Two-faced on facebook: Ad tailoring in U.S. house campaigns
Abstract
Congressional candidates simultaneously seek votes from local residents and money from partisan potential donors who live across the United States. Ad targeting allows political candidates an inexpensive way not only to reach this dispersed partisan audience but also to deliver messages tailored to donors, whose preferences are more extreme than voters’. Using data on geographically-targeted Facebook ads, I find that the national ads of Democratic and Republican candidates have less issue overlap — and are more extreme — than their local, voter-targeted ads. Candidates’ ability to direct tailored, extreme communication to receptive audiences via targeted ads facilitates divergent political speech.