Webinar 145: U.S. Midterm Elections: Analyzing Political Ads for Stories

This coming November 8 will be a big election day in the United States. Although it is not a presidential election day, the midterm election is a significant one considering all 435 seats in the House of Representatives and 35 Senate seats will be contested. That’s not all. There will also be 39 state and territorial gubernatorial elections, in addition to several other state and local elections. With so much going on, how can you provide valuable elections coverage and what insights can you get from data on digital ads?

The Ad Observatory is a project of NYU Cybersecurity for Democracy. It provides access to explore political advertising across Meta, including Facebook and Instagram. By providing transparency and insights on digital political spending, journalists can use the platform to identify top priorities that are on the ballot as far as ad spending is concerned. They can also identify what issues are a focus for key battle states and how interests differ from one region to another.

During the webinar, we will be learning how to use the free public dashboard to investigate political ads on Facebook and Instagram in the upcoming U.S. midterms. In this one hour session you'll learn:
How to follow the money behind the political ads -- who is doing the advertising, where, on what, and how much they are spending, by region, elections and more. Plus: how to dig deeper.
Tips and tricks for finding political ads peddling mis- and disinformation, plus best practices for responsible reporting around them.
How to search political ad messaging on topics such as abortion, economy, environmental protection, guns and immigration, and filter by language to see totals for for English-language and Spanish-language ads.
Ideas and templates for stories using Ad Observatory.

Our guest is Nancy Watzman, strategic advisor, NYU Cybersecurity for Democracy. Watzman is director of Lynx LLC, based in Denver, Colorado.