Illuminating 2020
The following is a project description from the official Illuminating blog.
The Illuminating project synthesizes data from the Facebook ad library and presents it in a way which journalists can easily tap into who politicians are targeting, how they are reaching them and how much money they are spending to do so. By tracking both the Democratic primary and now the general election campaign in 2020, Illuminating breaks down the Facebook and Instagram ads by each of the key players. Illuminating uses data compilation and visualization to filter ads by topic and type, and show which ads are most viewed by age group, gender, and location.
The 2020 version of the Illuminating project is funded and supported by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, and the Center for Computational and Data Sciences at Syracuse University.
Instead of just knowing that a candidate spent a certain amount of dollars to run a certain ad, the Illuminating project informs us about who each specific ad is targeted to and whether it was an attack ad on the opposition, or a call to action from the base voters.
The Illuminating team of 22 active members, including Syracuse University professors, PhD students, Masters students and 11 undergrads. The team uses a computational approach known as supervised machine learning to classify the message types and topics present in the thousands of relevant ads the team has collected from the Facebook Ad Library.
To do so, the team first manually classifies a sample of the ads by message type, for example attack, advocacy or call to action, and by message topic, for example health, immigration, or COVID-19. The message type team uses the results of this manual classification to train machine learning algorithms on how to accurately classify the advertisements, while the topic team uses a lexicon approach to identify specific words that signal the ad topic.
The Illuminating data allows the ability to notice patterns and changes in how candidates address their constituents and potential future voters over time and the course of a campaign. If candidates are spending millions of dollars to reach voters through the digital space through micro-targeting, then someone needs to improve transparency and hold them accountable, Stromer-Galley said. Members of the team have even begun to notice patterns of speech that are unique to certain candidates.
Explore the dashboard at https://illuminating.ischool.syr.edu/ and check out the blog at https://news.illuminating.ischool.syr.edu