Facebook Political Ads and Accountability: Outside Groups Are Most Negative, Especially When Hiding Donors

Abstract

The emergence of online political advertising has come with little regulation, allowing political advertisers on social media to avoid accountability. We analyze how transparency and accountability deficits caused by dark money and disappearing groups relate to the sentiment of political ads on Facebook. We obtained 430,044 ads with FEC-registered advertisers from Facebook’s ad library that ran between August-November 2018. We compare ads run by candidates, parties, and outside groups, which we classify by (1) their donor transparency (dark money or disclosed) and (2) the group's permanence (only FEC-registered in 2018 or persistent across cycles). The most negative advertising came from dark money and disappearing outside groups, which were mostly corporations or 501(c) organizations. However, only dark money was associated with a significant decrease in ad sentiment. These results suggest that accountability for political speech matters for advertising tone, especially in the context of affective polarization on social media.