In light of the foreign interference in the 2016 U.S. elections, the present research asks the question of whether the digital media has become the stealth media for anonymous political campaigns. By ...utilizing a user-based, real-time, digital ad tracking tool, the present research reverse engineers and tracks the groups (Study 1) and the targets (Study 2) of divisive issue campaigns based on 5 million paid ads on Facebook exposed to 9,519 individuals between September 28, 2016, and November 8, 2016. The findings reveal groups that did not file reports to the Federal Election Commission (FEC)-nonprofits, astroturf/movement groups, and unidentifiable "suspicious" groups, including foreign entities-ran most of the divisive issue campaigns. One out of six suspicious groups later turned out to be Russian groups. The volume of ads sponsored by non-FEC groups was 4 times larger than that of FEC groups. Divisive issue campaigns clearly targeted battleground states, including Pennsylvania and Wisconsin where traditional Democratic strongholds supported Donald Trump by a razor-thin margin. The present research asserts that media ecology, the technological features and capacity of digital media, as well as regulatory loopholes created by Citizens United v. FEC and the FEC's disclaimer exemption for digital platforms contribute to the prevalence of anonymous groups' divisive issue campaigns on digital media. The present research offers insight relevant for regulatory policy discussion and discusses the normative implications of the findings for the functioning of democracy.
Political parties increasingly rely on sophisticated targeting strategies to persuade potential voters. However, questions have been raised about the effectiveness of targeted political ads, ...considering that citizens frequently oppose the use of their data for political purposes. In this study, we investigate three avoidance behaviors that citizens might employ in order to circumvent targeted political ads: cognitive avoidance, blocking behaviors, and privacy-protective behaviors. We test if privacy concerns, perceived personalization, and overload explain why individuals resort to avoidance behaviors. Moreover, we explore interrelations between the different avoidance strategies. Findings from a two-wave panel study (N = 428) in the context of the Viennese state election showed that privacy concerns increased cognitive avoidance and privacy-protective behaviors. In contrast, perceived personalization decreased cognitive avoidance and blocking behaviors. Cognitive avoidance further reduced privacy-protective behaviors over time, indicating that low-effort strategies might inhibit preventive actions against data collection practices.
Political scientists often turn to natural experiments to draw causal inferences with observational data. Recently, the regression discontinuity design (RD) has become a popular type of natural ...experiment due to its relatively weak assumptions. We study a special type of regression discontinuity design where the discontinuity in treatment assignment is geographic. In this design, which we call the Geographic Regression Discontinuity (GRD) design, a geographic or administrative boundary splits units into treated and control areas, and analysts make the case that the division into treated and control areas occurs in an as-if random fashion. We show how this design is equivalent to a standard RD with two running variables, but we also clarify several methodological differences that arise in geographical contexts. We also offer a method for estimation of geographically located treatment effects that can also be used to validate the identification assumptions using observable pretreatment characteristics. We illustrate our methodological framework with a re-examination of the effects of political advertisements on voter turnout during a presidential campaign, exploiting the exogenous variation in the volume of presidential ads that is created by media market boundaries.
The question of how Facebook and Google make and justify decisions regarding permissible political advertising on their platforms is increasingly important. In this paper, we focus on the U.S. case ...and present findings from interviews with 17 former social media firm employees (n = 7) and political practitioners (n = 11). We also analyze emails (n = 45) exchanged between Facebook government and elections staffers and two campaigns, a U.S. gubernatorial (2017) and presidential campaign (2016), regarding the platform's policies in the context of paid speech. In addressing questions about Facebook's and Google's processes and policies regarding paid political content, the rationales for them, and the ability of campaigns to contest decisions, this study shows how while Facebook and Google resist being arbiters of political discourse, they actively vet paid content on their platforms. These platforms differ with respect to how and what decisions they make in the context of paid speech and within each company there are active and ongoing debates among staffers about speech. These debates at times take place in consultation with political practitioners and often occur in the context of external events. Across these firms, policies regarding speech evolve through these internal debates, appeals by practitioners, and outside pressure. At the same time, both Facebook and Google make decisions in often opaque ways, according to policies that are not transparent, and without clear justifications to campaigns or the public as to how they are applied or enforced. This limits options for political practitioners to contest regulation decisions. Finally, we conclude by arguing for the need for expanded capacities for political practitioners and the public to exercise voice around the content decisions that these firms make, and for firms to create more robust institutional mechanisms for incorporating it.
