Identifying Corporate Political Trends Online

Online interactions typically require a user to input personally identifiable information (PII) such as their name, email, and demographic characteristics. The service provider may then use that PII to send correspondence to the user’s email address or phone number, either through themselves or a third party. This study aims to create a tentative framework for measuring political bias within PII-harnessing communications. Three distinct spheres of analysis (time, corporate political values, and foreign senders) are utilized to develop this system of measurement. Although the results of a small-scale test of our method were inconclusive, our process for quantitatively measuring political bias nonetheless serves as a proof of concept that can be applied to future research.