
Politics in the Facebook Era: Evidence from the 2016 US Presidential Elections [pdf] - longdefeat
https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/centres/cage/manage/publications/389-2018_redoano.pdf
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dillondoyle
I think this paper's methods are suspect. They are 'measuring' politic
spend/targeting in 2016 by assuming that price increase for a specific
targeting segment = more targeted political spend to that measured audience.
But political spending is a tiny % of FB spending. I strongly doubt this
method gives any actual insight, first into what/who these campaigns
spent/targeted in 16, and second on the persuasion effect of that spend. Also
how would you control to only FB ad exposure effect using the survey data
mentioned in the paper...

I actually buy FB ads for political candidates as a big part of my business.
We've done some 'lift/persuasion' type experiments where we do 1:1 targeting
with a control group and do an IVR to measure changes pre and post exposure.
This feels like the best way to do this experiment - but that would require
academics to work with actual spenders (or to spend themselves).

I actually really wanted to use FB's new attribution reporting with voting
results this year but our accounts weren't given access until like a couple
days before election and it wont let me look back in 'time' (e.g. we uploaded
'votes' as a purchase with the voted date timestamp, but FB will only show
attribution window from date we setup the reporting tool, which is after the
votes...).

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bertil
> [O]nline political campaigns targeted on users’ gender, geographic location,
> and political ideology had a significant effect in persuading undecided
> voters to support Mr Trump, and in persuading Republican supporters to turn
> out on polling day.

No mention of any targeting beyond what has been on user’s profile for a
decade, and it transparently used by most ads.

> [W]e use variations in advertising prices across political audiences as a
> measure of the intensity of Facebook political campaigning.

Political advertising represents less than 5% of ads on Facebook at the peak
of a campaign, in swing states: I’m puzzled you can measure anything.
Actually:

> As illustrated in Figure 4, average worldwide prices sharply rose during the
> last two months before the elections (an average increase of around 50 USD
> cents, which corresponds to about a 25 percent increase in prices), and
> steadily dropped over the three months after the election date.

That’s unlikely to be the election unless people spend money for three months
after. That’s more likely to be US Holiday Season.

~~~
matt4077
> No mention of any targeting beyond what has been on user’s profile for a
> decade,

The story about Cambridge Anal. was specifically that they had build a dataset
that could infer a lot of information, such as sexual orientation and
political affiliation from a small set of apparently harmless information.

> Political advertising represents less than 5%

A market's reaction to such variation can be widely different. For bread, it's
probably nothing. If it's the last batch of the only medication that is
effective against some just-discovered deadly pandemic, the price could rise
from %1 to a billion.

> That’s unlikely to be the election unless people spend money for three
> months after. That’s more likely to be US Holiday Season.

The chart & data here are average over 40 different worldwide elections.
Unless elections cluster around certain dates, the data should be pretty well
spread out over the year.

~~~
bertil
> The story about Cambridge Anal. was specifically that they had build a
> dataset that could infer a lot of information, such as sexual orientation
> and political affiliation from a small set of apparently harmless
> information.

Yeah. That story is false. They used magazine subscriptions and car model.
Source: talked to the employees.

> The chart & data here are average over 40 different worldwide elections.
> Unless elections cluster around certain dates, the data should be pretty
> well spread out over the year.

I’m fairly confident no political advertising is significant _after_ the
election in most of them. The big secret here is that US ads still represent
the largest share of Facebook’s market and that commercial markets have a
strong yearly pattern. I don’t know how they averaged to get a ratio number,
but I would compare years with and without elections.

And, yes, elections tend to be around the same date in most countries (except,
notoriously, the UK): it doesn’t have to be the same in each country for an
aggregated commercial pattern to be prevalent.

