With close to one billion active users on social media, platforms and businesses are constantly rolling out new features, upgrading their ad tools and creating new ways to engage with users, moving away from traditional marketing strategies. Those emerging practices are also extensively relying on data analyses to gain insights and enhance more targeted opportunities, therefore shifting platforms and businesses’ focus on revenue.

The evolution towards increasingly personalized marketing practices occurs in parallel with end-users’ awareness of data protection frameworks, which may lead to a rift between transparency expectations towards complex advertising solutions based not only on personal data provided by the users themselves, but also in conjunction with other data collected by social media providers or third parties. Recent headlines about the roles played by social media targeting on democratic decision-making and electoral processes reinforce such perceptions.