The Mainz Ministry of Environment targets green voters with targeted advertising

Was Donald Trump The Rhineland-Palatinate government was right with its presidential campaign, it’s only cheap: it targeted voters whose Facebook data had been bugged by targeted ads. This method is called precision targeting. It allows advertisers to accurately deliver their messages to their addressees. Not only in the US, but also in the Rhineland-Palatinate, as the Green Party-led Department of the Environment acknowledged on Friday: the practice has been used since 2018 and in about 130 cases Facebook ads have specifically targeted Green supporters. The Ministry of Environment was looking for Facebook users who are particularly interested in nature conservation, ecological agriculture or greens. Then the users received the appropriate ads.

The Mainz Ministry recognized this only after research by Südwestrundfunk. SWR followed up on the “Neo Magazin Royale” signal on ZDF, which happened to be precisely targeted, and discovered it was not an isolated case, but an established practice that ended just a day before the general election. According to SWR, the data spying began under Green Environment Minister Ulrike Höfken, which continued under his successor, Anne Spiegel. According to her department, Spiegel was unaware of the matter. At the moment there are no ads at all Facebook social networking site more. The Top of the House “immediately put together a multidisciplinary team to put your entire social media strategy to the test.”

Immediately stopped?

The ministry said criticism of the practice of precision targeting was “justified”. SWR He wrote after the ZDF broadcast: “Therefore, we turned it off immediately after the notification and made sure that target group selection no longer occurred in the future.” The ministry also denied that this was an illegal partisan advertisement, and that such advertising was not made.

Sophie Schönberger, a professor of public law at the University of Dusseldorf, sees it differently, she told SWR. It’s an ‘illegal practice anyway. Public relations work in the country should be politically neutral – also in relation to the target group. This has nothing to do with legitimate PR. They want to work through the process in Parliament and are curious to know how the attorney general’s office is assessing’ ‘Absurd use’ of tax revenue The CDU member of the Bundestag Patrick Schneider said the Bundestag administration had to deal with this illegal party funding.