skip to main content
10.1145/3539637.3557935acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PageswebmediaConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Characterizing Brazilian Political Ads on Facebook

Authors Info & Claims
Published:07 November 2022Publication History

ABSTRACT

Most of politicians, public figures and political candidates use online advertising platforms to spread their political values and messages. Since 2018, Facebook has made available an Ad Library providing advertising transparency to prevent interference in elections and other political issues. However, it is not explicit how the ads are selected to incorporate this database and to what extent there is an artificial intelligence applied to this selection. In this work, we provide a categorization of the ads data in Brazil to understand the dynamic of political advertisements and what type of ads are present in this ad library. We analyze impressions, the money spent and who are the advertisers on ads from 2018 to 2021. Among our findings, we show that during the election months of 2018 and 2020 the volume of ads correspond to approximately 30% of the ads in the dataset and the moving average of the money spent per ads increases about 200% after the first round of brazilian elections.

References

  1. Muhammad Ali, Piotr Sapiezynski, Miranda Bogen, Aleksandra Korolova, Alan Mislove, and Aaron Rieke. 2019. Discrimination through optimization: How Facebook’s Ad delivery can lead to biased outcomes. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 3, CSCW(2019), 1–30. https://doi.org/10.1145/3359301Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  2. Muhammad Ali, Piotr Sapiezynski, Aleksandra Korolova, Alan Mislove, and Aaron Rieke. 2021. Ad Delivery Algorithms: The Hidden Arbiters of Political Messaging. In Proceedings of the 14th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM). 13–21. https://doi.org/10.1145/3437963.3441801Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  3. Athanasios Andreou, Márcio Silva, Fabrício Benevenuto, Oana Goga, Patrick Loiseau, and Alan Mislove. 2019. Measuring the Facebook advertising ecosystem. In Proceedings of the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium 2019 (NDSS). 1–15. https://doi.org/10.14722/ndss.2019.23280Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  4. Athanasios Andreou, Giridhari Venkatadri, Oana Goga, Krishna Gummadi, Patrick Loiseau, and Alan Mislove. 2018. Investigating ad transparency mechanisms in social media: A case study of Facebook’s explanations. In Proceedings of the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium 2018 (NDSS). 1–15. https://doi.org/10.14722/ndss.2018.23191Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  5. Fabrício Benevenuto. 2020. Propagandas nas Redes Sociais e o Problema da Desinformação. Computação Brasil43 (2020), 35–38. https://doi.org/10.5753/CompBR.2020.43.1795Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  6. Ricardo Campos, Juliano Souza de Albuquerque Maranhão, and Fabrício Benevenuto. 2018. Fake news e a crônica do caixa 2 anunciado. https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/opiniao/2018/04/ricardo-r-campos-juliano-maranhao-e-fabricio-benevenuto-fake-news-e-a-cronica-do-caixa-2-anunciado.shtml. Accessed May 20th, 2022.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  7. Kelley Cotter, Mel Medeiros, Chankyung Pak, and Kjerstin Thorson. 2021. “Reach the right people”: The politics of “interests” in Facebook’s classification system for ad targeting. Big Data & Society 8, 1 (2021), 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951721996046Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  8. Laura Edelson, Tobias Lauinger, and Damon McCoy. 2020. A security analysis of the Facebook ad library. In 2020 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P). 661–678. https://doi.org/10.1109/SP40000.2020.00084Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  9. Tribunal Superior Eleitoral. 2020. TSE assina parceria com Facebook Brasil e WhatsApp Inc. para combate à desinformação nas Eleições 2020. https://www.tse.jus.br/imprensa/noticias-tse/2020/Setembro/tse-assina-parceria-com-facebook-brasil-e-whatsapp-inc-para-combate-a-desinformacao-nas-eleicoes-2020. Accessed May 15th, 2022.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  10. Basileal Imana, Aleksandra Korolova, and John Heidemann. 2021. Auditing for discrimination in algorithms delivering job ads. In Proceedings of The Web Conference 2021 (TheWebConf). 3767–3778. https://doi.org/10.1145/3442381.3450077Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  11. Amelia M Jamison, David A Broniatowski, Mark Dredze, Zach Wood-Doughty, DureAden Khan, and Sandra Crouse Quinn. 2020. Vaccine-related advertising in the Facebook Ad Archive. Vaccine 38, 3 (2020), 512–520. