Advertising online, though still not properly regulated, is now commonplace in political campaigns. While Trump invested less than half of what Clinton did in TV advertising, he pulled out all the stops online with ‘Make America Great Again’, and in the UK, the Vote Leave campaign claims to have spent 98% of its advertising budget on digital ads.

But the conversation around this type of campaigning gets uncomfortable when combined with how ads are being targeted, and how data is being used. It’s about using personality profiling and micro-targeting messages to niche audiences. “You can say to Facebook, ‘I would like to make sure that I can micro-target that fisherman in certain parts of the UK’,” Gerry Gunster, a political campaigner at Leave.EU. “So they’re specifically hearing that if you vote to leave, you will be able to change the way that the regulations are set for the fishing industry.” Plus, due to the way Facebook’s advertising works, advertisers can stamp out other messages. “There’s only limited ad space on Facebook,” says Facebook advertiser Quentin Johns, “so if you’re targeting a particular demographic in a particular area and have a lot of money, you can simply drown out other advertisers.”

Tech brands continue to be implicated for providing the platform and tools for systems that are deemed ‘unfair’. Facebook in particular is under fire, with the Electoral Commission estimating that more than 99% of ad spend on social media was spent via Facebook in the last general election. And given the amount of data people’s profiles can provide, the ads on Facebook can fragment popular understanding extensively. It’s generating a new need for transparency; Who Targets Me is a British start-up intended to shed light on which parties are targeting you and why. “For the good of our democracy, it’s time to throw some light on this dark and unregulated area of campaign spending,” says co-creator Sam Jeffers.

But while the big tech brands are doing what they can to minimise their impact – whether introducing fact checking or asking users to flag fake news – much of the responsibility falls with government bodies who have been slow to adapt to the ways people consume and share politics. With 51% of people globally using social media as a news source and 47% of 16- to 29-year-old Britons learning about political issues from what people post, it’s unsettling that campaigning on Facebook and its contemporaries are unpoliced. As the general election looms, increasingly it seems that the winner will not be the party with the better policies, but the one with a better understanding of how the public consumes information – both online and offline.

Lucy Thompson works in the client services department at Canvas8, which specialises in behavioural insights and consumer research. She lives in Brixton and spends her free time hunting down the meanest Negronis or trundling about the Kentish countryside.

Lore Oxford is cultural editor at Canvas8. She previously ran her own science and technology publication and was a columnist for Dazed and Confused. When she’s not busy analysing human behaviour, she can be found defending anything from selfie culture to the Kardashians from contemporary culture snobs.