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Olive Heffernan is a freelance environment writer
six million kilometres of the surface of our star, travelling at several hundred kilometres per second, making it the fastest object ever launched. Reinforced instruments will sample the corona, revealing the secrets of one of the harshest places in the solar system. Could this be the start of a new trend in honouring living scientists in mission naming? It is easy to see why tradition honours science’s dead greats, but why not recognise the living too? ■ Geraint Lewis is a professor of astrophysics at the University of Sydney, Australia
INSIGHT Political adverts
JUSTIN TALLIS/GETTY
commercial small-scale seeding for research purposes is allowed. The Chile trial fits this bill. The backlash comes, in part, because of the legacy of a similar scheme by a different organisation in 2012 off British Columbia, Canada. In that case, there was no firm evidence of benefits to the salmon population it was hoping to revive, or to the Haida community that helped fund it. And it was a commercial project in open ocean despite the moratorium. In a previous incarnation, the organisation behind the Chile proposal sought to present seeding as a means to remove carbon from the atmosphere, a technology it applied to patent. What’s more, the new plans are opaque, with the details of compounds and methods not yet spelled out. Given the pace of climate change, maybe we’ll have to turn to geoengineering, be it seeding oceans or deflecting the sun’s rays. While neither is desirable, to choose the best course of action, research will be vital. It’s also vital that any trials that inform geoengineering – whether intended for this or not – are done for the public good. ■
–Feeling targeted?–
Weneedtransparency overdarksocialads Matt Reynolds
campaign was criticised for its inaccurate claim that the UK sends £350 million to the European Union every week, but this claim was plastered on the side of a bus for all to see. What goes on in personalised newsfeeds is another matter entirely. A small group of online vigilantes aims to find out what’s in the messages. Who Targets Me? is a browser extension that extracts every political advert that 6000 volunteers stumble across in their Facebook feeds. “We’ve tracked over 1100 versions of the same message from the Liberal Democrats alone,” says Louis Knight-
A shadowy battle is being fought in the Facebook feeds of UK voters. Political parties are using the online giant’s wealth of data on its users to send precisely targeted adverts that they hope will swing this week’s general election. But there is little clarity about what the ads are saying. These “dark adverts” allow political parties to tailor a message to pop up only in the newsfeeds of specific audiences, leaving non-targeted people unaware. These adverts don’t appear publicly anywhere, which is raising concerns about their content. “These ads allow parties to “It’s fundamental to a healthy tailor a message to appear democracy that claims and promises made by candidates and parties before only in the Facebook feeds an election should be open to scrutiny of specific people” and challenge. Dark ads made over closed social media platforms are not,” Webb, co-founder of the project. Some adverts targeted Facebook users more says Martin Moore of the Centre for likely to be concerned by funding cuts the Study of Media, Communication to the military, while other people saw and Power at King’s College London. a similar ad about grammar schools. There is no indication that parties Knight-Webb thinks there should be are using these ads to mislead voters, but without seeing what’s in them, it is a public repository of these adverts so anyone can vet politicians’ claims. It is impossible to know. During the Brexit also important that voters can poke vote last year, the Vote Leave
their heads out of their own filter bubbles and see what messages other people are being exposed to, he says. Another way to shine a light on these messages would be to require parties to give more detail about their spending on social media campaigns. The Electoral Commission, which governs campaign spending, reports that UK parties spent £1.3 million on Facebook advertising during the 2015 election campaign, £1.2 million of which came from the Conservative party. But this doesn’t tell us how that money was used or who was targeted. And although Electoral Commission rules regulate the money that parties can spend during campaigns, social media advertising is blurring the lines between different types of spending. If a national Facebook advert campaign is targeted at people who are more likely to live in one area, is it local spending or national? The Electoral Commission deals with who the parties give money to, not what that money is used for, says its spokesperson. It also doesn’t vet the accuracy of political adverts. However, the Information Commissioner’s Office, the UK body that protects data rights, has launched an investigation into the targeting of voters through social media. To ensure there is clarity over the use of dark adverts, the UK’s electoral laws will need updating for the social media age. Until then, the electorate remains in the dark. ■ 10 June 2017 | NewScientist | 25