As the death toll in the U.S. climbs to over 230,000, let’s see how Biden and Trump are choosing to discuss COVID.
The Cost of COVID: For Candidates and for the Country
All Eyes on Georgia: How Candidates are Spending in the Peach State
As Election Day ballots are being cast, both candidates are hoping their ad spending efforts in Georgia have paid off. In this post, we take a look at how the candidates are using different types of Facebook ads to appeal to Georgia voters.
Battle in the Badger State: Campaign Advertising in Wisconsin
In the final days of the election, the Biden and Trump campaigns have focused a large sum of their ad spending in Wisconsin. In this post, we analyze how each candidate is allocating their money in hopes of winning over last-minute voters in this critical battleground state.
The Biden campaign is running ads for Jill Biden’s chicken parmesan recipe
The Biden campaign has started running ads from a staggering 26 additional pages over the last two weeks, including pages for established media outlets. The ads the Biden campaign has run from pages for some of these media outlets are worth more closely scrutinizing.
How candidates are spending in Pennsylvania
Joe Biden and Donald Trump have heavily focused spending in Pennsylvania, a critical battleground state in the November election.
Week in Review, 10/26: The campaign enters the final full week
Donald Trump and Joe Biden enter the final full week of the campaign with an increased focus on swing states and spending records.
Deep Dive into Trump’s Demographic-Specific Facebook Pages
To run ads on Facebook, advertisers must connect their ads to a particular Facebook page that they administer. However, Facebook does not limit advertisers to running ads from a single Facebook page. For example, the Trump campaign has been running ads from over 20 different Facebook pages so far this year. Several of these pages are targeted at specific demographics. This is a deep dive of the month-by-month breakdown of how Donald Trump has utilized demographic-specific Facebook pages to run ads.
Week in Review, 10/5: Trump outspends on COVID-19 messaging
In a week that ended with President Trump announcing that he had tested positive for COVID-19 and being admitted to the Walter Reed medical center, for the first time the Trump campaign outspent the Biden campaign on messages related to COVID-19.
Facebook Political Advertising Transparency Report
This report summarizes the challenges and concerns that the Illuminating project’s team encountered when using Facebook’s Ad Library to conduct research on the 2020 U.S. presidential election. We provide examples of each problem and explain why hindering the transparency of the online campaigning ecosystem poses a threat to campaign advertising research by academics and journalists. Our report concludes with recommendations that would help make Facebook’s Ad Library more accessible and transparent to journalists, researchers, and the general public.
Trump and Biden ads on Facebook and Instagram focus on rallying the base
The campaigns of Donald Trump and Joe Biden together spent US $65.8 million on social media advertising between June 1 and Sept. 13. With these ads, which amount to about 30% of both campaigns’ spending, the candidates are trying to mobilize voters – find supporters and then spark them to get involved.