Political Microtargeting in Ecuador Digital Advertising, Data Exploitation, and Electoral Manipulation in the Age of Algorithmic Campaigns

Abstract

Ecuador’s rapidly expanding digital ecosystem with 15.3 million Facebook users and 13.5 million social media users aged 18+ as of early 2025 has transformed political campaigning into a data-driven enterprise. This study examines the phenomenon of political microtargeting in Ecuadorian elections (2021–2025) through a mixed-methods approach combining content analysis of Meta Ad Library data from 847 political advertisements, semi-structured interviews with 12 campaign strategists and digital consultants, and a survey of 1,200 voters across three provinces. Drawing on the theoretical frameworks of computational propaganda (Woolley & Howard, 2019), the privacy calculus model (Schäwel et al., 2021), and deliberative democracy (Habermas, 1991), the study reveals that campaign spending on digital advertising ranged from USD 300,000 to USD 1,000,000+ per presidential candidate, with sophisticated psychographic segmentation techniques deployed despite the absence of specific regulatory frameworks.