INDIA NOWHERE IN POLITICAL ADS ON FACEBOOK

India figures nowhere in the political advertisements on Facebook and Instagram. A research showed that Donald Trump and Planned Parenthood are the top recent advertisers and young men were targeted most often in the political advertising on the two social media forums.

Thrust of the research was on the advertisements impacting the Americans and as such the foreign countries did not figure in it. However, the exception is China Xinhua News with 44 ads and 6.8 million impressions costing $6,000 in the unvetted sponsored advertisements.

Using complex data scraping methods, cybersecurity researchers analyzed more than 267,000 political ads that primarily ran between May 2018 and July 2018. They developed tools to enable the public to do their own analyses, using weekly updates that the researchers plan to conduct through the November elections.

The data also reveal substantial online advertising by candidates in congressional and state races.

The researchers found Facebook and Instagram users viewed political ads at least 1.4 billion times-and impressions may have reached nearly 3.9 billion. (Facebook's data provide only ranges.)

Advertisers targeted males aged 25-34 most frequently. The most ads per capita appeared in Washington, DC, followed by Nevada, Colorado, and Maine. The fewest appeared in Delaware, Nebraska, and New Hampshire.

Political spending equaled at least $13.9 million and could have been five times that-the uncertainty is due to the ranges provided in the original data. A significant number of ads-43,573-did not comply with Facebook's new requirement that political ads list sponsors and were therefore shut down, but the researchers' daily archiving captured these “unvetted sponsor” ads.