Social Media Advertising in the 2022 Australian Federal Election

The final paper in this AoIR 2022 session is presented by my colleague Dan Angus, who shifts our focus to patterns of advertising in the 2022 Australian federal election. The slides are below, too. There are a number of tools for the analysis of online political advertising that have started to emerge in recent times, exploring for instance ad spending, audience targetting, and political messaging. But we need more data from the platforms and develop further tools to do this kind of work at scale and discover dodgy activities. This is also critical for journalists, and academic collaborations with journalists.

One set of such tools are the ad transparency dashboards that are now beginning to emerge. The platforms themselves largely fail to provide adequate data and dashboards on advertising, except perhaps for a very narrow definition of political advertising. The Meta Ad Library provides some ad information, as well as (too-)basic targetting and location data; the Social Media Lab’s fabulous PoliDashboard project is one of the key scholarly attempts to make such data more usable, by providing the information gathered from the Ad Library in a more useful, real-time interface. It provides aggregate and in-depth data on political advertising patterns.

Another project in this space is the Australian Ad Observatory, which built on the ProPublica/NYU Ad Observatory browser plugin. The plugin captures all ads that users encounter on their Facebook feeds, and submits these in de-identified form to a central repository. It provides a dashboard to researchers about the ads being run, and to users about the ads they’ve received.

One case identified through this work was advertising that pointed to a Website registered to a disendorsed One Nation candidate and that promoted various far-right ‘freedom candidates’; the case was eventually identified by the Australian Electoral Commission as a clear case of illegal advertising.