An analysis of
Facebook Political Advertisementsby Prev Wong & Danny Tey

Advertisement is an extremely powerful and therefore, potentially dangerous tool to spread words on any issues, and being the world's largest social media platform in the world, Facebook undeniably has become a platform to disseminate information through targeted ads. While it all seems fine -- we get to access social media for free, in exchange for advertisements, it's actually much more than that. "If you are not paying, then you are the product", this saying has been circulating over the past few years and to an extent, it is true. Realize it or not, we are always subconsciously affected by the advertisement shown to us.

What is the
Big picture of Facebook political ads?

Let's have a high level overview of the ads. Who are the most frequently mentioned entities, targets, and advertisers?

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How are the top
Political entities represented by advertisers?

Let's take a look how the top 10 most mentioned entities are potrayed across the top 100 most impressionable ads.

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What are the
Hottest topics in each U.S state?

We gathered and categorised each entities associated with a state, using NLP. Each state is then represented by the category that has the most impressions.

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What are the
Entities that occur together with each other?

To better understand what kind of advertisements are displayed, we used K-means clustering algorithm to cluster the ad entities, and therefore, those in the same cluster suggests that they occur frequently in an ad. By doing so, we can see how advertisers tend to associate an entity with each other, eg. Trump with white house. (However, due to limitations of d3, we are only able to select a very small portion of the data as proof-of-concept.)

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