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Analyzing Microtargeting on Social Media

Published onJan 31, 2025
Analyzing Microtargeting on Social Media

The landscape of social media is highly dynamic, with users generating and consuming a diverse range of content. Various interest groups, including politicians, advertisers, and stakeholders, utilize these platforms to target potential users to advance their interests by adapting their messaging. This process, known as microtargeting, relies on data-driven techniques that exploit the rich information collected by social networks about their users. Microtargeting is a double-edged sword; while it enhances the relevance and efficiency of targeted content, it also poses challenges. There is the risk of influencing user behavior and perceptions, fostering echo chambers and polarization. Understanding these impacts is crucial for promoting healthy public discourse in the digital age and maintaining a cohesive society. Our work focuses on developing an organizing framework for a better understanding of microtargeting and activity patterns in social media on contentious topics. In this tutorial, we will present the challenges we face in our work and how we address these challenges by developing computational approaches for (1) characterizing user types and their motivations for engaging with content, (2) analyzing the messaging based on topics relevant to the users and their responses to it, and (3) delving into a deeper understanding of the themes and arguments involved in the content. We dive into the cutting-edge realm of social media microtargeting, a strategy that powerfully shapes public discourse, in our engaging tutorial at ADSA 2024. This tutorial, tailored for researchers and practitioners, offers computational methods, NLP tools, and analytical frameworks to explore online messaging dynamics.

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