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Post-graduate theses

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Identifier

000454997

Title

Exploration and analysis of online political ad libraries

Alternative Title

Εξερεύνηση και ανάλυση διαδικτυακών βιβλιοθηκών πολιτικών διαφημίσεων

Author

Βιτσαξάκη, Αικατερίνη Ι.

Thesis advisor

Μαρκάτος, Ευάγγελος

Reviewer

Πρατικάκης, Πολύβιος
Κουτρέλης, Πολύβιος

Abstract

In recent years, online advertising has become an important tool for businesses and organizations. Politicians also use digital platforms during pre-electoral peri- ods to promote their campaigns and messages to potential voters. However, these kinds of ads have faced much criticism for the misinformation and microtargeting they use based on the users’ personal data. Following these concerns, major plat- forms like Facebook and Google have released Ad Libraries that contain archived political ads of 2018 and later, along with information about their cost, views, the demographic distribution of the audience and more. In this thesis, we used these two ad collections to crawl ads that were created by a variety of parties from over 30 countries. Our goal was to explore and analyse political trends across di↵erent nations. Moreover, we used this data to train a machine learning model that predicts the winner of an election. Our experiments show that there is not a strong correlation between these ad attributes and the election outcome however, there is room for further study in this area.

Language

English

Subject

Data analysis

Political ads

Social media analysis

Ανάλυση δεδομένων

Ανάλυση κοινωνικών δικτύων

Πολιτικές διαφημίσεις

Issue date

2023-07-21

Collection