6533b82bfe1ef96bd128d5ce

RESEARCH PRODUCT

Political Advertising on Facebook

Márton BeneSimon Kruschinski

subject

media_common.quotation_subjectImmigrationSignificant partAdvertising (activity)AdvertisingMetadataPoliticsOrder (business)Political sciencemedia_common.cataloged_instanceEuropean unionComputingMilieux_MISCELLANEOUSmedia_commonPolitical advertising

description

Parties have limited opportunities to determine the audiences of their organic communication. However, Facebook offers sophisticated advertising possibilities which enable parties to sponsor their organic messages in order to target them at selected and narrow segments of the electorate. Information on advertising activity was not available in Europe until Facebook has launched its ‘Ad Library’ right before the 2019 European Parliamentary election which provided access to all political ads and its metadata. By drawing on this data, our chapter will advance on the previous country chapters and investigate parties’ advertising activity in the 12 analysed countries with a specific focus on sponsored posts. We find that political advertising makes up a significant part of the parties’ digital activity on Facebook, but there are also large cross-country differences in their advertising strategy. Sponsored posts are applied mainly to informing and mobilising voters, but also to strategically emphasise specific issues such as environment and immigration.

yearjournalcountryeditionlanguage
2021-01-01
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73851-8_18