Exploring Political Ads on News and Media Websites During the 2024 U.S. Elections
Emi Yoshikawa, Franziska Roesner
TL;DR
This paper investigates the content of political ads on news and media websites surrounding the 2024 U.S. elections by crawling 745 sites across Atlanta, Seattle, and Los Angeles to collect over 15,000 ads, including 315 political ads. Employing a mixed-methods approach, it combines OCR-based text extraction, BERTopic with dual representations, and manual qualitative coding to identify and classify ads into political clusters, while revealing regional differences and new themes such as voter-eligibility messaging and non-election advocacy like Israel-Palestine content. The key contributions include a spatio-temporal analysis of ad content, a dataset release, and recommendations for regulation and transparency to curb misleading clickbait, safeguard voter information, and study non-election political messaging. The findings highlight the need for broader oversight of political ads on the web, not just official campaign ads, to understand and mitigate their potential impact on public discourse and democratic participation.
Abstract
Building on recent work studying content in the online advertising ecosystem, including our own prior study of political ads on the web during the 2020 U.S. elections, we analyze political ad content appearing on websites leading up to and during the 2024 U.S. elections. Crawling a set of 745 news and media websites several times from three different U.S. locations (Atlanta, Seattle, and Los Angeles), we collect a dataset of over 15000 ads, including (at least) 315 political ads, and we analyze it quantitatively and qualitatively. Among our findings: a prevalence of clickbait political news ads, echoing prior work; a seemingly new emphasis (compared to 2020) on voting safety and eligibility ads, particularly in Atlanta; and non-election related political ads around the Israel-Palestine conflict, particularly in Seattle. We join prior work in calling for more oversight and transparency of political-related ads on the web. Our dataset is available at https://ad-archive.cs.washington.edu.