A Dip into a Deep Well: Online Political Advertisements, Valence, and European Electoral Campaigning




Ruohonen Jukka

Max van Duijn, Mike Preuss, Viktoria Spaiser, Frank Takes, Suzan Verberne

Multidisciplinary International Symposium on Disinformation in Open Online Media

PublisherSpringer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH

2020

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

Disinformation in Open Online Media Second Multidisciplinary International Symposium, MISDOOM 2020, Leiden, The Netherlands, October 26–27, 2020, Proceedings

Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

12259

37

51

978-3-030-61840-7

978-3-030-61841-4

0302-9743

DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61841-4_3

https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.10622



Online political advertisements have become an important element in electoral campaigning throughout the world. At the same time, concepts such as disinformation and manipulation have emerged as a global concern. Although these concepts are distinct from online political ads and data-driven electoral campaigning, they tend to share a similar trait related to valence, the intrinsic attractiveness or averseness of a message. Given this background, the paper examines online political ads by using a dataset collected from Google’s transparency reports. The examination is framed to the mid-2019 situation in Europe, including the European Parliament elections in particular. According to the results based on sentiment analysis of the textual ads displayed via Google’s advertisement machinery, (i) most of the political ads have expressed positive sentiments, although these vary greatly between (ii) European countries as well as across (iii) European political parties. In addition to these results, the paper contributes to the timely discussion about data-driven electoral campaigning and its relation to politics and democracy.



Last updated on 2024-26-11 at 16:45