Tag: Campaign advertising

A key finding is that people traveling from places with very high levels of political advertisements experienced a more extreme holiday-shortening effect. Many Americans avoid talking politics at family gatherings. Among the people in these politically mismatched families, 6 in 10 said their families keep politics out of their conversations. The cellphone data merely reveal that, broadly speaking, people had less opportunity to talk about politics because of the shorter gatherings on average, and the tendency for some people to stay home rather than travel as they did in 2015. For example, the partisan beliefs of people who traveled or stayed home were assumed to track the partisan leanings of their home voting precincts. To protect privacy, the researchers tracked people only at the precinct or Zip code level, Chen said: “We do not try and identify where someone lives at the level of a street address.” The researchers also assumed that people exposed to political ads over the course of many months continue to feel the polarizing effects weeks after the election, said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor of communication at the University of Pennsylvania. In an interview, Chen acknowledged that it is difficult to isolate the cause of the observed change in behavior captured by the cellphone data. A striking feature of this intensifying tribalism is that Americans have grown more negative in their views of people affiliated with the other major political party. Since 1994, there has been a near-tripling in the percentage of Democrats and Republicans who say they have a “very unfavorable” view of the other party, according to a report published last year by the Pew Research Center. And that’s new.” Larry Diamond, a political scientist at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, said of the study by Chen and Rohla, “It’s very intriguing, and sounds like a very innovative study, which is certainly telling us something of sobering importance about the way political polarization is affecting American life.” He added, “There's nothing happening in American politics now to suggest it will be better at Thanksgiving in 2020.”

Instead, it’s now launching its previously announced “paid for by” labels on political and issue ads on Facebook and Instagram in the U.S. and its publicly searchable archive of all these politics-related ads that run in the U.S. That includes ads run by news publishers or others that promote articles with political content. The labeling won’t just apply to candidate and election ads, but those dealing with political issues such as “abortion, guns, immigration or foreign policy.” Clicking through the labels that appear at the top of these News Feed ads will lead to the archive, which isn’t backdated and will only include ads from early May 2018 and after. It also will display the ad’s budget, and the number of people who saw it, plus aggregated, anonymized data on their age, gender and location. Any advertiser that wants to run political ads must now go through Facebook’s authorization process that requires them to reveal their identity and location, and advertisers will only have a week’s grace period starting today before those unauthorized will have their ads paused. The reviewers and AI will analyze these ads’ images, text and the outside websites to which they point to look for political content. Their buyer will then be required to go through the authorization process before they can buy more. As part of work with Facebook’s new commission investigating social media’s impact on elections, it plans to provide a database available via a forthcoming API that will let watchdog groups, academics and researchers review how ads are being used. Simply listing those organizations in the Paid For By labels or archive won’t necessarily give users a lot of information about who the people behind the money are unless they’re willing to go digging across the internet themselves. An example of a “Paid for by” label on an Instagram ad For example, the notorious conservative political donors the Koch brothers funnel cash through a PAC called Prosperity Action to fund Republican candidates like Paul Ryan. But Harbath described on the call how even though all the monitoring of political ads will cost more than the revenue the company earns from them, Facebook felt it necessary to “make sure people have a way to express themselves and engage in political discourse in a transparent way.” Self-policing in this manner could reduce the urgency of calls to pass the Honest Ads Act that was unveiled last year to bring online advertising disclosures in line with those for television, though Congress has yet to hold a hearing about.