The effects of political advertising on Facebook and Instagram before the 2020 US election
Abstract
We study the effects of social media political advertising by randomizing subsets of 36,906 Facebook
users and 25,925 Instagram users to have political ads removed from their news feeds for six weeks
before the 2020 US presidential election. We show that most presidential ads were targeted toward
parties’ own supporters and that fundraising ads were most common. On both Facebook and
Instagram, we found no detectable effects of removing political ads on political knowledge,
polarization, perceived legitimacy of the election, political participation (including campaign
contributions), candidate favorability, and turnout. This was true overall and for both Democrats and
Republicans separately.
Date Posted
May 1, 2025
Authors
Hunt Allcott, Matthew Gentzkow, Ro’ee Levy, Adriana Crespo-Tenorio, Natasha Dumas, Winter Mason, Devra Moehler, Pablo Barbera, Taylor W. Brown, Juan Carlos Cisneros, Drew Dimmery, Deen Freelon, Sandra González-Bailón, Andrew M. Guess, Young Mie Kim, David Lazer, Neil Malhotra, Sameer Nair-Desai, Brendan Nyhan, Ana Carolina Paixao de Queiroz, Jennifer Pan, Jaime Settle, Emily Thorson, Rebekah Tromble, Carlos Velasco Rivera, Benjamin Wittenbrink, Magdalena Wojcieszak, Shiqi Yang, Saam Zahedian, Annie Franco, Chad Kiewiet de Jonge, Natalie Jomini Stroud & Joshua A. Tucker
Themes
Online Behavior, Political Behavior
Abstract
We study the effects of social media political advertising by randomizing subsets of 36,906 Facebook
users and 25,925 Instagram users to have political ads removed from their news feeds for six weeks
before the 2020 US presidential election. We show that most presidential ads were targeted toward
parties’ own supporters and that fundraising ads were most common. On both Facebook and
Instagram, we found no detectable effects of removing political ads on political knowledge,
polarization, perceived legitimacy of the election, political participation (including campaign
contributions), candidate favorability, and turnout. This was true overall and for both Democrats and
Republicans separately.
Date Posted
May 1, 2025
Authors
Hunt Allcott, Matthew Gentzkow, Ro’ee Levy, Adriana Crespo-Tenorio, Natasha Dumas, Winter Mason, Devra Moehler, Pablo Barbera, Taylor W. Brown, Juan Carlos Cisneros, Drew Dimmery, Deen Freelon, Sandra González-Bailón, Andrew M. Guess, Young Mie Kim, David Lazer, Neil Malhotra, Sameer Nair-Desai, Brendan Nyhan, Ana Carolina Paixao de Queiroz, Jennifer Pan, Jaime Settle, Emily Thorson, Rebekah Tromble, Carlos Velasco Rivera, Benjamin Wittenbrink, Magdalena Wojcieszak, Shiqi Yang, Saam Zahedian, Annie Franco, Chad Kiewiet de Jonge, Natalie Jomini Stroud & Joshua A. Tucker
Themes
Online Behavior, Political Behavior