In this study, we analyze organic and paid social media communication from political candidates, parties, and other social media users, in the lead-up to the 2021 German federal election. We document the investment in Facebook advertising of the main parties and their targeting strategies, the engagement they reached organically, and the activity of coordinated networks of Facebook pages and groups dealing with the election. As in 2019 (Hegelich & Serrano, 2019), the AfD reached an exceptionally high engagement on Facebook, but Die Grünen, instead of CDU, led the standings of the Facebook advertisement investment in 2021. Nonetheless, they were both outrun in the overall number of ad impressions by the FDP, who strategically spent less on a higher number of advertisements. Considering the area of microtargeting, our findings show that the content of some advertisements was exclusively targeted to women or young generations. They, however, represented just a modest part of the total number of advertisements run by parties and candidates. We also found large coordinated networks on Facebook (Giglietto, Righetti, Rossi, & Marino, 2020) spreading anti-establishment narratives, as well as anti-lockdown and anti-COVID19 policies messages. In these networks, harsh comments against opponents and a wide range of sources that shared disinformation (NewsGuard, 2021) during the elections were common. The analyses herein conducted quickly ran into limitations in data access. In particular, the lack of Facebook data on the activity of individual users prevented exploring the possible use of bots to quickly cross-post content in public groups and inflate engagement metrics. The lack of data on Facebook comments prevented the analysis of coordi- nated strategies aimed at staying under the radar of fact-checkers and platforms censoring. The lack of fine-grained data on advertising also prevented us from investigating microtargeting strategies besides general cases related to gender and age.
POLITICAL ADVERTISEMENT AND COORDINATED BEHAVIOR ON SOCIAL MEDIA IN THE LEAD-UP TO THE 2021 GERMAN FEDERAL ELECTIONS
Righetti N.
;Giglietto F.;Marino G.;Terenzi M.
2022
Abstract
In this study, we analyze organic and paid social media communication from political candidates, parties, and other social media users, in the lead-up to the 2021 German federal election. We document the investment in Facebook advertising of the main parties and their targeting strategies, the engagement they reached organically, and the activity of coordinated networks of Facebook pages and groups dealing with the election. As in 2019 (Hegelich & Serrano, 2019), the AfD reached an exceptionally high engagement on Facebook, but Die Grünen, instead of CDU, led the standings of the Facebook advertisement investment in 2021. Nonetheless, they were both outrun in the overall number of ad impressions by the FDP, who strategically spent less on a higher number of advertisements. Considering the area of microtargeting, our findings show that the content of some advertisements was exclusively targeted to women or young generations. They, however, represented just a modest part of the total number of advertisements run by parties and candidates. We also found large coordinated networks on Facebook (Giglietto, Righetti, Rossi, & Marino, 2020) spreading anti-establishment narratives, as well as anti-lockdown and anti-COVID19 policies messages. In these networks, harsh comments against opponents and a wide range of sources that shared disinformation (NewsGuard, 2021) during the elections were common. The analyses herein conducted quickly ran into limitations in data access. In particular, the lack of Facebook data on the activity of individual users prevented exploring the possible use of bots to quickly cross-post content in public groups and inflate engagement metrics. The lack of data on Facebook comments prevented the analysis of coordi- nated strategies aimed at staying under the radar of fact-checkers and platforms censoring. The lack of fine-grained data on advertising also prevented us from investigating microtargeting strategies besides general cases related to gender and age.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
