Who Was Microtargeted in the 2020 Presidential Elections?

• In Event: The Political Effects of Social Media

Abstract

What drives presidential campaigns to invest in microtargeted digital political advertisements? Why do political campaigns employ microtargeted digital political advertising, and who is most affected by it? While political actors have increasingly allocated advertising resources to digital platforms such as Facebook Ads, and scholars have theorized that such platforms can harm democracy by enabling microtargeting with unprecedented scale and precision, it is not yet known who is most affected by microtargeted advertisements or what their purposes are. This paper answers these questions by analyzing Facebook Ads run by the Biden and Trump campaigns in the 2020 presidential elections, measuring microtargeting intensity by state, gender, and age group, and then evaluating the predictive value of political and fundraising factors using OLS regressions. I expect to find that microtargeted digital advertising intensity can be predicted by a state’s or demographic group’s donation history, thus providing evidence that political campaigns primarily employ microtargeting in digital advertising for resource mobilization, such as fundraising and volunteer recruitment, instead of political mobilization such as persuading undecided voters. If so, these findings will clarify the role that microtargeting currently plays in political campaigning, which can then inform future research on microtargeting effects and audiences.

Author

• Rohan Grover, University of Southern California