helping journalists cover social media in the presidential campaign
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.
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.
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.