Trump is one of the biggest political ad spenders on Facebook
https://www.engadget.com/2018/07/18/trump-big-political-ad-spender-facebook/
Mallory Locklear at Engadget
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In May, Facebook began requiring political ads to disclose who paid for them and started collecting all political ads in a searchable archive. Now, researchers are using that information to see how politicians are incorporating the social platform into their campaigns. As the New York Times reports, researchers at New York University have conducted an initial analysis of political Facebook ads and found that President Trump is a leading spender.
Of the 267,000 political ads that the research team was able to collect accurate information on from Facebook's archive, Donald Trump's campaign and his PAC were both top 10 ad sponsors based on how many impressions their ads attracted on the social media platform. Combined, the two spent at least $274,100 on 9,523 ads between May and June of this year, which attracted a minimum of 37.6 million impressions. Comparatively, Planned Parenthood, which had the second most impressions, spent at least $188,800 on 3,389 ads viewed by 24.5 million people. The only other politician in the top 10 list is, Beto O'Rourke, a Democratic Senate candidate from Texas who spent a minimum of $194,400 on Facebook ads.
Social media was a big part of President Trump's campaign and Brad Parscale, the digital advisor for Trump's 2016 run, has been selected as Trump's 2020 campaign manager. "Facebook and Twitter were the reason we won this thing," Parscale told Wired in 2016. "Twitter for Mr. Trump. And Facebook for fundraising."
There are a few caveats to keep in mind about this analysis. First, all of the data was scraped from Facebook's archive using keywords. And because of this, the researchers note that the data collected likely represent only a portion of the political ads posted on the platform. But the archive doesn't yet allow for more thorough data collection as it currently stands. Facebook has said it will release an API later this year that could aid in this type of large-scale, automated research, but it isn't available yet.
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