Ads for Anyone: The Facebook Ads of Candidates, PACs and non-Traditional Actors

• In Event: Political Advertising

Abstract

Each election cycle, the proportion of political advertising directed toward digital outreach increases, largely because it allows for direct targeting of potential voters with very little cost. But challenges in data collection and measuring exposure have limited our ability to understand campaign decision making in this environment. Further, there has been limited research on the role that outside groups, empowered by the low cost of these ads, can play in this environment. We use a new data source - the Facebook Political Ads API - to examine the political ads surrounding 15 contentious statewide races for Senate or governor in the final two months of the 2018 election. Our analysis shows that lower barriers to entry associated with digital advertising have important implications for what political messaging looks like online. Specifically, we show that ad buys from non-campaign organizations are distinct from campaign ads in both topics and tone, in contrast with research on television ads (Franz et al. 2015). However, the majority of Facebook ads in the sample came from the candidates themselves, and reflected many of the traditional uses of political advertising, with perhaps a stronger emphasis on get out the vote efforts and more precise targeting by age and gender. Yet in each race, there were dozens - sometimes hundreds - of other advertisers sponsoring messages around each race. Many of these were traditional Political Action Committees or other candidates, but there were also ads sponsored by groups whose background wasn’t clear or who didn’t register with the FEC or by individuals promoting their own specific issues. A substantial share of the ads from these opaque outside organizations or individuals contained misleading or incorrect information. We conclude by offering general lessons about the potential and pitfalls associated with platform-supplied political advertising data.

Authors

• Galen Stocking, Pew Research Center

• Patrick van Kessel, Pew Research Center

• Adam G. Hughes, Pew Research Center