‘Beto for Texas’? ‘Team Nunes’? How to Get Political Ads Off Your Facebook Feed
...“We’re seeing some really sophisticated operations,” says Damon McCoy, an assistant professor at New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering. Dr. McCoy and his colleagues started analyzing Facebook’s searchable database of these ads after the social network made the tool public in May. … Laura Edelson, a doctoral student at the Tandon School, estimates political-ad spending across Facebook was somewhere between $6.5 million and $38 million from Oct. 21 to Oct. 27, up from a range of $5.9 million to $33 million the week before. Dr. McCoy uses Beto O’Rourke, who is running for U.S. Senate in Texas against incumbent Ted Cruz, as an example of sophistication. “He’s doing these microtargeted ads county by county and giving people detailed [voting] instructions.”
