Trump Campaign Floods Web With Ads, Raking In Cash as Democrats Struggle
This story features data from the Online Political Transparency Project at NYU Tandon, led by Computer Science and Engineering Professor Damon McCoy, and Ph.D. student Laura Edelson.
On any given day, the Trump campaign is plastering ads all over Facebook, YouTube and the millions of sites served by Google, hitting the kind of incendiary themes — immigrant invaders, the corrupt media — that play best on platforms where algorithms favor outrage and political campaigns are free to disregard facts. … “We see much less of that kind of experimentation with the Democratic candidates,” said Laura Edelson, a researcher at New York University [Tandon School of Engineering] who tracks political advertising on Facebook. “They’re running fewer ads. We don’t see the wide array of targeting.” The Trump campaign, she said, “is like a supercar racing a little Volkswagen Bug.”
