Understanding the communicative strategies used in online political advertising and how the public views them
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Concerns about online political advertising often focus on the techniques used to engage the intended audience. This article assesses the communicative strategies used in online political advertising and their reception by the public by analysing 2272 Facebook ads during the 2019 UK general election. By examining the prominence, tone, and source of six communicative strategies, we find that different communicative strategies are not used to the same extent. While positive tones are predominantly used by all actors, negative tones are more prevalent in several strategies, especially when mobilised by satellite campaign groups. Moreover, ads with negative strategies are deemed less acceptable compared to those employing targeting or positive strategies. However, when negative and positive strategies are combined, adverts can be deemed more acceptable. This study contributes new empirical evidence regarding the communicative strategies deployed in online political ads and offers insights for campaigners about public perceptions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".