Who Is Targeting Me? Privacy Perceptions of and Responses to Commercial and Political Targeted Advertising on Social Media

Social media users are frequently targeted by commercial and political advertisements, which many perceive as a privacy threat. Although commercial and political targeting intend to influence users in different ways, comparative studies about user perceptions and responses to different kinds of targeting are scarce. Moreover, notwithstanding the legal obligation to make people aware of targeting in the European Union, current transparency cues do not immediately inform about the use of personal data. The present preregistered between-subjects online experiment (N = 1,248) investigates social media users' privacy perceptions and reactions to commercial and political targeting using an expanded protection motivation theory approach. Results revealed that more salient transparency cues can increase users' perception of ad manipulativeness, which in turn positively relates to privacy protection motivation. Perceiving privacy risks from targeting and protecting against it as effective positively relates to both protection motivation and desired legal regulation of targeting. Differences in perceptions of and reactions to commercial and political ads were marginal.