Disinformation in Facebook Ads in the 2019 Spanish General Election Campaigns

Lorena Cano-Orón, Dafne Calvo, Guillermo López García and Tomás Baviera
Additional contact information
Lorena Cano-Orón: Department of Language Theory and Communication Sciences, University of Valencia, Spain
Dafne Calvo: Department of Early Modern History, Modern History and History of America, Journalism and Audiovisual Communication and Advertising, University of Valladolid, Spain
Guillermo López García: Department of Language Theory and Communication Sciences, University of Valencia, Spain
Tomás Baviera: Department of Economics and Social Sciences, Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain

Media and Communication, 2021, vol. 9, issue 1, 217-228

Abstract: As fake news elicits an emotional response from users, whose attention is then monetised, political advertising has a significant influence on its production and dissemination. Facebook ads, therefore, have an essential role in contemporary political communication, not only because of their extensive use in international political campaigns, but also because they address intriguing questions about the regulation of disinformation on social networking sites. This research employs a corpus of 14,684 Facebook ads published by the major national political parties during their campaigns leading up to the two Spanish general elections held in 2019. A manual content analysis was performed on all the visually identical ads so as to identify those containing disinformation and those denouncing it. The topics addressed in these ads were then examined. The results show that the political parties’ Facebook ad strategies were akin to those of conventional advertising. Disinformation messages were infrequent and mainly posted by Ciudadanos and VOX. Nonetheless, it is striking that the main topic addressed in the ads was the unity of Spain—precisely the issue of Catalonia’s independence. In light of this, it can be deduced that ‘traditional’ parties are taking longer to renounce classical forms of campaigning than their ‘new’ counterparts, thus demonstrating that the actors implementing disinformation strategies are not only restricted to the extreme right of the ideological spectrum.

Keywords: campaigns; disinformation; elections; Facebook; fake news; political communication; political parties; Spain (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cogitatiopress.com/mediaandcommunication/article/view/3335 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cog:meanco:v9:y:2021:i:1:p:217-228

DOI: 10.17645/mac.v9i1.3335

Access Statistics for this article

Media and Communication is currently edited by Raquel Silva

More articles in Media and Communication from Cogitatio Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by António Vieira () and IT Department ().