Political Advertising on Facebook During the 2022 Australian Federal Election: A Social Identity Perspective

TL;DR

This study analyzes political advertising on Meta's Facebook and Instagram during the 2022 Australian federal election using Meta Ad Library data. It systematically curates and annotates ads to compare scale, timing, targeting, and content across major parties, interpreting the results through Social Identity Theory in a compulsory-voting context. Key findings show the ALP and Liberal Coalition dominating spend and impressions, with distinct demographic and regional targeting patterns and a shift toward issue-based messaging among smaller parties. The work contributes a reproducible dataset, party-affiliation annotations, and a theory-grounded understanding of online persuasion, with implications for transparency and the study of digital political campaigning in compulsory voting systems.

Abstract

The spread of targeted advertising on social media platforms has revolutionized political marketing strategies. Monitoring these digital campaigns is essential for maintaining transparency and accountability in democratic processes. Leveraging Meta's Ad Library, we analyze political advertising on Facebook and Instagram during the 2022 Australian federal election campaign. We investigate temporal, demographic, and geographical patterns in the advertising strategies of major Australian political actors to establish an empirical evidence base, and interpret these findings through the lens of Social Identity Theory (SIT). Our findings not only reveal significant disparities in spending and reach among parties, but also in persuasion strategies being deployed in targeted online campaigns. We observe a marked increase in advertising activity as the election approached, peaking just before the mandated media blackout period. Demographic analysis shows distinct targeting strategies, with parties focusing more on younger demographics and exhibiting gender-based differences in ad impressions. Regional distribution of ads largely mirrored population densities, with some parties employing more targeted approaches in specific states. Moreover, we found that parties emphasized different themes aligned with their ideologies-major parties focused on party names and opponents, while smaller parties emphasized issue-specific messages. Drawing on SIT, we interpret these findings within Australia's compulsory voting context, suggesting that parties employed distinct persuasion strategies. With turnout guaranteed, major parties focused on reinforcing partisan identities to prevent voter defection, while smaller parties cultivated issue-based identities to capture the support of disaffected voters who are obligated to participate.

Figures (12)

• Figure 1: Pipeline for collecting, cleaning, and annotating Meta Ad Library data, followed by analyses.
• Figure 2: Frequency distribution of selected keywords used in political advertisements during the considered period. Keywords are ranked by the number of ads they appear in.
• Figure 3: Total spend on political advertising by top sponsors during the 2022 election. Bars represent individual sponsors, color-coded by party affiliation. The legend shows the aggregated total spend for each major party.
• Figure 4: Time series of the total AUD spend, the number of impressions, and the number of unique ads for each day and party in the PAP dataset. In the two upper panels the dashed area represents lower and upper bounds, with the solid line corresponding to the mean value. In all plots we use a 3-day moving average.
• Figure 5: Distribution of ad impressions across demographic categories for major Australian political parties during the 2022 campaign. Each box plot represents the variation in the percentage of ad impressions reaching a specific age group and gender combination. The whiskers show the full range of values, boxes indicate the interquartile range, and triangles mark the mean.