helping journalists cover social media in the presidential campaign
Due to the sheer magnitude of the Facebook and Instagram ads run by 2020 presidential campaigns, the Illuminating 2020 Project developed Machine Learning (ML) algorithms to automatically classify ads by message topic. This post breaks down the topic classifications used by the ML model to understand how the Trump and Biden campaigns attempt to persuade the public.
By Brian McKernan On September 16 and 17, the Trump campaign started running ads from twelve state-specific pages, such as “Trump For Florida” and “Trump for Wisconsin.” These Facebook pages provide insight into what the Trump campaign considers their must-win
We have now resolved the technical issues we were experiencing with our website. The estimates on the Illuminating 2020 dashboard are now accurate. We are currently only supporting access to data for the general election candidates from June 1 to
Text messages and emails from political campaigns are pouring into Americans’ phones and inboxes right now. This is because campaign operatives believe that the more messages they send, the greater the odds that you will act. Each time you act, the campaign gets insight on what types of messages seem to work with you. They’ll learn from your responses, and send you more messages, in the hopes you’ll stay involved and that they can eventually secure your vote.
Our website is currently experiencing some technical issues which are in the process of being resolved.
An analysis of how Donald Trump’s campaign uses smaller ad buys to target specific subsets of people.
An analysis of how Joe Biden’s campaign uses smaller ad buys to target specific subsets of people.
While Joe Biden ran plenty of convention-specific advertising during the DNC, Donald Trump’s campaign still outspent him in the week from Aug. 17-23.
Although Donald Trump’s re-election campaign traditionally spends more money towards civil ads, a drastic increase in incivility during the week of July 6th, led to 68.8% of that week’s spending contributing towards uncivil ads.
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.