Beto O’Rourke’s Huge Facebook Bet
Article features research by Damon McCoy, assistant professor of computer science and engineering at NYU Tandon.
...Through October 20, O’Rourke alone had spent $5.4 million advertising on the platform, according to Facebook’s Ad Archive Report. J. B. Pritzker, Kamala Harris, Andrew Cuomo, Claire McCaskill, and Heidi Heitkamp had spent $5.5 million total. O’Rourke’s opponent, Senator Ted Cruz, had spent only $427,000 on Facebook, about 1/13th as much as O’Rourke. … According to an analysis of Facebook’s political-ad archive by NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering’s Online Political Ads Transparency Project, the $400,000 that O’Rourke’s campaign spent from September 9 to September 22 generated a minimum of 19.4 million impressions and likely many, many more.
