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The Effects of Political Advertising on Facebook and Instagram Before the 2020 US Election
We randomized over 60,000 Facebook and Instagram users to have their political ads removed ahead of the 2020 US presidential election, and find that removing these ads had no measurable impact on users' political attitudes, knowledge, behavior, and more.
Citation
Hunt Allcott, Matthew Gentzkow, Ro’ee Levy, Adriana Crespo-Tenorio, Natasha Dumas, Winter Mason, Devra Moehler, Pablo Barbera, et al. “The Effects of Political Advertising on Facebook and Instagram before the 2020 US Election.” National Bureau of Economic Research volume, 33818 (2025). https://doi.org/10.3386/w33818
Date Posted
Jul 12, 2025
Authors
- Hunt Allcott,
- Matthew Gentzkow,
- Ro’ee Levy,
- Adriana Crespo-Tenorio,
- Natasha Dumas,
- Winter Mason,
- Devra Moehler,
- Pablo Barberá,
- Taylor Brown,
- Juan Carlos Cisneros,
- Drew Dimmery,
- Deen Freelon,
- Sandra González-Bailón,
- Andrew M. Guess,
- Young Mie Kim,
- David Lazer,
- Neil Malhotra,
- Sameer Nair-Desai,
- Brendan Nyhan,
- Ana Carolina Paixao de Queiroz,
- Jennifer Pan,
- Jaime Settle,
- Emily Thorson,
- Rebekah Tromble,
- Carlos Velasco Rivera,
- Benjamin Wittenbrink,
- Magdalena Wojcieszak,
- Shiqi Yang,
- Saam Zahedian,
- Annie Franco,
- Chad Kiewiet de Jonge,
- Natalie Jomini Stroud,
- Joshua A. Tucker
Area of Study
Abstract
We study the effects of social media political advertising by randomizing subsets of 36,906 Facebook users and 25,925 Instagram users to have political ads removed from their news feeds for six weeks before the 2020 US presidential election. We show that most presidential ads were targeted toward parties’ own supporters and that fundraising ads were most common. On both Facebook and Instagram, we found no detectable effects of removing political ads on political knowledge, polarization, perceived legitimacy of the election, political participation (including campaign contributions), candidate favorability, and turnout. This was true overall and for both Democrats and Republicans separately.