Social media is more chaotic and obsessive than ever, and ads are more frequent and less visible. As you scroll through endless influencers and videos on TikTok or Instagram, you may have been inspired to buy something or change your behavior without realizing it. And governments around the world, including the UK government, are now coming to terms with this idea.
In mid-February, it was reported that the Home Office was planning to pay Albanian social media influencers to discourage people from crossing the Albanian Strait to the UK in small boats.
This news seemed to come out of nowhere. Even many of the influencers reportedly being considered said they had never heard of these plans. But in reality, this is just the latest example of how the UK government and law enforcement agencies are using social media to implement policy and influence the public.
Labor is also proposing that influencers be trained in schools to act as positive role models for young boys in a bid to combat widespread misogyny on social media.
Social media has introduced complex new ways for creators and advertisers to influence users. One of the most popular is targeted advertising, which allows businesses (and governments) to deliver ads to people with specific characteristics or interests.
I have been studying how governments have used these tools to implement policies and change people’s behavior. This practice, which my colleagues and I call “government influence,” began as a counterterrorism measure. The Home Office was an early adopter and he introduced several campaigns throughout the 2010s to counter online radicalization.
One example is This is Woke, which describes itself as a digital media network for young British Muslims. In fact, it was created as part of the Home Office’s counter-terrorism strategy.
A not-so-secret example is a campaign against child exploitation that targets people who use specific keywords in their social media posts. Advertisements for support services for victims of serious violence targeted postcodes near individual hospitals, and the actors’ accents in the videos were tailored to the region. A recent campaign to help people facing problems in public housing also targeted low-income people who have recently shown an interest in DIY.
Migration and targeted advertising
The Home Office has been leveraging digital influence in migration and security policy for many years. The i newspaper exposed a campaign organized by behavior change agency Seefar that targeted asylum seekers in Calais and other French and Belgian towns between January 2021 and September 2022.
The ad showed a military drone, a dog and a boat submerged in the ocean, illustrating the dangers of attempting to cross the Channel through fear and emotion.
My colleagues and I have noticed that these ads target people based on their interests, which act as proxies for ethnicity and religion. We analyzed data obtained from her Meta (Facebook’s parent company) advertising library for researchers. This data showed different interest and behavioral characteristics used in advertising profiles.
This long list of identifiers shows exactly who was being targeted: people who recently left their homeland, people who are interested in Syrian cuisine, supporters of the Afghanistan national soccer team, people who speak Arabic. . i later reported that it cost the Home Office at least ÂŁ35,000 to run these.
In our ongoing research, we have compiled a dataset of thousands of campaigns currently being used by UK law enforcement agencies on Facebook and Instagram alone. These include anti-terrorism ads that appear when your phone moves within certain postcodes, anti-misogynist campaigns that target the use of certain words on social media, and when you search for illegal services on Google. This includes advertisements that pop up.
These ad campaigns may offer some solutions to social problems long considered intractable, but they also raise serious concerns about privacy, transparency, democratic oversight, and political participation.
Their use in “influencing policing” by law enforcement agencies is even more controversial, providing police with sophisticated tools to shape public behavior.
As advertisers, police have a unique relationship with their audiences. It is the only entity whose marketing is backed by the power of lethal coercion. This means that the use of these approaches by law enforcement requires even higher levels of oversight and accountability.
From influencer to influencer
A campaign using influencers to persuade people not to risk traveling to the UK marks an evolution in government communications. Marketing is not just about promoting government policy or raising awareness of an issue, it is an important part of how policy works. This would leverage influencers’ personal connections and power over specific audiences the government wants to target.
Two years ago, this would have been considered too risky. Influencers can easily ignore your messages or find themselves embroiled in legal disputes. But the growing popularity of platforms like his TikTok, which rely on video content and have fewer direct targeting options, calls for change.
Influencers are agile, moving between different platforms with their audience and maintaining a direct connection with their community. As the online landscape further changes, with digital advertising being one of the first industries to lean toward the potential of generative AI, governments and law enforcement will need more transparency in how they use digital communications. We need to raise awareness and engage in public discussion.
There are other privacy and ethical concerns. The campaign to stop Channel crossings reached far beyond its target audience, among Muslim communities in France and Belgium. This raises questions about the ethics of using religion and ethnicity in advertising aimed at inciting fear.
These campaigns have long since ceased to be mere advertisements for government policy. They are now front-line tools for implementing policies and governments trying to influence our lives.