Biden and Trump Mentions in Facebook Advertising Data

Time period: June 1, 2020 through Election Day 2020

Through its Cross-Platform Election Advertising Transparency Initiative (CREATIVE) funded in part through a grant from the NSF (Award Number 2235006), the Wesleyan Media Project is actively working on identifying and summarizing federal election content from the general election periods in federal cycles (September through Election Day). In late 2020, we received a request from the collaboration between Facebook and academics studying the 2020 election to obtain our classifications of advertising data relevant to the presidential election (defined by mentions of either candidate). We already had September through Election Day content in hand and worked backward to acquire June through August 2020 content relevant to presidential mentions solely in service of this request. The data provided here, which cover the June 1 to Election Day period from 2020, apply many of our methods employed in CREATIVE but precedes many of the refinements that we have made in identifying and classifying federal advertising to the content relevant to presidential ads. In addition, in the provided data we did not conduct a lot of fine tuning just for the presidential race. If we had built methods solely for delivery of presidential advertising in particular, we likely would have chosen different methods. We would like to remind researchers that the earlier (June through August) period contains, for many races, primary advertising rather than general election advertising, and we did not examine carefully the differences between these two.