Characterizing Brazilian Political Ads on Facebook

Abstract

Most of politicians, public figures and political candidates use online advertising platforms to spread their political values and messages. Since 2018, Facebook has made available an Ad Library providing advertising transparency to prevent interference in elections and other political issues. However, it is not explicit how the ads are selected to incorporate this database and to what extent there is an artificial intelligence applied to this selection. In this work, we provide a categorization of the ads data in Brazil to understand the dynamic of political advertisements and what type of ads are present in this ad library. We analyze impressions, the money spent and who are the advertisers on ads from 2018 to 2021. Among our findings, we show that during the election months of 2018 and 2020 the volume of ads correspond to approximately 30% of the ads in the dataset and the moving average of the money spent per ads increases about 200% after the first round of brazilian elections.