New:
Political advertisers in the United States spent more than $619 million on the two largest digital ad platforms between the beginning of 2023 and the end of August of this year, according to a first-of-its-kind analysis jointly conducted by the Brennan Center, OpenSecrets, and the Wesleyan Media Project. Using publicly available data from Google and Meta (owner of Facebook and Instagram) and a transparent methodology, our analysis sheds light on the scope of online spending this election cycle on the two largest online platforms.
As the internet’s importance in American life has risen, much of our political activity has moved online. So too have efforts by hostile foreign governments and other bad actors sowing political disinformation to exploit divisions in the U.S. electorate. Examples of this type of interference include the Russian government’s $10 million Tenet Media scheme to build a network of right-wing influencers on YouTube and other media, as well as its similar effort earlier this summer to influence European elections through covertly sponsored Facebook advertisements.
Despite the importance of online spending in elections, existing transparency rules are extremely weak. As a result, the public data are limited and inconsistent, making it difficult to identify many advertisers and impossible to know the sources of much of the spending. In part because of the difficulty of analyzing and combining the available data, we have focused on Google and Meta. Although they are the largest digital ad platforms in the United States, this means that the numbers reported here represent only a portion of the total universe of online political spending.
Key findings:
- In the 2024 election cycle through the end of August, advertisers who spent at least $5,000 on Google and Meta bought $619 million in political ads, with at least $248 million focused on the presidential race.
- Of spenders on Meta and Google known to advertise in support of a party, spending in favor of Democrats was more than three times the amount of spending for Republicans. Some Republican-aligned spending may have migrated to other platforms not included in this analysis, in part due to lack of public data.
- Almost half the total, $281 million, came from spenders that may hide some or all of their donors.
Ultimately, even with the limited data available, it is clear that online spending is playing a significant and growing role in politics this election cycle, a trend that will almost certainly continue. More than a decade into the era of social media, the need to update campaign transparency rules to take new modes of political communication into account has never been more apparent.