Left-leaning organizations are dominating political ads on Facebook and Twitter while rightwing advertisers are outspending liberal groups on Google, according to new research.
Computer scientists at the New York University (NYU) Tandon School of Engineering analyzed more than 884,000 recent political ads on the three social media sites. They found that Donald Trump and his Make America Great Again political action committee had the largest number of ads of any candidate while a Republican group called the Senate Leadership Fund spent the most on ads.
Meanwhile, Beto O’Rourke, the Democratic Senate candidate fighting to unseat Ted Cruz in Texas, was the largest spender on Facebook and Twitter, with a focus on ads seeking small donations from outside of his state, the researchers found. In total, ads with political content generated at least 5.9bn “impressions”, meaning the number of times the ads were seen, and cost the sponsors between $116m and $403m.
The report released Monday is part of NYU’s ongoing ads transparency project and offered a look at social media strategies and priorities of different political groups. The research followed Facebook, Twitter and Google implementing policies and portals this year designed to provide the public insight into political ads.
The Silicon Valley companies have faced mounting pressure surrounding election interference and propaganda polluting the platforms.