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.vaccine.2019.10.066Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  12. Victor Le Pochat, Laura Edelson, Tom Van Goethem, Wouter Joosen, Damon McCoy, and Tobias Lauinger. 2022. An Audit of Facebook’s Political Ad Policy Enforcement. In Proceedings of the 31st USENIX Security Symposium. 607–624.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  13. J Nathan Matias, Austin Hounsel, and Nick Feamster. 2022. Software-Supported Audits of Decision-Making Systems: Testing Google and Facebook’s Political Advertising Policies. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 6, CSCW1(2022), 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1145/3512965Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  14. Yelena Mejova and Kyriaki Kalimeri. 2020. COVID-19 on Facebook ads: competing agendas around a public health crisis. In Proceedings of the 3rd ACM SIGCAS Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies (COMPASS). 22–31. https://doi.org/10.1145/3378393.3402241Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  15. Meta. 2018. Hard Questions: Why Doesn’t Facebook Just Ban Political Ads?https://about.fb.com/news/2018/05/hard-questions-political-ads. Accessed June 10th, 2022.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  16. Meta. 2022. Anúncios sobre temas sociais, eleições ou política. https://pt-br.facebook.com/policies_center/ads/restricted_content/political. Accessed Aug 21th, 2022.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  17. Meta. 2022. Facebook Ad Library API. https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/api. Accessed May 15th, 2022.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  18. Meta. 2022. Facebook for Developers. https://developers.facebook.com. Accessed May 15th, 2022.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  19. Meta. 2022. Meta Reports First Quarter 2022 Results. https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/2022/Meta-Reports-First-Quarter-2022-Results/default.aspx. Accessed May 11th, 2022.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  20. Nic Newman, Richard Fletcher, Anne Schulz, Simge Andi, Craig T Robertson, and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen. 2021. newman2021reuters. Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  21. Filipe N Ribeiro, Koustuv Saha, Mahmoudreza Babaei, Lucas Henrique, Johnnatan Messias, Fabricio Benevenuto, Oana Goga, Krishna P Gummadi, and Elissa M Redmiles. 2019. On microtargeting socially divisive ads: A case study of russia-linked ad campaigns on facebook. In Proceedings of the Conference on Fairness, Accountability and Transparency (FAT*). 140–149. https://doi.org/10.1145/3287560.3287580Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  22. Márcio Silva and Fabrício Benevenuto. 2020. Analyzing the use of COVID-19 ads on Facebook. In Proceedings of the 26th Brazilian Symposium on Multimedia and the Web (Webmedia). 21–24. https://doi.org/10.1145/3428658.3431088Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  23. Márcio Silva, Lucas Santos de Oliveira, Athanasios Andreou, Pedro Olmo Vaz de Melo, Oana Goga, and Fabrício Benevenuto. 2020. Facebook ads monitor: An independent auditing system for political ads on facebook. In Proceedings of The Web Conference 2020 (TheWebConf). 224–234. https://doi.org/10.1145/3366423.3380109Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  24. Till Speicher, Muhammad Ali, Giridhari Venkatadri, Filipe Nunes Ribeiro, George Arvanitakis, Fabrício Benevenuto, Krishna P Gummadi, Patrick Loiseau, and Alan Mislove. 2018. Potential for discrimination in online targeted advertising. In Proceedings of the Conference on Fairness, Accountability and Transparency (FAT*). 5–19.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar

Index Terms

  1. Characterizing Brazilian Political Ads on Facebook

    Recommendations

    Comments

    Login options

    Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

    Sign in
    • Published in

      cover image ACM Conferences
      WebMedia '22: Proceedings of the Brazilian Symposium on Multimedia and the Web
      November 2022
      389 pages
      ISBN:9781450394093
      DOI:10.1145/3539637

      Copyright © 2022 ACM

      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

      Publisher

      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      • Published: 7 November 2022

      Permissions

      Request permissions about this article.

      Request Permissions

      Check for updates

      Qualifiers

      • research-article
      • Research
      • Refereed limited

      Acceptance Rates

      Overall Acceptance Rate270of873submissions,31%
    • Article Metrics

      • Downloads (Last 12 months)33
      • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)2

      Other Metrics

    PDF Format

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader

    HTML Format

    View this article in HTML Format .

    View HTML Format