Are microtargeted campaign messages more negative and diverse? An analysis of Facebook Ads in European election campaigns

Abstract

Concerns about the use of online political microtargeting (OPM) by campaigners have arisen since the Cambridge Analytica scandal hit the international political arena. In addition to providing conceptual clarity on OPM and explore the use of such techniques in Europe, this paper seeks to empirically disentangle the differing behaviours of campaigners when they message citizens through microtargeted rather than non-targeted campaigning. More precisely, I hypothesise that campaigners use negative campaigning and are more diverse in terms of topics when they use OPM. To investigate whether these expectations hold true, I use text-as-data techniques to analyse an original dataset of 4,091 political Facebook Ads during the last national elections in Austria, Italy, Germany and Sweden. Results show that while microtargeted ads might indeed be more thematically diverse, there does not seem to be a significant difference to non-microtargeted ads in terms of negativity. In conclusion, I discuss the implications of these findings for microtargeted campaigns and how future research could be conducted.

Exploring mobile banking service quality dimensions in Pakistan: a text mining approach

“…Conversely, if too many topics are extracted, we will get redundant topics with many similarities (Gan and Qi, 2021). We used the “ldatuning” package in R to get an idea of the optimal number of topics (López Ortega, 2021; Wang et al. , 2021).…”

Who Does(n't) Target You?

“…In practice, campaigns often employ a hybrid approach, combining various targeting and exclusion criteria to maximize the precision and impact of their messaging. For instance, Votta (2021) shows that around half of political ads seen during the 2021 German federal election used at least three different criteria and López Ortega (2022) highlights the use of Facebook advertisements with a range of combined targeting criteria by Swedish, German, Austrian, and Italian election campaigns. While these findings provide insights into targeting criteria selected by political advertisers, the active exclusion of specific voter groups adds a layer of complexity which remains largely unexplored.…”

“…Studies that examine the usage of microtargeting in countries in the global south, such as Brazil are much rarer in comparison (Silva et al, 2020). Finally, despite a handful of exceptions such as the works of Stuckelberger and Koedam (2022); Kruschinski and Bene (2022); López Ortega (2022), and Kefford et al (2022), there is a notable paucity of comparative studies on online political microtargeting. Furthermore, none of these comparative studies extend their focus to countries beyond the global north.…”