Algorithmic Opportunity: Digital Advertising and Inequality in Political Involvement

Contemporary digital advertising operates through algorithms – a data-driven logic created by the constant loop between a voter’s voluntary choices and campaigns’ strategic feedback on these choices. By paying attention to the logic of digital advertising, I discuss how digital advertising algorithms adjudicate consequential decisions that broadly affect political involvement. I argue digital advertising limits algorithmic opportunity to access and acquire political information. Voters are strategically defined, and information inequality is created between the arbitrarily defined “strategically important” and “strategically unimportant.” Discriminately defined by campaigns, different voters receive different information, thereby engaging differently in politics. To illuminate main points, an exploratory analysis of empirical data that “reverse engineered” the algorithms of digital advertising is presented. I conclude that contemporary digital advertising perhaps propels inequality of political involvement and polarizes the electorate.