It’s not just political ads that are made to divide us

Five years since the Brexit vote and three since the Cambridge Analytica scandal, we’re now familiar with the role that targeted political advertising can play in fomenting polarisation. It was revealed in 2018 that Cambridge Analytica had used data harvested from 87 million Facebook profiles, without users’ consent, to help Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign target key voters with online adverts. In the years since, we’ve learned how these kinds of targeted adverts c