Trusting tech firms’ big data for political microtargeting? A qualitative analysis of parties’ communication managers risk and trust perceptions

ABSTRACTParties use political microtargeting (PMT) to address voter subsegments individually. Due to limited resources and legal restrictions, parties often rely on Meta’s platforms and advertising ecosystem for PMT. However, using these external infrastructures and big data analyses might be risky for parties, since big data are criticized for their validity, robustness, representativeness, and usefulness. A mechanism to tolerate risks is trust. With the theoretical background of trust in technology, this study investigates the extent to which parties’ communication managers perceive risks in their strategic use of PMT on Meta’s platforms and how they evaluate big data’s trustworthiness. Based on in-depth expert interviews with German parties’ communication managers on state level, the results show that parties’ communication managers perceive various risks in relying on Meta’s platforms and are ambivalent about PMT’s big data analytics in terms of quality and reliability. To minimize risk perceptions, parties adopt strategies such as inputting their own data or creating own target audiences. Parties’ risk perceptions only partially influence their trust in big data and Meta. Despite varying degrees of trust, PMT is still used in campaigns as it has become too common and necessary to compete with other parties.KEYWORDS: Political microtargetingdata-driven campaigningtrust in big dataqualitative expert interviewsadvertising infrastructure Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Supplementary materialSupplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/19331681.2023.2264299.Ethics declarationsResearch in the social sciences requires ethical standards that were thoroughly considered in this study. First, the study’s author confirms that the qualitative expert interviews were based on the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). In doing so, no personal data and information of the interviewees are used in the presented work by anonymizing all interviews, i.e., there is no possibility to identify participants from their data. The author confirms that the interviewees were informed accordingly that strict confidentiality will be maintained about all collected data and that these data will be used exclusively for scientific purposes. The author also declares that all interviewees have participated voluntarily. Their participation was free to be declined or withdrawn at any time during the study, without giving any reason and without any adverse consequences.More general ethical standards are defined in the Guidelines for Good Scientific Practice by the German Research Foundation (DFG). With regard to the research project, ethical aspects of the study were evaluated before data collection. The study’s topic and the qualitative guideline’s questions are not likely to trigger strong emotions or cause severe psychological distress or traumatic experiences. Further, the study does not pose any physical or extraordinary risks to the interviewees or their parties. They have also been informed about the aims of the study that does not involve any deception of the participants.For the reasons stated above, the author dispensed of involving an ethics committee for this study.Notes1. This paper is based on the thesis of the author previously published in German (Löffler, Citation2022).2. Communication managers of the right-wing party “Alternative für Deutschland” [AfD] were not willed to conduct any interview.3. Ethical standards were thoroughly considered in this study in line with the GDPR and the Guidelines for Good Scientific Practice by the German Research Foundation (see ethics declarations).4. The coding frame used for analyzing the interviews can be found in the supplemental online material.Additional informationFundingThis work was supported by the Research Training group “Trust and Communication in a Digitized World”, grant number 1712/2, of the German Research Foundation (DFG).Notes on contributorsNatascha LöfflerNatascha Löffler works as a postdoc at the Faculty of Education and Social Sciences with the focus on communication science, University of Münster (Germany). Her research interests are data-driven political communication, trust and internal communication within different types of organizations.