Conservative news sites are more likely to spy on their readers with 73 percent more cookies

Readers of conservative-leaning websites are significantly more susceptible to being spied on by ad tracking software compared to those that read liberal-leaning news sites.

According to a new study from King’s College London, Brave Software, and Spanish broadband provider Telefonica, the median conservative website will load its users web browsers with 73 percent more cookies than liberal sites.

For the study, the team went through the 10,000 most popular sites on the internet and broke out those that qualified as partisan sites and found the media conservative site placed 227 cookies on its readers computers to track their general online habits, compared to 131 from the median left-leaning site.

Cookies are small bits of code sent from a website to a person browsing their site.

Cookie files are stored locally on the users computer and help with tasks like remembering what the contents of a person’s digital shopping cart, or saving login information.

Cookies have also been used to collect data from users web browsing activity even when they’re not using the particular site they were sent from, and this data is often used by advertisers identify relevant subjects to pitch their products to.

The team categorized each site’s general political orientation by relying on an earlier study from 2017 that analyzed major political news sites, their Facebook pages, and their own About pages.

The team categorized sites like Fox News, The Daily Caller, Real Clear Politics, and The Gateway Pundit as conservative, while sites like Salon, Rawstory, and Alternet were categorized as liberal.

The team was hesitant to say any of these tracking tools were used to sway political opinions, but instead seemed squarely focused on advertising and consumer spending.

‘We don’t study or know if the ad ecosystem is tracking right-wing people more intensely because the advertisers are serving political interests or supporting some political orientation, or some other such conspiracy theory,’ Telefonica’s Nicolas Kourtellis told Wired.

‘If we just look at the fundamentals, advertisers target users on the right-wing websites because their eyeballs are more valuable.’

As a result, right-leaning sites charged an average of 67 cents for every 1,000 impressions, compared to an average of 56 cents per 1,000 impressions on left-leaning sites.

One possible explanation for why conservative sites can charge higher prices for ads is that their readers are generally more suggestible.

Past research has shown conservative readers are more likely than liberal readers to fall for untruthful or misleading stories at a higher rate, which means they could also be more likely to be taken in by an advertisement.

According to the researchers there could be another, simpler explanation: the more tracking tools a site uses the more effectively its able to distribute ads to the appropriate target audience.

‘Advertisers and their trackers get embedded in such websites to perform more intense tracking, leading to even better user targeting, which consequently leads to more expensive ads,’ Kourtellis said.

‘This makes such websites even more appealing to other trackers and advertisers who may want to also be embedded to such websites, as they can make more money, and the whole circle or spiral continues.’