探索小型、中型和大型企业的在线微定向实践
Exploring the Online Micro-targeting Practices of Small, Medium, and Large Businesses
AI总结：
本文通过890名美国用户的浏览器监控数据考察Facebook广告主及其微定向使用，发现中小企业占广告主多数且多数定向由平台算法完成，建议监管同时覆盖广告主驱动与算法驱动微定向。
摘要：
Facebook和其他广告平台出于营销目的利用用户数据，允许广告主选择特定用户并对其进行定向（这种做法被称为微定向）。然而，Cambridge Analytica等广告主曾恶意使用这些定向功能，在选举背景下操纵用户。欧盟委员会计划在新的《欧洲民主行动计划》法案中限制或禁止部分定向功能，以保护用户免受此类伤害。困难在于，我们并不清楚这些限制对普通广告主的经济影响。在本文中，为给相关辩论提供信息，我们迈出了第一步，去了解谁在Facebook上投放广告，以及他们如何使用这些定向功能。为此，我们邀请890名美国用户在其浏览器中安装一个监控工具，以收集他们在Facebook上收到的广告以及这些广告如何被定向的信息。通过将Facebook上的广告主与其LinkedIn资料进行匹配，我们可以看到71%的广告主是员工人数不超过200人的小型和中型企业，并且它们贡献了61%的广告和57%的广告展示量。关于微定向，我们发现只有32%的小型和中型企业以及30%的大型企业会对至少一条广告进行微定向。这些结果不应被解释为微定向作为一种营销策略没有用处，而应理解为广告主更倾向于将微定向任务外包给广告平台。事实上，Facebook正在使用优化算法，利用用户数据来决定哪些用户应该看到什么广告；这意味着广告平台正在执行一种由算法驱动的微定向。因此，在制定限制措施时，立法者既应考虑传统的由广告主驱动的微定向，也应考虑由广告平台执行的算法驱动微定向。
英文摘要：
Facebook and other advertising platforms exploit users data for marketing purposes by allowing advertisers to select specific users and target them (the practice is being called micro-targeting). However, advertisers such as Cambridge Analytica have maliciously used these targeting features to manipulate users in the context of elections. The European Commission plans to restrict or ban some targeting functionalities in the new European Democracy Action Plan act to protect users from such harms. The difficulty is that we do not know the economic impact of these restrictions on regular advertisers. In this paper, to inform the debate, we take a first step by understanding who is advertising on Facebook and how they use the targeting functionalities. For this, we asked 890 U.S. users to install a monitoring tool on their browsers to collect the ads they receive on Facebook and information about how these ads were targeted. By matching advertisers on Facebook with their LinkedIn profiles, we could see that 71% of advertisers are small and medium-sized businesses with 200 employees or less, and they are responsible for 61% of ads and 57% of ad impressions. Regarding micro-targeting, we found that only 32% of small and medium-sized businesses and 30% of large-sized businesses micro-target at least one of their ads. These results should not be interpreted as micro-targeting not being useful as a marketing strategy, but rather that advertisers prefer to outsource the micro-targeting task to ad platforms. Indeed, Facebook is employing optimization algorithms that exploit user data to decide which users should see what ads; which means ad platforms are performing an algorithmic-driven micro-targeting. Hence, when setting restrictions, legislators should take into account both the traditional advertiser-driven micro-targeting as well as algorithmic-driven micro-targeting performed by ad platforms.
机构、总结、中文摘要均由AI分析而来，可能存在错误，请以论文正文为准。
