The Biggest Spender of Political Ads on Facebook? President Trump

[highplainsdem]

Source: NYT

SAN FRANCISCO — It’s official: President Trump is the single biggest political advertiser on Facebook.

Mr. Trump and his political action committee spent $274,000 on ads on the social network since early May, outpacing the second-biggest spender, Planned Parenthood Federation of America, a nonprofit organization that provides reproductive health care. Planned Parenthood spent just over $188,000 on Facebook ads over the same period.

The ads bought by Mr. Trump and his PAC were also seen the most by Facebook’s users, having been viewed by at least 37 million people since May. That compared with 24 million people who saw the second-most viewed group of political ads, which were also from Planned Parenthood.

These findings were laid out in a new study by a group of researchers from New York University, who used Facebook’s own data to arrive at the results. Facebook in May began an archive of political ads, which is a publicly searchable database that catalogs the ads and identifies which groups or individuals paid for them. Facebook hopes the database will include any ad that has political content and that was aimed at Americans. The researchers conducted their study by scraping all of that raw data.


-snip-

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/17/technology/political-ads-facebook-trump.html

[liberal N proud]

1. Does that include the Russian faction?

[PSPS]

4. Precisely. The headline is misleading, as are the conclusions from the 'study'

This doesn't cover any of the troll/bot propaganda activity coming from russia and its operatives in the US and elsewhere, so russia's ongoing propaganda campaign isn't addressed at all.

Also, this claims to cover only purchased ads. The phrase "bought by Mr. Trump and his PAC" relies on how Facebook tags a political ad as far as its purchaser. There are many fake front groups that are also funded by the same people or with funding from abroad (russia) which is supposed to be illegal (wink.)

zuckerberg makes a fortune from destroying the country.

[Va Lefty]

2. Yeah, just in case anybody thinks he's going away antime soon

[elmac]

3. i use facebook about as much as i used myspace

which is zero.