•Shows that metaphor and humor converge in framing evaluation in discourse.•Introduces a new category of humorous metaphors: recycled humorous metaphors.•Highlights the conceptual and rhetorical ...power of the journey metaphor in politics.•Adds to the growing body of knowledge on political humor and social media.•Empirically corroborates the compatibility between metaphor and humor theories.
The relationship between metaphor and humor has long been viewed as one of conceptual similarity in that both phenomena dwell on duality, yet they process it in a different way; metaphor fully resolves the tension between domains while humor does so only partially. This paper aims to offer a novel understanding of this issue by suggesting that metaphor and humor converge, instead, vis-à-vis their evaluative function in discourse. The empirical evidence under examination comes from three political ads that were used for election campaign advertizing in Greece in 2015, each one building on a different scenario of the journey metaphor (i.e., a train trip, a flight and a taxi ride), and their humorous representations in internet memes that were spread through social media platforms. Aiming to parody the political parties and figures in the political ads, the memes recast the metaphorical conceptualization involved therein in a humorous way, thus giving rise to what I wish to call ‘recycled humorous metaphors’ (cf. Attardo, 2015). The analysis shows that metaphor and humor serve the particular rhetorical goals of election campaign advertizing and political satire; metaphor through the evaluative frames it evokes and humor through its targets and its function as a means of criticism.
Research on growing American political polarization and antipathy primarily studies public institutions and political processes, ignoring private effects, including strained family ties. Using ...anonymized smartphone-location data and precinct-level voting, we show that Thanksgiving dinners attended by residents from opposing-party precincts were 30 to 50 minutes shorter than same-party dinners. This decline from a mean of 257 minutes survives extensive spatial and demographic controls. Reductions in the duration of Thanksgiving dinner in 2016 tripled for travelers from media markets with heavy political advertising-an effect not observed in 2015-implying a relationship to election-related behavior. Effects appear asymmetric: Although fewer Democratic-precinct residents traveled in 2016 than in 2015, Republican-precinct residents shortened their Thanksgiving dinners by more minutes in response to political differences. Nationwide, 34 million hours of cross-partisan Thanksgiving dinner discourse were lost in 2016 owing to partisan effects.
If one had tried to write the story of the 2016 digital campaign for the US presidency before knowing the election's result, the account might have gone as follows. Hillary Clinton improved on the ...model built by the successful campaigns of Barack Obama, perfecting the art of microtargeting and the use of online tools to mobilize voters through social media. To be sure, her ability to vastly outspend her opponent on all forms of campaign communication, as well as her opponent's relative weakness on all traditional metrics, makes it hard to say whether the new media strategies were decisive. The 2016 election represents the latest chapter in the disintegration of the legacy institutions that had set bounds for US politics in the postwar era. It is tempting to view the Donald Trump campaign as unprecedented in its breaking of established norms of politics. Yet this type of campaign could only be successful because established institutions had already lost most of their power, both in the United States and around the world.
At a time when Moroccan researchers still undecided on the appropriate definition of Political Marketing, the debate around this subject is initiated already, whether on their side the opinion ...makers, the media and the politicians themselves. Among supporters and opponents of the adoption and the use of this discipline’s strategies, each one according to his own definition of Political Marketing, few months before 2016’s elections in Morocco, the debate around this emerging science, is growing increasingly. Through an exploratory survey, we tried to highlight the common perception in analytical comparison, with what was overdraft, until today by international research. The purpose is an essay of definition adapted to the needs of this particular Moroccan context. Considering that rare are the academic researches that has been initiated in Morocco, around the concept, this paper is an analysis of the gap, among common perception, and scientific conceptual framework of this discipline.
The present study argues that political communication on social media is mediated by a platform’s digital architecture—the technical protocols that enable, constrain, and shape user behavior in a ...virtual space. A framework for understanding digital architectures is introduced, and four platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat) are compared along the typology. Using the 2016 U.S. election as a case, interviews with three Republican digital strategists are combined with social media data to qualify the study’s theoretical claim that a platform’s network structure, functionality, algorithmic filtering, and datafication model affect political campaign strategy on social media.
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