POLITICS
If political ads are making you angry — that’s because they were meant to
New data shows campaigns target potential donors with toxic ads
By: Seo-young Silvia Kim, Jan Zilinsky, and Brian Brew
If you happen to be a frequent user of social media, odds are you’ve seen your fair share of political advertisements while scrolling through your feed in recent months and years. In a short span of time, digital advertising has become a mainstay of contemporary campaigns. House and Senate general-election candidates ran a total of 56,585 distinct advertisements on Facebook in the 2020 election cycle. All told, many hundreds of thousands of advertisements crossed American users’ screens in the lead-up to the 2020 election, and many of those ads used toxic language.
Digital advertisements hardly emerge from a vacuum. Campaigns do everything they can to craft messages that will appeal to certain potential participants in politics, and to target them towards those groups. What appeals to one target audience will not necessarily endear a campaign to another. Campaigns have varied goals with respect to different groups, and may find varied messages are appropriate means to achieving those goals. There is reason to expect potential donors and would-be voters to have different preferences, and to be receptive to different messages. For instance, a study of campaign emails by Hassell and Oeltjenbruns (2016) shows that messages that contained donation requests tended to be more negative than those which did not.
In a piece forthcoming in the journal, Party Politics, we consider how campaign advertisements aimed at potential donors differs from that intended for would-be voters. Using the Meta (formerly Facebook) Ad Library, we pulled the texts and associated metadata of advertisements that were run on Facebook by all congressional nominees in the 2020 election cycle. We classified ads that included links to fundraising pages or direct fundraising appeals (“chip in,” “donate today”) as donor-targeting, and all others as voter-targeting. Some differences across these two types of ads readily became apparent. While Meta does not furnish researchers with precise geographic data, it does provide information on the states where ads were run. As Figure 1 shows, donor-targeted advertisements were much more likely to be distributed to out-of-state audiences.
The reasons for this are unsurprising: in the digital age, it is superlatively easy for candidates to raise money outside of their own districts. 4.7 million Americans donated to a political campaign in 2020, up from 1.7 in 2016. Candidates can naturally raise more money by targeting a wider audience of potential donors. A substantial majority of campaign funds in congressional races originate beyond candidates’ districts and states (see Gimpel et al., 2008). This trend informs our expectations: national donors tend to be more ideologically extreme than the typical voter (see Baker, 2016), and strong negative emotions such as anger have been shown to motivate participation in the political process (see Webster, 2020). We expected advertisements aimed at donors to feature more negative and toxic language than those aimed at voters.
To assess whether ads targeted at voters differed from those aimed at donors, we first used the NRC’s Emotions Lexicon to identify ads that aimed to instill anger, disgust, or fear. As Figure 2 shows, across parties and chambers, donor-targeted ads tended to feature more words which activate these negative emotions. The effects are particularly pronounced with words linked to anger. Republican donor-targeting ads tended to use the most words associated with fear, and Democratic donor-targeting ads tended to use the most words associated with anger.
In addition, we used the Perspective API, which was trained on online speech and is widely used to flag toxic language, to gauge whether donor-targeted ads were more likely to be classified as toxic than their voter-targeted counterparts. Across the two parties and the two chambers, donor-targeted ads were more likely to be classified as toxic, as Figure 3 illustrates. The difference in likelihood is statistically significant. These findings also indicate that Republican advertisements tended to be more likely to be perceived as toxic than Democratic advertisements. These trends were robust across states and within individual candidates.
The proportions of negatively-charged language in advertisements and the percentage of ads that the Perspective API classifies as toxic are not overwhelming, but the differences which emerge are striking. Among the most telling is our finding that individual candidates’ donor-targeted ads were more likely to be classified as toxic than their voter-targeted messages. This suggests that polarization and extremism alone are not sole drivers of vitriolic rhetoric: candidates of all ideological stripes seem to recognize the utility of negative messaging in appeals for donations. With this said, the different dynamics across party lines should not be overlooked. Our finding that Republican candidates tend to use more vitriolic rhetoric is consistent with the wider academic assessment of the contemporary G.O.P.’s turn towards extreme politics (see Skocpol, 2020).
As of yet, the downstream effects of this messaging remain unexplored. However, the implications are concerning.
If candidates are using caustic rhetoric to secure donations, it stands to reason that they will be less inclined towards bipartisan cooperation if elected. Moreover, the stream of negative rhetoric from elites may sour many Americans on the fundamental norms which have long upheld American democracy. Disrespectful discourse and negative emotions may suppress participation and accelerate democratic backsliding. Elites’ ceaseless attacks upon the rival party may contribute to an increasing number of Americans’ willingness to place party over democracy.
The content of donor-targeted advertisements are yet another reminder that rancor and vitriol are becoming increasingly normalized in American politics — not least because online advertisements are subject to fewer and weaker regulations than other forms of advertising.
