The next session at the Weizenbaum Conference starts with Mona Krewel, whose interest is in (micro-)targeted advertising in elections; she explores this here especially in the context of the 2024 US presidential election. All parties use such advertising, and tend to target voters whom they assume are ideologically close to them; our understanding of how this works is limited, however, and based largely on self-reporting from campaign managers (which is not necessarily reliable).
A different approach to this is via the Meta Ad Targeting dataset, which is problematic for other reasons; the present project explored the targeting strategies of some 4,000 verified party-linked advertisers. Whether such targeting has any effect on voters remains unknown, but it is at least possible to explore which ads achieve high levels of ad impressions on social media users.
The dataset covers Facebook and Instagram, and provides data on ad targets’ age, gender, location, languages, demographic and other attributes, etc.; it also contains the ads run by advertisers. This can be cross-referenced by the Database on Ideology, Money in Politics, Elections (DIME), which covers campaign financing in US elections; and the OpenSecrets dataset, which provides PAC and funder affiliations.
The project filtered for political, electoral, and social issue ads from the US during the US presidential campaign, and explored the level of visibility that these various ads received. It covered some 2.7 million ads from some 39,000 distinct funding entities; from these it selected the ads from some 4,000 party-affiliated advertisers, or some 741,000 ads. Funders were relatively evenly split across liberal and conservative funders, though liberal advertisers ran considerably more ads.
Most ads were run cheaply and did not specifically target voters by age or gender; even geographic targeting was generally very broad, rather than focussing on specific states or cities. The key target area, in fact, was personal interests. Ads that cost more reached larger audiences; Instagram ads produced more impressions than Facebook ads.
