The targeted digital advertising infrastructures on which the business models of the major online business rest have been the subject of significant academic and political interest. In this blog we will share our research on the appropriation of these infrastructures – designed for commercial and political advertising – as technologies of government .  In the UK, government departments and law enforcement agencies have begun to repurpose the surveillance and messaging capacities of these social media platforms, along with the ‘influencer economy’, to deliver targeted behaviour change campaigns in order to achieve public policy goals. We explore how frameworks of ‘behavioural government’ have aligned with online media platforms’ extensive infrastructures and the commercial ecologies of professionalised strategic marketing.

The broad questions we are asking include

1. What is the public sector doing with online advertising systems  –  are they ‘campaigns’, ‘interventions’,  nudges, social marketing,  cost saving exercises, data gathering etc? 
2. What theories and practices contribute to their design? What professional communities and academic  disciplines are they drawn from?
3. How is this new approach changing the ‘job’ of public sector communications – and how are these methods establishing themselves in the institutions government and its private sector partners and suppliers?
4. How do the campaigns work in practice? What role is being played by partners in the corporate and charitable sector? How are they being evaluated?
5. What formal institutional arrangements are being developed to manage these uses of targeted online influence? What is their wider role in the business of government?
6. What ethical and practical issues are emerging, and how are they understood by public officials and their private sector proxies?

This work is being conducted by a team from the University of Edinburgh, the University of Strathclyde, and Napier University, bring together expertise in Science and Technology Studies, and Criminology

Keywords: government, influence, digital advertising, e-government, advertising, marketing, strategic communications, social marketing, infrastructures

For more information please contact Dr Ben Collier or Dr James Stewart at the Science Technology and Innovation Studies Unit at Edinburgh University