Description
In 2022 tech "entrepreneur" Elon Musk bought the social media networking site Twitter and subsequently renaming it X. There has been a growing interest in the number of advertisers who have been leaving this platform and what this might potentially do for its market value. As a result of social media's significant global reach, a variety of recent articles have examined the issue of targeted advertising in the context of democracy and misinformation (Bay, 2018). Social media companies have been highly selective in the information shared about how their targeted advertising works, leaving gaps and making this an ontological and epistemological puzzle. This article aims to render this less of a “black box,” specifically with regards to advertising by actors involved in international security (broadly defined), which has up to now been less well-explored. What use, for example, might militaries make of this feature? How might arms manufacturers present themselves within these adverts? And how might people be targeted? Making use of Lee Ann Fujii’s concept of accidental ethnography, data collection for this article began in 2021, when I started to log the advertisements that I (someone with an evident security interest) began to receive. The article begins by examining the methods and politics of targeted social media advertising. It then moves on to explore the security actors targeting me, the explanations offered for targeting, and an analysis of the types of material received. Overall, it concludes that the discourses contained within targeted advertising related to international security legitimises the actors in question. With minimal information offered, the article calls for greater transparency.
