.png){kind=logo}
The effects of political advertising on Facebook and Instagram before the 2020 US election
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
Working Paper
|
May 1, 2025
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.
citation
Allcott, H., Gentzkow, M., Levy, R., Crespo-Tenorio, A., Dumas, N., Mason, W., Moehler, D., Barberá, P., Brown, T. W., Cisneros, J. C., Dimmery, D., Freelon, D., González-Bailón, S., Guess, A. M., Kim, Y. M., Lazer, D., Malhotra, N., Nair-Desai, S., Nyhan, B., ... Tucker, J. A. (2025). The effects of political advertising on Facebook and Instagram before the 2020 US election (NBER Working Paper No. 33818). National Bureau of Economic Research. https://doi.org/10.3386/w33818
topics
Online Behavior
Political Behavior
related work
Broken, Buried, or Missing: Anatomies of Failure (and Success) of Social Media Child Safety Features
June 29, 2026
Lexie Matsumoto, Arturo Béjar, Abdulraheem Arar, Damon McCoy, Laura Edelson
Measuring Agency-Amplifying AI Literacy: The HuskyAI Coaching Platform for Workforce Readiness
July 1, 2026
John P. Wihbey, Yash Phalle, Shashank Kadiyala, Caleb Okereke
Working Paper
How Americans Spend their Time Online
June 8, 2026
David Lazer, Burak Ozturan, Christo Wilson, David Choffnes, Cassidy Waldrip, Hsiu-Chi Lu, John Wihbey