The UK parliament has provided another telling glimpse behind the curtain of Facebook’s unregulated ad platform by publishing data on scores of pro-Brexit adverts which it distributed to UK voters during the 2016 referendum on European Union membership. The ads were run on behalf of several vote leave campaigns who paid a third company to use Facebook’s ad targeting tools.
The ads were run prior to Facebook having any disclosure rules for political ads. So there was no way for anyone other than each target recipient to know a particular ad existed or who it was being targeted at.
The targeting of the ads was carried out on Facebook’s platform by AggregateIQ, a Canadian data firm that has been linked to Cambridge Analytica/SCL — aka the political consultancy at the center of a massive Facebook data misuse storm, including by Facebook itself, which earlier this year told the UK parliament it had found billing and administration connections between the two.
Aggregate IQ is now under joint investigation by Canadian data watchdogs. But in 2016 the data firm was paid £3.5M by a number of Brexit supporting campaigns to spend on targeted social media advertising using Facebook as the primary conduit.
Irony of these demonstrably xenophobic, nativist, nationalist Vote Leave ads: they were done by a Canadian shop, the one with an exclusive IP license with SCL Elections, a firm largely financed by an American family, run on Facebook, controlled by American who won’t come to UK. https://t.co/I5JEnXq3Z3
— David Carroll
https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/26/facebook-finally-hands-over-leave-campaign-brexit-ads/
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