Hello everyone. My name is Tanusree Sharma Ph.D. candidate in informatics at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
I'm delighted to be here today. Alongside my colleagues to present our research on users experience and perception. of targeted ads on social media platform. Learning from Bangladesh. And India.
I invite my colleagues to join me. Smirity, over to you
Thank you. My name is Smirity Kaushik. I'm also a PhD candidate at the information Sciences program In UIUC iSchool. We are very excited to share the insights from our study with you all after we introduce our next member, Yaman.
Thank you, Smirity. My name is Yaman Yu like the other two team members. I'm a PhD student in UIUC in the school of information sciences. glad to share the project with you all here over to you, Tanusree
so social media has become an intrigal part of our life and it's no surprise when we frequently see different types of targeted ads while using various social media platforms.
This ads comes in many forms, including text and image ads on our news feeds which are the most common, video or sponsorship ads, influence ads and so on,
Our project is motivated by the cultural, economical and development difference in South Asian countries. Additionally, some members of a team belongs to this under representative group which further allows us to uniquely positioned ourselves to conduct this research
It is worth noting that India and Bangladesh have a large number of social media users. The fact makes our project even more interesting, as we can, explore the impact of Target ads on this understudied area of current literature to unlock potential design implications.
We hope to provide insight to research community and companies on the effective implementation of privacy control based on users mental model of Target ads
So I broad research questions here. First. How do users from Bangladesh in India perceive and experience targeted ads on the popular social media platform?
second to address current practices, we explored how do user manage their privacy regarding Target ads on these platforms.
Finally, to Better articulate design implication, we asked what concern do user have in managing their privacy regarding Target ad on this platforms.
To recruit participants, we distributed a screening survey on social media, platforms and also use snowball sampling. Then we conducted interviews with participant to gather their experience, perception and challenges related to Target ads on various social media
during the interview, participants demonstrate their understanding of targeted ads by sharing their screen and drawing sketches.
We used thematic and inductive analysis for qualitative data and please refer to our paper to read additional information.
As for insights, in the next few slides, we present findings related to participants' perception of targeted ads on social media, their unique mental model of how Target ads works their management strategies and concerns about targeted ads. Over to you, Yaman
Thank you.
The first, research question is, how do users from Bangladesh and India perceive and experience targeted ads. we highlight multiple user perceptions.
First, participants reported to emerging ad formats. second they compared targeted ads on various platforms. And third, they have the tendency to buy these content and products.
For the purpose of the presentation, I will explain the first two in the upcoming slides
During the interview, We learn about some emerging ad format, as one of them is influencer based ads. Influencer based ads are becoming increasingly popular on social media platforms, like Instagram and YouTube.
Participants trust the recommendations of the internet celebrities they follow who endorsed those products? For example, a participant from Bangladesh how he got a new credit card based on the suggestion of the famous influencer,
they believe that top influencer are careful in selecting the product and ensure the product quality.
We also found that participants compare targeted ads on various platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, they primarily focused on the relevance of the ads to their interest whether the ads are repetitive, and appear too frequently and how much the ads disrupts the browsing experience
For example, participant 15 from Bangladesh made an interesting observation during the interview. He found that the ads on YouTube are not relevant to his interests at all. However, Facebook provide a mix of ads, some of which were relevant and some were not.
Moreover, they noted that the ads on Instagram and Facebook was static. So these ads did not disrupted the browsing experience.
Next, Our participants also shared two Unique mental models to understand how targeted ads work.
First, many participants believe that device app permission enable the collection of users information, including audio camera access and microphone in this model, user's device permission becomes primary entry point for Target ads
second mental model is that participants believe various social media have a central database to process uses information, such as online activities. And keyword searches, for example, if a user's Behavior and the search get updated on one social media, such as Facebook, the users' interest database on Instagram will also get updated
These two mental models indicate that participants from both countries. May have a limited understanding of how Target ad works.
Okay, let's move on to the second research question. How do users from Bangladesh and India manage, their privacy regarding Target ads on this platforms
most participants didn't find it necessary to manage targeted ads or still hard to discover and change the ad setting. for other participants, who have experienced adjusting their ad settings, they use methods such as, hiding reporting ads or scrolling skipping ads. over to you, Smirity
Thank you, Yaman
Now we're going to discuss our third research question which explored the concerns of users when comes to managing the Privacy regarding targeted ads on these platforms.
Participants shared multiple concerns related to the ad Management in privacy. in social media. Here we present four major concerns.
The first is device sharing and boundary management. second, Ad fraud in social media. Third, psychological manipulation and gender-based ads and fourth, listening and reading of the personal conversation
for the purpose of this presentation, I will focus on the first and second concerns.
Unlike the western countries, device sharing is a common practice in South Asian countries, It can lead to multiple privacy complications. from example P10 from India is a mother. She shares a laptop with her eight year old son. She uses her laptop for personal work and also for entertainment purposes, such as watching a webseries
However, She was concerned that when her child uses the laptop, he might get ads of those web series that may not be appropriate for his age.
Second, a lot of participants from both countries also highlighted how they were scammed through online ads on social media platforms, specially Facebook,
In particular, I want to highlight the examples of B-17 from Bangladesh is aspect that the companies are targeting non-educated people from low socio-economic background. One of his friends invested a sizable amount of savings into a company that he got to know from Facebook ads
Later the company vanish with all his savings. Other participants also highlighted that it is very difficult to exercise redressal mechanism around ad fraud on the social media companies, platforms
This brings us to the design implications from our findings. We recommend multiple design implication. However, for the purpose of this talk, I will focus on three implications
first, verifying the legitimacy of ads and the sellers. Building on our discussion on the ads fraud concerns shared by a participant we propose a system for scanning of ads and provide more effective redressal mechanism
second, they should offer in-app persmission and explanation because many participants suspected that social media platform are listening to the conversations by accessing the microphone or monitoring their text. So to make this process more transparent, the social media platform should provide in app permission
which users can configure and they should also provide explanations for using this permission
Lastly, we also propose that the social media platform should improve the discoverability of ad settings by providing easy access to ad controls next to the ad that the user is browsing
And that's a wrap on our presentation. Thank you so much for listening. We would like to acknowledge Meta's grant what facilitates this research and also our participants for the valuable insights inside and time
thank you for tuning in. Feel free to reach out to us to our emails and twitter. we are always open to chatting with you. Thank you.