauthored the CPRA, which Ross opposed.)"

"The reason is that routine big-data analytical techniques can now effectively manufacture personal data that is not protected by any of the measures we've used up to now. A well-known illustration of this is the way Target, an American retail chain, creatively collated scattered pieces of data about individuals' changes in shopping habits to predict the delivery date of pregnant shoppers - so that they could then be targeted with relevant advertisements."

"This affects all of us every single day. When the algorithms that govern increasingly large parts of our lives have been designed almost exclusively by young bro-grammers with homogeneous experiences and worldviews, those algorithms are going to fail significant sections of society. A heartbreaking example of this is Gillian Brockell's experience of continuing to get targeted by pregnancy-related ads on Facebook after the stillbirth of her son. Brockell, a Washington Post journalist, recently made headlines when she tweeted an open letter to big tech companies, imploring them to think more carefully about how they target parenting ads."

"The universities admissions service, Ucas, broke data protection rules when it signed up teenagers to receive adverts about mobile phones, energy drinks and other products, the information commissioner has ruled."

"Mobile advertising was the great hope for newspapers and magazines, replacing revenues lost in the switch to digital from print. Earlier this year the influential analyst Mary Meeker, of the venture capitalists Kleiner Perkins, had pegged it as a $25bn opportunity in the US alone. Now the hoped-for revenues are in peril, and publishers - and people who care about free, independent news - are rightly worried."

"The ethics of Facebook's micro-targeted advertising was thrust into the spotlight this week by a report out of Australia. The article, based on a leaked presentation, said that Facebook was able to identify teenagers at their most vulnerable, including when they feel "insecure", "worthless", "defeated" and "stressed"."

"Data collection is a prerequisite to delivering targeted ads, so their use will inherently stir up privacy concerns. Ad companies are incentivized to collect and share as much data as they can, with safeguarding this information only a secondary issue at best. Breaches are a concern largely because of the potential fallout to a company's brand."

"The criminals were able to send banner ads and javascript to their targets' computers by pushing both into ad networks. These networks aggressively scan advertisers' javascript for suspicious code, so the criminals needed to sneak their bad code past these checks."

""We've taken down hundreds of thousands of pieces of misinformation related to COVID-19, including theories like drinking bleach cures the virus or that physical distancing is ineffective at preventing the disease from spreading," Zuckerberg wrote. But at the very same time, The Markup found, Facebook was allowing advertisers to profit from ads targeting people that the company believes are interested in "pseudoscience." According to Facebook's ad portal, the pseudoscience interest category contained more than 78 million people."

"Imagine a store showing you targeted advertising based on the products you look at but never buy - or even personalized pricing based on a perception of your income once they've identified you. Or a store scanning the faces of everyone approaching the building, barring anyone with a criminal record from entering. These nightmare scenarios are terrifying precisely because they are so plausible."

"Under the oxymoronic rubric of "self-regulation", Facebook, Twitter and Google are already considering ways to appear responsible and protective of the integrity of those two elections. Twitter has pledged to stop running political ads, and both Google and Facebook are considering suspending precise targeting of political ads."

"I can't believe this has to be said (again), but cyberpunk was meant as a warning, not a business plan. It turns out that you need very few identifiers to make a guess about who a person standing in front of a billboard is, especially when you can suck data out of their phones. Throw in data about how long you stand in front of a billboard and you've got metrics that advertisers can use to tune their campaigns."

"But the oddest thing happened when you searched the word "trespassing" on Etsy, which feels like the natural place to look for that sort of thing. Lots of the signs high up in the search rankings were strange, word salad, anti-vax signs. They were impossible to ignore or miss. They were everywhere."