Brown Political Review
Interview background:
Young Mie Kim is a Professor at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication and an Andrew Carnegie Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Professor Kim’s research centers on the influence of digital media on political communication in contemporary media and politics across political campaigns, issue advocacy groups, and voters. Professor Kim’s most recent project, Project DATA (Digital Ad Tracking & Analysis), employs a real-time, user-based ad tracking tool to study the sponsors, content, targets, and algorithms of online political campaigns across social media platforms. The project highlights the oft-obscured operations of digital campaigns whilehighlighting pernicious microtargeting practices. Kim’s 2016 article “The Stealth Media? Groups and Targets behind Divisive Issue Campaigns on Facebook” won the Kaid-Sanders Award for the Best Political Communication Article of the Year by the International Communication, and her work has appeared in over 400 major media outlets both in the United States and abroad (The New York Times; WIRED; BBC). Her research has also appeared in journals including Communication Research, the Journal of Communication, and the Journal of Politics, among others. Kim received her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Zach Stern: What prompted you to start Project DATA?

Young Mie Kim: For almost my entire career, I have been studying passionate publics—people, like those who care about the abortion issue because of their religious values, who care about political issues because of particular values, identities, or interests. I realized that these people tend to put their issues ahead of political party identification and that they tend to distrust mainstream media, opting instead to spend a lot of time on social media platforms like Facebook. They’re mobilized because of the issues they care about, and in the data-driven, algorithm-based digital age, I realized that political leaders and campaigns try to identify and target these passionate people using data and microtargeting tools because it’s much easier for political campaigns to convert, persuade, and mobilize people who are very passionate about particular issues given their personal concerns. These groups are scattered around the country, so it has traditionally been hard to identify and mobilize them, but with microtargeting tools, you can now do just that. I realized that studying advertising—the outcome of very deliberate strategy—would be a good way to examine how political campaigns identify these people and come one step closer to understanding the strategies and tactics that they use. 

That’s why I started this project, but I quickly realized that political ad data on social media is not publicly accessible. Even when Congress investigated Russian election interference after the 2016 election, they relied entirely on data that the platforms voluntarily handed over to them, so I hired a computer scientist and developed an app that tracks digital political ads across social media platforms—a user-based and real-time reverse engineering tracking tool that would allow us to track who sent ads and capture ad content. In addition to the app, we also surveyed users on their demographics and their political attitudes so that we could reverse engineer how the ads targeted particular groups and build targeting profiles for political ads. It is very important to have an independent investigator outside the tech platforms, and this project collects data independent of these tech platforms through our user-based app. 

ZS: Whether it is the government throwing some force behind it or expansion among researchers like yourself, could Project DATA be scaled up to cover more users or more platforms? 

YMK: It is not easy because we have to protect the users and have to think about surveillance. I don’t necessarily like the idea of the government doing this. With advanced data analytical techniques, you can get a pretty good idea of who people are if you really drill into individual-level analysis, but we don’t do that. I think the best model is to do this kind of research in real time with a larger pool of participants in an ongoing manner by some kind of independent consortium. At the moment, we only track data for a certain period of time in election years, but ideally, we want the project to be ongoing. Relatively speaking, in 2016 we had 17,000 people participate in the study and 11,000 people complete all of the surveys we asked for, but still, compared to what tech platforms have, it is a relatively small sample. MORE