Two people search the same thing. They see different ads. Different prices. Different messages.
Literal meaning: Microtargeting is the practice of delivering highly specific messages to precisely defined audience segments — identified through detailed behavioural, demographic, and psychographic data — so that different people receive different content based on inferred characteristics, vulnerabilities, or persuadability.
Origin: Microtargeting originated in direct mail marketing in the 1990s and moved to digital platforms with the scaling of social media advertising. Cambridge Analytica’s use of Facebook data to build psychographic profiles for political targeting in the 2016 US and UK elections brought the practice into mainstream public awareness. The technique exploits the same data infrastructure that powers commercial advertising, applied to political persuasion.
The delivery of individually tailored messages based on detailed data profiles — so that different people see different versions of the same message, each tuned to persuade them specifically.
The Appeal: From the advertiser’s perspective, microtargeting is efficient: messages reach the people most likely to respond, reducing waste and increasing conversion. For political campaigns, it enables resource allocation toward persuadable voters. The same technique that targets someone with running shoes targets them with political messages calibrated to their anxieties.
The Friction: The asymmetry is the structural problem. The person being targeted does not know what others are seeing. Surveillance Capitalism — human behaviour as raw material for prediction products — is the economic model that generates the data microtargeting requires. Bot Farms can combine with microtargeting: manufactured content can be delivered to precisely identified vulnerable audiences. The Cambridge Analytica case documented how psychological profiling from social media data could be used to target people at moments of particular susceptibility. Filter Bubble is the aggregate consequence: each person inhabits a slightly different information environment, making shared political reality harder to sustain. Van Iperen (2026) identifies the structural dimension: on the basis of data analyses, tech companies draw virtual frames — “virtuele kaders” — in which specific groups and individuals are isolated and steered in a particular direction. Where Cambridge Analytica targeted individuals, this logic scales to the architecture of entire communities.
Why This Matters: Microtargeting makes visible that the political message you saw was chosen for you specifically. The argument was calibrated to your profile. The anxiety it addressed was inferred from your behaviour. Once you know that, political communication looks different.
Related terms: Surveillance Capitalism · Recommender Systems · Bot Farms · Filter Bubble · Data Brokers · Narrative Engineering · Brussels Effect · Biometric Surveillance · Great Replacement
Read more:
- The Great Hack — Noujaim, J. & Amer, K. (2019). Netflix documentary
- Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America — Wylie, C. (2019). Random House
- Online Political Microtargeting: Promises and Threats for Democracy — Zuiderveen Borgesius, F.J. et al. (2025). arXiv Privacy in the age of psychological targeting — Matz, S.C. et al. (2020). Current Opinion in Psychology
- Cambridge Analytica’s black box — Hu, M. (2020). Big Data & Society
- Big Tech maakt van burgers vee — Van Iperen, R. (2026). Vrij Nederland, 9 juli