Partisan American news sites track more user data

Targeted advertising has been hotly debated in recent years. Now, research has found that hyper-partisan news websites in the USA (those with a declared political allegiance to the left or right) track and target advertising at much higher levels than the general web.

Of the 556 websites the researchers focused on, right-leaning websites were found to target users significantly more, with more costly and profitable adverts.

Targeting you?

The research team from King’s Faculty of Natural and Mathematical Sciences, in collaboration with Brave Software Inc and Telefonica Research, created nine online personas, building in realistic user behaviour to give their profiles characteristics including age and sex.

The team then had these personas visit the websites, which were identified from a list compiled by Buzzfeed News in 2017. The researchers tracked the number of cookies, and cookie synchronisation, with high levels indicating that the visited webpages were tracking their personas. The data also showed that advertisers set most of the tracking cookies. 

Pushkal further added: 'Cookie synchronisation is the way collaborators (third-parties) can tag user profiles, to bypass not being able to see cookies set by others. Third parties on hyper-partisan websites also employ this technique, and right-leaning news websites have up to 50 percent more cookie synchronisations than left-leaning.'

Many websites have sophisticated techniques for building a profile of their visitors, enabling third parties to match adverts to their target audiences – but the researchers suggest that these techniques breach user’s privacy, taking information without consent.

The top-ranking websites found to be hyper-partisan and embedding high quantities of cookies including Fox News, Breitbart and MSNBC’s online platforms. Although not all the websites are distributing fake news, their partisan presentation of information excludes the journalistic balance that many reputable outlets, such as the BBC, aim to uphold, presenting different perspectives and aspects of news stories.

The Political Angle

User profiling techniques have also been used in a variety of recent political issues, most notably by Cambridge Analytica in Donald Trump’s and Ted Cruz’s presidential campaigns, as well as campaigns in the Brexit referendum.

The paper builds on research lead by Dr Nishanth Sastry in 2018, which tracked the creation of filter bubbles during the 2016 US election. That research found that hyper-partisan news webpages on the left and right created their own internal ecosystems, or filter bubbles, by linking to each other on their websites and social media profiles. These bubbles were much discussed in the wake of Donald Trump’s electoral victory, with fake and partisan news shared unchecked on social media platforms, garnering ever increasing partisan audiences.

This research built on those findings, discovering that of the 667 websites initially created in the database, 111 were now inactive. The implications suggest that some of those hyper-partisan news websites could have been created to push politicised messaging around the 2016 US election, a phenomena that could recur in the upcoming election.

Sagar Joglekar said: 'In today's age, you are the product if you are not paying anything to access the information on the web. The value you give back to the companies is in the form of your likes, dislikes, and behavioural patterns, so being tracked could be seen as an expected outcome.'

'What is most surprising is the reflection of political polarising in how ad technology companies view you as a product, with the advertising system adapting to increasingly polar political behaviour. In the end, the goal is to earn as many ad clicks as possible.'

How can I hide?

Unfortunately, it’s complicated.

Dr Nishanth Sastry suggested that normal web users need to be more aware of those partisan websites which track their users more significantly than general websites. However, he argues that to combat the issue of internet privacy, systemic change is required.

'The issue can’t be solved by normal web users practicing internet hygiene – to avoid creating an online persona they’d have to delete their cookies after every session which just isn’t practical. Even using incognito mode doesn’t remove some kinds of sophisticated cookies. There’s a need for change to make sure people are aware of the ways their data is being collected and monetised.'

Read the full research here. The paper, 'Stop tracking me Bro! Differential Tracking of User Demographics on Hyper-Partisan Websites' is being presented at The 2020 Web Conference in Taipei, Taiwan in April.

Image of Donald Trump courtesy of Michael Vadon.