helping journalists cover social media in the presidential campaign
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.
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 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.
Joe Biden and Donald Trump have heavily focused spending in Pennsylvania, a critical battleground state in the November election.
Donald Trump and Joe Biden enter the final full week of the campaign with an increased focus on swing states and spending records.
Campaigns may have different strategies depending on if a state leans towards them or their opponent. In this post, Illuminating lead researcher Jeff Hemsley investigates if the Trump and Biden campaigns are using different Facebook ad strategies in six key contested states, including Iowa, Georgia, Ohio, North Carolina, Florida and Arizona.
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.
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.
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.
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.