Speaking of FB ad targeting in elections, I was recently surprised to learn that an advertiser can give FB a specific list of names of people they want to target.
I learned that because I own a handful of shares of Arconic, which is a company in the midst of a hostile takeover attempt. I was rather curious how FB figured that out... but both sides know my identity, and apparently whatever I agreed to when I opened a brokerage account included giving my identity to companies I invest in, and them giving it to activist investors, and the company/investors giving it to social networks.
My understanding is that in the US at least, it's common for both parties to attempt to maintain complete databases of all voters, so it's feasible for them to select individual ad targets themselves and just give FB the names.
This is called an "audience". You can pretty much create an audience from anything.
You can build up a whole chain of audiences. For example, if you watch a video ad, you can then be targeted. If you, say, click a link as part of that audience, you can find yourself inside an even tighter targeted audience. At that point, you're considered hot. Before you know it, you could be buying a product. At which point, you're in another audience still, tempting you to buy again!
In fact, with this type of targeting, interest and demographic based targeting doesn't even come close. You can, however, target all the people, at each step in your funnel, who "look like" people who wanna buy (have the same interests, age, gender). These get fed back into the top of your targeting funnel and so it goes.
As for the UK GE, I'm not seeing this type of targeting so I think they may be stuck in the "old" interest-based model of FB advertising.
This looks like a hilarious accident of enabling scammers to target vulnerable people through the magic of gradient descent. Nobody would want to look like they're intentionally targeting multi-level marketing schemes to special education students, but if the students happen to "become part of an audience" and "people like your audience" happen to be special education students, then you get all the benefit of exploiting them with none of the terrible optics.
Ah yes - I remember the day I had an ad show up telling me that the very niche item I purchased in another state at a retail store was the subject of a class-action lawsuit...
edit: and it probably wasn't the class action you're thinking of :)
Well surely he company needs a list of its shareholders so it can fulfill its obligations to you like sending you notices for annual meetings, share splits etc.
I learned that because I own a handful of shares of Arconic, which is a company in the midst of a hostile takeover attempt. I was rather curious how FB figured that out... but both sides know my identity, and apparently whatever I agreed to when I opened a brokerage account included giving my identity to companies I invest in, and them giving it to activist investors, and the company/investors giving it to social networks.
My understanding is that in the US at least, it's common for both parties to attempt to maintain complete databases of all voters, so it's feasible for them to select individual ad targets themselves and just give FB the names.