Why Am I Seeing This Ad? The affordances and limits of automated user-level explanation in Meta’s advertising system

Abstract

Against the backdrop of calls for greater platform transparency, this exploratory article investigates Meta’s ‘Why Am I Seeing This Ad’ (WAIST) feature, which is positioned as a consumer-level explanation of Meta’s advertising model. Drawing on our own walkthroughs of Facebook and Instagram and data from the Australian Ad Observatory, we find the feature falls short in two ways. First, the explanations do not always align with how the system and its audience-building tools are sold to and used by advertisers. Second, the feature is focused narrowly on single ads and individual users, doing nothing to generate understanding of the patterns and sequences of targeted advertising in relation to other users or over time. We propose both platform practices and independent research strategies that could help to fill this gap between individual explanations, population-level patterns of targeted online advertising and the societal issues associated with it.