Can Facebook Ads Be Used to Survey Hard-to-Reach Communities?

The final speaker in this iCS Symposium session is Laura Ianelli, whose focus is on understanding the supporters of conspiracy theories. Some such theories may be amusing, but many others are in fact deadly serious and can have significant negative effects. The networks for these theories can be closed epistemological networks with distinctive self-sealing qualities, and who are increasingly suspicious of broader social networks; this makes them difficult to reach for critical scholars.

Drawing on available digital traces in platforms such as Facebook would be one solution to this, but the increasing closure of its APIs is making this more and more difficult. One opportunity for bypassing such roadblocks that still remains is the Facebook advertising system: researchers have already explored the use of these tools for targetting hard-to-reach communities with advertising that promotes topical surveys, by directing ads at users with specific lifestyles, attributes, or political preferences.

Can this approach be used to reach conspiracy theorists, then? The present project aimed Facebook ads at Italian users who were interested in typical conspiracy theory topics such as ‘vaccine controversy’ and ‘chemtrails conspiracy’, and examined their support for conspiracy perspectives by delivering a survey to users who clicked on the ad.

This found a slightly higher degree of support for conspiracy theories, as well as greater polarisation between supportive and non-supportive responses, amongst this targetted group as compared to the general Italian population, but the difference is small, and it therefore remains unclear whether the ad-based targetting approach is effective.

It is possible that the Italian Facebook population already diverges in its views from the overall Italian population, of course; this could be tested by further surveys of Facebook users who are distinctly disinterested in conspiracy theories. But, more work needs to be done to make more sense of these results.