In the days following President Donald Trump’s COVID-19 diagnosis last week, the president’s crusade spent more than $500,000 on Facebook’s classified political ads to talk about his fitness and remedy plans, far exceeding advertising spending through other defense teams and crusades on the same subject. . , according to the knowledge shared exclusively with Morning Consult through researchers from the Tandon School of Engineering of Tandon School of Engineering.
Trump’s crusade relied primarily on those politically classified Facebook ads to advertise management videos, some of which contained misleading data on immunities, vaccines, and other COVID-19 treatments, according to Morning Consult’s research of classified ads in Facebook’s ad library.
For example, since Tuesday, after leaving the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center a day earlier, Trump posted a political ad on Facebook with the video of him urging others not to let the coronavirus pandemic “take over” and saying, “Maybe me. ” I’m immune, I don’t know, “even though medical studies provide conflicting reports on COVID-19 immunity and longevity. Knowledge from Facebook indicates that users who have noticed the ad are primarily in Florida, Texas, and Pennsylvania, which are key states on the electoral battlefield.
Although the video was also shared on other social media platforms such as Twitter, the use of the video in paid promotions raises moral questions about how the president talks about his joy with the virus that on Friday killed more than 213,000 people in the United States. States, and how classified ads paid on social media play a role in delivering those messages. In total, Trump’s classified ads about his coVID-19 diagnosis and remedy garnered between 16. 3 million and 19. 2 million impressions or visits on Facebook.
Researchers from the NYU Ads Observatory, which oversees political advertising and Facebook issues, gathered knowledge about a search from Facebook’s ad library for classified ads after October 1 that come with one of the following keyword pairs: “Trump Walter,” “Trump diagnostics”, and “Trump’s test. “
Knowledge also implies that Trump, until now, had the highest number of overall classified ads, with 664 among Donald J’s official pages. Trump and the Trump. Cost of Chaos team, a progressive and anti-Trump Facebook page, recorded the second-highest spending and total number of classified ads of the week, and investigators estimated that he spent $36029 on 42 classified ads.
While several progressive and Democratic teams are turning to Facebook to promote Trump’s coronavirus diagnosis, none of the pages are related to Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. The ex-vice president’s crusade bought classified ads that talk about diagnosis more subtly: on Monday, Biden’s crusade began broadcasting an ad to the Wisconsin electorate and selling the concept that Biden ‘trusts science’, and on Thursday, the crusade began selling his Biden video by slowly putting on a mask with the legend “When it comes to Covid , Joe Biden will stick to Science. “
As Election Day approaches, Facebook has made several adjustments to its political advertising policy, adding a plan to suspend all those classified ads ranked after the closure of polling stations on November 3 in an effort to weigh any confusion, incorrect information, and abuse of the final. results and legitimacy of the elections. And Facebook launched a new tool in June to allow users to remove all classified politically classified ads from their feeds, the company’s refusal to remove or report classified ads containing lies has been analyzed.
This is especially true given the platform’s dominant position for political advertising in this election cycle, as Twitter and TikTok banned all political classified ads from their sites last year and Google imposed position restrictions on previously micro-targeted political classified ads earlier this year.
Facebook declined to comment. In reaction to Morning Consult’s questions about advertising spending data, Trump’s crusade issued a promotion of the president’s pandemic reaction “even when he contracted and fought the coronavirus. “
This account was updated after it was published with a reaction from the Trump campaign.
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Sam is a Morning Consult journalist and covers generation policy.