We have discovered that the Illuminating 2020 dashboard has been underestimating the spending and impressions totals, particularly for the Biden campaign. This discrepancy is the result of our original decision to not include ads that ran without any text in
Introduction to the Illuminating 2020 Project Architecture
Jay Kachhadia, one of the talented researchers on the Illuminating team, recently published an article on Towards Data Science, a Medium publication, describing the tools we use to collect digital political ads, classify these ads, and share the results on
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.
The Year of the Youth Vote: How Candidates are Targeting 18 to 24 Year-Olds Through Advertising
Historically, youth voters (ages 18-29) have had the lowest voter turnout when participating in national and local elections. With 23 million eligible Gen Z voters this year, almost 16 million more than could vote in the 2016 election, this large but historically inactive voting demographic is a challenging yet necessary group of voters that presidential candidates Joe Biden and Donald Trump have targeted using Facebook and Instagram advertisements. Using the Illuminating Data, we are able to break down how each candidate is tackling the younger portion of this demographic (ages 18 to 24). Both candidates have different strategies on how to reach young adults, but employ these strategies in a way that targets social issues young Americans care about in attempts to mobilize this age group.
Post-Debate Analysis: Biden and Trump have distinct differences on the issues
Learning Biden’s and Trump’s visions for the future are critical, now more than ever. Unfortunately, the post-debate analysis was unanimous: the public did not get to hear in depth how Trump and Biden will tackle the pressing issues.
Our team at the Illuminating 2020 project analyzed Biden’s and Trump’s messaging in their Facebook and Instagram ads on the issues. Our curiosity was whether the public could glean some understanding of the two candidates’ policies in their ads. Our analysis suggests that Biden, in particular, is less likely to share his policy positions in his ads. He is more likely to emphasize his character and personality and to attack Trump.
Trump’s slow summer climb in the Florida polls
Biden has maintained a fairly consistent national polling lead of around 7 to 8% since mid June, but Trump’s standing in the race has tightened in certain key battleground states. For example, Biden had a polling lead of approximately 7% in Florida mid June, but his lead has dropped to 1.8% as of September 29. Has the Trump campaign changed its advertising strategies between mid June and September? By looking at the Illuminating 2020 data, we see that there is a re-balancing of ad strategy taking place, as both campaigns are trying their best to find their “sweet spot” of message type targeting potential voters in important battleground states.
Update: Ads after September 13 are still processing.
The Illuminating dashboard has a complete set of ads from June 1 to September 13. We are still processing ads after September 13.