The Impact of New Transparency in Digital Advertising on Media Coverage

ABSTRACT

In response to foreign meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign through social media – and subsequent congressional threats to tightly regulate online political advertising – major digital platforms in the U.S. established databases that allow users to look up online political ads, their sponsors and how much they spend on advertising. What has been the impact of this new transparency? This research examines media coverage of digital political advertising in three news outlets both before and after the release of the Facebook, Google and Twitter political ads libraries in May 2018. We find that media coverage of digital advertising increased after the libraries’ introduction, that the libraries are sometimes referenced in coverage, that discussion of ad costs has increased as has fact-checking and discussion of misinformation.

KEYWORDS:

• Ad libraries
• political advertising
• media coverage
• social media

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data Availability Statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in Figshare at: http://doi.org/10.25438/wes02.24749376

Notes

1. The full search term was: (election OR candidate OR political) AND (ad OR advertisement OR advertising) AND (digital OR online OR Facebook OR Google OR Twitter OR Snapchat).

2. To calculate the number of election-related articles about advertising, we used this search: (election OR candidate OR political) AND (ad OR advertisement OR advertising).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Travis N. Ridout

Travis N. Ridout is Thomas S. Foley Distinguished Professor of Government and Public Policy in the School of Politics, Philosophy and Public Affairs at Washington State University.

Furkan Cakmak

Furkan Cakmak is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Quantitative Analysis at Wesleyan University. He works with the Wesleyan Media Project, which tracks political advertising, and collaborates with the Quantitative Analysis Center.