The Pursuit of Transparency and Control: A Classification of Ad Explanations in Social Media

Abstract

Online advertising on social media platforms has been at the center of recent controversies over growing concerns regarding users' privacy, dishonest data collection, and a lack of transparency and control. Facing public pressure, some social media platforms have opted to implement explanatory tools in an effort to empower consumers and shed light on marketing practices. Yet, to date research shows significant inconsistencies around how ads should be explained. To address this issue, we conduct a systematic literature review on ad explanations, covering existing research on how they are generated, presented, and perceived by users. Based on this review, we present a classification scheme of ad explanations that offers insights into the reasoning behind the ad recommendation, the objective of the explanation, the content of the explanation, and how this content should be presented. Moreover, we identify challenges that are unaddressed by either current research or explanatory tools deployed in practice, and we discuss avenues for future research to address these challenges. This paper calls attention to and helps to solidify an agenda for interdisciplinary communities to collaboratively approach the design and implementation of explanations for online ads in social media.