Political polarization is a significant issue in American politics, influencing public discourse, policy, and consumer behavior. While studies on polarization in news media have extensively focused on verbal content, non-verbal elements, particularly visual content, have received less attention due to the complexity and high dimensionality of image data. Traditional descriptive approaches often rely on feature extraction from images, leading to biased polarization estimates due to information loss.

Digital publishers increasingly use advertising as a monetization strategy. At the core of ad-based monetization is behavioral ad targeting, which creates a sustainable revenue stream for publishers and keeps online content mostly free. However, behavioral ad targeting requires the collection and use of consumer-level data, which leads to privacy concerns among consumers. Although the main intent of privacy regulations is to safeguard consumer privacy, a consistent finding from past empirical research is that privacy regulation hurts digital publishers. Specifically, prior research suggests that the revenue loss due to privacy regulations is more pronounced for general interest (vs. specialized) publishers, who have greater uncertainty about their consumer types without consumer tracking. For example, in the absence of consumer tracking, a mainstream news website such as the New York Times - which attracts a highly heterogeneous pool of readers - has a harder time inferring consumer types and interests in order to show them relevant ads, compared to a niche, ideologically extreme website such as Infowars.