POLITICAL ADVERTISING ON SOCIAL MEDIA: FACEBOOK CONTENT ANALYSIS ON 14 MAY 2023 ELECTIONS

Abstract

Political advertising has transformed into a voter-oriented structure with social media. Especially during election periods, paid political advertising applications of social networking platforms have become widespread. The Ad Library application on Facebook is one of them. According to this application, political candidates had the opportunity to present their political advertising content directly to the target electorate. It similarly facilitated the sharing of metadata on the cost of these ads, the electorate they reached and the content of the impression of the ads with researchers.Turkey held a two-round presidential election in May 2023. In these elections, various political parties, including the People's Alliance, the Nation Alliance, the Ancestral Alliance and the Labour and Freedom Alliance, supported presidential candidates. In this process, both candidates and parties and other political groups tried to influence voters through various political advertisements on Facebook. This research examines the Facebook advertising content of four presidential candidates, the political parties and groups supporting them in the elections held in May 2023. Therefore, the study aims to reveal the influence of political candidates/parties/groups in winning or losing the elections, to determine which electorate they reached and to discuss how they followed a strategy. At the end of the research, it was determined that the candidates/parties/groups in the People's Alliance reached the right electorate on Facebook, allocated significant budgets for advertisements, reached a high number of advertisements and made demographic analyzes correctly. In spite of this, it was found that the candidates/parties/groups in other alliances did not conduct accurate voter analysis, did not allocate sufficient budget for advertisements, and kept the number of advertisements low and very limited.