Political campaigns are increasingly turning to digital advertising to reach voters. It is predicted that, during the 2020 U.S. presidential elections, 28% of political marketing spending will go to online advertising, compared to 20% in 2018 and 0.2% in 2010. Digital advertising platforms’ popularity is partially explained by how they empower advertisers to target messages to platform users with great precision, including through inferences about those users’ political affiliations. However, prior work has shown that platforms’ ad delivery algorithms can selectively deliver ads within these target audiences in ways that can lead to demographic skews along race and gender lines, often without an advertiser’s knowledge.
In this study, we investigate the impact of Facebook’s ad delivery algorithms on political ads. We run a series of political ads on Facebook—one of the world’s largest advertising platforms—and measure how Facebook delivers those ads to different groups, depending on an ad’s content (e.g., the political viewpoint featured) and targeting criteria. We find that Facebook’s ad delivery algorithms effectively differentiate the price of reaching a user based on their inferred political alignment with the advertised content, inhibiting political campaigns’ ability to reach voters with diverse political views. This effect is most acute when advertisers use small budgets, as Facebook’s delivery algorithm tends to preferentially deliver to the users who are, according to Facebook’s estimation, most relevant. Moreover, due to how Facebook currently reports ad performance, this effect may be invisible to political campaigns.
Our findings point to advertising platforms’ potential role in political polarization and creating informational filter bubbles. We show that Facebook preferentially exposes users to political advertising that it believes is relevant for them, even when other advertisers with opposing viewpoints may be actively trying to reach them. Furthermore, some large ad platforms have recently changed their policies to restrict the targeting tools they offer to political campaigns; our findings show that such reforms will be insufficient if the goal is to ensure that political ads are shown to users of diverse political views. Counterintuitively, advertisers who target broad audiences may end up ceding platforms even more influence over which users ultimately see which ads, adding urgency to calls for more meaningful public transparency into the political advertising ecosystem.