The number of negative ads on Facebook and Instagram in the U.S. presidential race surged after a July assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump despite calls from both major parties to tone down heated rhetoric, according a new ElectionGraph report. Trump’s own ads played a significant role in the shift.
Researchers also found continued patterns of “coordinated inauthentic behavior” among some outside organizations, including a large network of Facebook pages running ads aimed at scamming the public. The analysis found an estimated $5 million spent on ads that are potential scams, or roughly 4% of the overall ad spending by outside organizations. This translates into about 234 million impressions.
The ElectionGraph project seeks to identify misinformation trends in the U.S. presidential election and other top 2024 contests.
These are among the findings in the third quarterly report from the ElectionGraph project at the University’s Institute for Democracy, Journalism and Citizenship (IDJC). The report examines ads on Meta platforms, which include Facebook and Instagram, mentioning primary and general election presidential candidates between Sept. 1, 2023, and Aug. 31, 2024.
The latest report found the Democratic ticket (Biden-Harris, then Harris-Walz) outspending the Trump campaign 10-to-1—or roughly $50 million to $5 million—on Facebook and Instagram between September 2023 and August 2024. That gap expanded to 12-to-1 in the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania. But Trump outpaced Biden’s and Harris’ campaigns combined by about 5-to-1 in ads categorized as “uncivil.”
The data shows a 4-to-1 difference in impressions on the social media platforms, or about 1 billion impressions for the Democratic ticket compared with 250 million impressions for the GOP. This gap doesn’t take into account Trump-related spending on messaging on social platform X, Trump’s Truth Social network or other media platforms.
In addition to campaigns’ spending, nearly 3,500 Facebook pages from outside organizations have spent $55 million over the past year in an effort to influence the public this election season.
ElectionGraph seeks to identify misinformation trends in the U.S. presidential election and other top 2024 contests. The project is supported by a grant and use of analytics software from Neo4j, the world’s leading graph database and analytics company.
The ElectionGraph team’s efforts include pinpointing origins of messages and tracing misinformation by collecting and algorithmically classifying ads run on Facebook and Instagram. ElectionGraph also has developed a publicly accessible dashboard to explore its findings.
While Meta allows approved organizations to access ad data, such data is not required to be made available—and is not similarly trackable—on TikTok, Google, YouTube or Snapchat. The findings nevertheless provide a framework to visualize the fire hose of information and misinformation targeting voters from groups with a jumble of motives, ties and trustworthiness ahead of the 2024 elections.
The Institute for Democracy, Journalism and Citizenship is a joint University initiative of the Newhouse School of Public Communications and the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs.
“My concern with the ongoing scams running on Facebook and Instagram is that they look like legitimate advertisements, but they are full of falsehoods and even deepfakes, further polluting the information environment and deceiving voters,” says Jennifer Stromer-Galley, a professor in the School of Information Studies and ElectionGraph’s lead researcher.
Social media scams that exploit heightened sentiments during important moments like elections have become widespread, says Jim Webber, chief scientist at Neo4j.
“This important research, enabled by Neo4j, can help voters and policymakers to distinguish legitimate actors from malicious ones hidden within complex networks,” Webber says. “Without this technology, achieving such insights would be almost impossible.”
Adds IDJC Kramer Director Margaret Talev: “Real, bipartisan concerns about election-related violence—accentuated by assassination attempts against former President Trump—have proved no match for the magnetic pull of negative, uncivil and attack-ad campaigning that Trump himself and his rivals consider too useful to set aside.” Talev is a journalist and professor of practice in the Newhouse School.
