Illuminating – helping journalists cover social media in the presidential campaign

An Introduction to the Illuminating Project

Illuminating is a computational journalism project that empowers journalists covering US political campaigns. The Illuminating data helps journalists see patterns and changes in how candidates address communicate to voters over time. If candidates are spending millions of dollars to micro-target voters on digital media, then someone needs to improve transparency and hold them accountable, explains Dr. Jennifer Stromer-Galley, Principal Investigator of the project.

Recap: “Steady Drumbeat of Election Fraud During 2020 Presidential Election: The Role of Facebook Advertising”

Learn about Dr. Stromer-Galley’s recent presentation, where she discussed campaign advertising practices on Facebook during the 2020 presidential election and surfaced patterns in Trump’s Facebook messaging on mail-in and absentee ballots.

Illuminating 2020 Message Topic Report

This report provides analyses by the Illuminating 2020 project on the topics in the ads the Biden and Trump campaigns ran on Facebook and Instagram during the 2020 U.S. presidential election.

Identifying Political Topics in Social Media Messages

In this post, we introduce our lexicon-based approach to political campaign advertisement message topic classification.

Illuminating 2020 Report: The 2020 General Election Campaign Advertising on Facebook

Former Vice President Joe Biden and President Donald Trump spent a historic $217 million advertising on the Facebook and Instagram social media platforms during the 2020 general election. This report provides analyses by the Illuminating 2020 project for how both campaigns used Facebook and Instagram advertising in the general election campaign, including targeting and messaging.

How Biden Used Facebook Ads in Arizona

Biden’s historic win in Arizona created reason to explore how he advertised on Facebook in Arizona, and how that differed from how he advertised overall.

To Swing or Not to Swing: How Facebook Ads Were Used to Reach Ohio Voters

Ohio has been considered one of the most significant swing states for decades, but for the first time since 1960 the winner did not win the state of Ohio. In this post, we take a look at how the candidates used Facebook and Instagram ads to appeal to voters in Ohio.

PoliBERT: Classifying political social media messages with BERT

This post features a working paper that the Illuminating team presented at the 2020 SBP-BRiMS Conference. We describe and compare two computational techniques that we have used to classify Facebook and Twitter posts by message type.

Noteworthy News in Nevada: A Retrospective on 2020 Presidential Election Campaign Ads in the Silver State

As a swing state with 6 electoral votes, Nevada was integral on the path to winning the 2020 election. Here we take a deep dive into how the official Biden and Trump campaign pages targeted voters within the Silver State.

How Trump Used Facebook Ads in Arizona

Prior to the election, many analysts predicted that Arizona would be a tight race and a key battleground state for both campaign’s path to victory. Donald Trump ran ads in Arizona from several different Facebook pages. Using data collected by Illuminating, trends about the demographics Trump targeted can be examined, comparing state-specific strategy to what Trump did overall.

Examining how the candidates’ amount spent per view changed throughout the campaign

Earlier in the summer, Donald Trump consistently had a lower spend per 1000 views than Joe Biden. However, in many of the final weeks before the election, it was Joe Biden’s ads that had a lower spend per view.

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