Prof. Jennifer Stromer-Galley
Professor in the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University. She studies political communication and digital technology. Stromer-Galley is author of Presidential Campaigning in the Internet Age (2nd. Ed., 2019, Oxford University Press), as well as over 70 peer-reviewed publications. She is the lead researcher of the ElectionGraph Project funded by Neo4j to study misinformation in the 2024 presidential election.
Email: jstromer@syr.edu
U.S. Election 2024
64. Reversion to the meme: A return to grassroots content (Dr Jessica Baldwin-Philippi)
65. From platform politics to partisan platforms (Prof Philip M. Napoli, Talia Goodman)
66. The fragmented social media landscape in the 2024 U.S. election (Dr Michael A. Beam, Dr Myiah J. Hutchens, Dr Jay D. Hmielowski)
67. Outside organization advertising on Meta platforms: Coordination and duplicity (Prof Jennifer Stromer-Galley)
68. Prejudice and priming in the online political sphere (Prof Richard Perloff)
69. Perceptions of social media in the 2024 presidential election (Dr Daniel Lane, Dr Prateekshit “Kanu” Pandey)
70. Modeling public Facebook comments on the attempted assassination of President Trump (Dr Justin Phillips, Prof Andrea Carson)
71. The memes of production: Grassroots-made digital content and the presidential campaign (Dr Rosalynd Southern, Dr Caroline Leicht)
72. The gendered dynamics of presidential campaign tweets in 2024 (Prof Heather K. Evans, Dr Jennifer Hayes Clark)
73. Threads and TikTok adoption among 2024 congressional candidates in battleground states (Prof Terri L. Towner, Prof Caroline Muñoz)
74. Who would extraterrestrials side with if they were watching us on social media? (Taewoo Kang, Prof Kjerstin Thorson)
75. AI and voter suppression in the 2024 election (Prof Diana Owen)
76. News from AI: ChatGPT and political information (Dr Caroline Leicht, Dr Peter Finn, Dr Lauren C. Bell, Dr Amy Tatum)
77. Analyzing the perceived humanness of AI-generated social media content around the presidential debate (Dr Tiago Ventura, Rebecca Ansell, Dr Sejin Paik, Autumn Toney, Prof Leticia Bode, Prof Lisa Singh)
While much attention was paid to the presidential candidates’ ad spending, including on social media platforms, less attention was paid to outside organizations advertising on social media. We tracked ad messaging, spending, and targets on Meta platforms beyond the candidates to “Extended-Party Networks”, which include the political parties, political action committees (PACS), Super-PACS, and even individuals and shady groups with unclear origins and motives. We found a remarkable number of coordinated pages that are tied together through shared administrators or links to websites, and that are engaging in deceptive messaging practices, including credit card scams. Their activity continues to raise questions about Meta’s own regulatory practices and profit motives.
To identify outside organizations engaged in messaging around the campaign, we collected ads that ran on Facebook and Instagram from September 1st, 2023 during the pre-primaries through August 31st, 2024, which marks the end of the political conventions. We searched the Meta Ad Library API for ads that mentioned any of the presidential primary candidates and the vice-presidential nominees.
We found 3,483 Facebook pages that ran ads around the presidential campaign. We estimate that they spent $55 million on those ads and had over 3 billion impressions (Meta provides an upper and lower bound for spending and impressions. We take the mid-point of an ad buy to estimate these two metrics). These organizations spent heavily once Kamala Harris became the nominee in July.
We received data on ad targets from Meta, including gender, and age. Overall, the ads targeted primarily older Facebook and Instagram users, but especially older women.
Of the roughly 3500 Facebook pages, we found a surprising number that appeared to be independent but were actually interconnected. Using metadata, we were able to identify pages that shared an administrator email address, telephone number or postal address for the organization, or the sponsor of the ad (i.e. who paid for it). We identified 252 networks of pages where at least 2 pages shared data elements.
Some of these networks are expected. For example, Donald Trump’s Facebook page was tied to five other pages that included a campaign manager as well his daughter-in-law and now head of the Republican National Committee. They likely share a consulting firm that is assisting with their social media accounts. One surprising page, however, was that of Ronny Jackson, a candidate running for a U.S. House race in Texas. Jackson was Trump’s physician, and we suspect that Trump or his campaign staff helped Jackson to use the same consulting firm.
More surprising, we identified several networks that appear to be targeting supporters of Donald Trump with a credit card scam. The largest network included 55 Facebook pages that we estimate spent at least $2.5 million on ads. One Facebook page in the network is Frontier of Freedom. The page spent an estimated $5,339 running ads in our time period of analysis. Like similar ads in the network, one ad attacks Democrats and promotes Trump’s agenda, and makes false statements about immigrants engaging in “horrific crimes.” At the end of the ad, the announcer urges viewers to click the link at the bottom of the ad to fill out a poll and claim a Trump 2024 flag to show support for Trump. The URL to the link is to a four-question poll, and then asks for contact information. After completing that, it resolves to a new page that asks that Shipping & Handling be paid for to receive the flag. Buried at the very bottom of the page, however, is a statement in micro-font that stated that by giving credit card information, the target agrees to pay $79.97/month for a membership to the Patriot American Club. There is little evidence such a club exists or what its purpose is.
The existence of scammers capitalizing on the enthusiasm of voters this election is troubling. Although we notified Meta in June to the existence of this scam network, we found that while several pages had been disabled, additional pages had launched later in the year running similar scam ads that were active during the general election. The continued existence on Meta platforms of scammers that are taking advantage of the political moment to both advance false and misleading claims while also scamming citizens speaks to the inadequacy and inattentiveness of the tech company to police itself when profit is at stake.
Acknowledgements: I would like to thank my student research team including: Saklain Zaman, Jill Karia, and Amol Borkar. Research funded with support from Neo4j.