Facebook Ads and Campaign Styles, and Issue Based Networks
By Natalie Appel ‘23, Drew Olsen ‘24, Bryan Do ’24 Candidates take different approaches when it comes to advertising on Facebook in terms of how much is spent on each ad, the content of ads, and how long each is live on the platform. We wanted to investigate these trends and find patterns in the […]
Using Guns in Political Advertisements
By Latonya Smith ’24, and Emma Tuhabonye ’23 Due to persistent worries about gun violence and mass shootings, the question of gun regulation has become a highly divisive one in current American politics. In this regard, the goal of our research was to gain insight into how candidate traits, such as gender and partisanship, may […]
Evaluating Automatic Speech Recognition Models on Digital Advertisements by Latine Candidates
By Sam Feuer ’23 Automatic speech recognition (ASR) models are key to our understanding of political communication. They allow us to convert audio data into text data, so they are vital to any of our projects which involve analyzing audio communication on a large scale. However, they are impeded by poor quality audio, background music, […]
Snapchat Images and Videos Facial Recognition
By Jem Shin ’23, Latonya Smith ’24, and Emma Tuhabonye ’23 Our goal was to use deep learning-based facial recognition algorithms to determine the appearances of political leaders, candidates, and opponents in political ad images. To do this, we ran a facial recognition algorithm in Python on Snapchat political campaign ad images. This algorithm uses […]
Controversy on the Small Screen: The Sinclair Broadcasting Group and Pandemic-Era Local News Coverage of Vaccine
By Ori Cantwell ‘22 This research aims to understand the role of station ownership in local news stations’ discussion of vaccinations during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Past research tells us that a large proportion of the US population gets public health information from local news, with those who get COVID-19 vaccine information from local news […]
Image and Video Facial Recognition and Transcription and Building a Classifier with Snapchat Political Advertisements Data
By Trey Plante ‘24, Dale Ross ‘22 Our goal was to develop a dataset of Snapchat ads to enable the Wesleyan Media Project to research an area of ads that impacts a younger demographic, and hasn’t been explored as thoroughly as other platforms like Facebook. The Snapchat political ads library offers an interesting look into […]
BLM in the Battleground: An Analysis of Racial Justice-Related Ads in Georgia
By Brianna Mebane ‘22 This research centers around discussions of race and racial justice in Facebook campaign advertisements run during the 2020 election cycle. More specifically, this research analyzed Facebook campaign advertisements run by 2020 presidential and Georgia Senate special candidates in the state of Georgia. 2020 marked a watershed in the contemporary fight for […]
Inside the Black Box: Examining Possible Sources of Classification Bias in Facebook Political Advertisements
By Trey Plante ‘24 and Dale Ross ‘22 Our goal was to analyze the multiple classifiers that the Wesleyan Media Project has run on political advertisements and uncover the patterns that the classifier identified and utilized to make its predictions. The ABSA classifier works by analyzing the text of an ad for mentions of Joe […]
Reproductive, Radical, Religious: Partisan Differences in Abortion-Related Facebook Political Ads
By Ori Cantwell ‘22, Dale Ross ‘22, Emma Tuhabonye ‘23 Abortion has emerged as a key polarizing issue for voters over the last few decades. Attitudes toward abortion predict voters’ decisions across levels of government––presidential, congressional, gubernatorial, lower offices––making abortion a matter of issue ownership for political parties (Jelen & Wilcox, 2003). Since the pro-life […]
Automated Issue Classification of Political Advertisements on Facebook
By Natalie Appel ‘23, Noah Cohen ‘22, Spencer Dean ‘21, Sam Feuer ‘23, Magda Kisielinska ‘22, and Brianna Mebane ‘22 Since 2010, the Wesleyan Media Project has hand coded American political advertisements for an extensive list of variables relating to content and tone. The information collected through this process is insightful, however it is a […]
