Exploring Illuminating’s 12 topic categories for the 2020 Presidential Election campaign ads

Exploring Illuminating’s 12 topic categories for the 2020 Presidential Election campaign ads

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.