Online Political Advertising in the United States
Erika Franklin Fowler, Michael M. Franz, Travis N. Ridout · Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2020
This chapter reviews the data that scholars have started to assemble on the volume, content, targeting, and effect of paid online advertising in the United States. It discusses how online advertising is regulated through formal rules and shaped informally by content negotiations between advertisers and platforms. It also explains how the decentralized methods of purchasing digital ads make systematic research challenging. That said, this review (at best) provides tentative conclusions, which will be tested in earnest over the next few years. In many ways, then, we are at a precipice awaiting the flood of more systematic analyses yet to come as scholars dig into the newly available data. With that in mind, it reviews what is known at present and evaluates the information that is available through the platform archives.