helping journalists cover social media in the presidential campaign
With the election finally decided, it is clear that the 2020 election was far from predictable. Several key voting demographics defied polling and created an unexpected outcome. In this article, we take a look at the “Latinos for Trump” Facebook page and how ads were used to influence this key demographic of voters.
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.
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.
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.
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.