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Facebook's advertising platform provides political parties with an electoral tool that enables them to reach an extremely detailed audience. Unlike television, the sponsored content on Facebook is seen only by the targeted users. This opacity was an obstacle to political communications research until Facebook released advertiser-sponsored content in 2018. The company's new transparent policy included sharing metadata related to the cost and number of impressions the ads received. This research studies the content sponsored on Facebook by the five main national political parties in Spain during the two General Elections held in 2019. The research corpus consists of 14,684 Facebook ads. An extraction algorithm detected the key terms in the text-based messages conveyed in the ad. The prominence of these topics was estimated from the aggregate number of impressions accumulated by each term. Different content patterns were assessed following three categories: user mobilization, candidate presence, and ideological issues. PSOE and PP positioned themselves more toward calls to action. Podemos had the greater number of issues related to policy among the most salient topics in its advertising. Ciudadanos' strategy focused more on its candidate and mobilization. Vox sponsored few Facebook ads, and they barely included policy issues. Spain was a highly prominent term in all parties' campaigns. Ciudadanos shared the middle ground on the ideological axis: they promoted social issues more aligned with left-wing parties as well as economic topics usually advocated by the right-wing. Overall, our results point to a greater emphasis on candidates rather than issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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As fake news elicits an emotional response from users, whose attention is then monetised, political advertising has a significant influence on its production and dissemination. Facebook ads, therefore, have an essential role in contemporary political communication, not only because of their extensive use in international political campaigns, but also because they address intriguing questions about the regulation of disinformation on social networking sites. This research employs a corpus of 14,684 Facebook ads published by the major national political parties during their campaigns leading up to the two Spanish general elections held in 2019. A manual content analysis was performed on all the visually identical ads so as to identify those containing disinformation and those denouncing it. The topics addressed in these ads were then examined. The results show that the political parties' Facebook ad strategies were akin to those of conventional advertising. Disinformation messages were infrequent and mainly posted by Ciudadanos and VOX. Nonetheless, it is striking that the main topic addressed in the ads was the unity of Spain--precisely the issue of Catalonia's independence. In light of this, it can be deduced that 'traditional' parties are taking longer to renounce classical forms of campaigning than their 'new' counterparts, thus demonstrating that the actors implementing disinformation strategies are not only restricted to the extreme right of the ideological spectrum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The mediatisation model in politics assumes that media conveys political messages between parties and citizenship, with the risk of promoting issues that frame the electoral content in terms of competition. These dynamics could distract from the debate of ideas and political policies. However, digital media like Twitter provide direct communication channels between parties, candidates and users. The present research explores Twitter content during an electoral campaign focused on the four issues proposed by Patterson (1980) to assess mediatisation: political, policy, campaign and personal (regarding the candidate). The goal of this research study is to evaluate the degree of mediatisation on Twitter using this typology. The research also evaluates the influence of the issue on retweet volume. The study's basis was a 15.8 million-tweet corpus obtained during the 2015 Spanish General Election pre-campaign and campaign. This dataset was analysed using an automatic classification system. The results highlighted a predominance of policy issues during both the pre-campaign and campaign, except for the two televised debates, during which campaign issues were the most prevalent. On the election night, users commented much more on political issues. Finally, the kind of issue most likely to be retweeted was policy issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The infotainment format offers candidates an informal setting to show a more personal side of themselves to the electorate, opening themselves up to potential voters. An example of media hybridisation, social networks users can immediately comment on infotainment television programmes, a process known as second screening. These second screeners tend to be especially active in politics. This paper analyses the immediate emotional reaction of these users as they watch infotainment programmes that air during the campaign or pre-campaign seasons and feature political candidates as guests. We have confirmed that second screeners react more emotionally towards the candidate when his or her party is mentioned, and less emotionally when the host displays an aggressive attitude through his or her non-verbal communication. When issues related to the candidate's personal lives are discussed, users' emotional reactions improve slightly. The relevance of this research stems from the fact that we are witnessing the consolidation of a politics that increasingly strays from ideological questions, and instead focuses on more emotional and personal issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Candidates, parties, media and citizens have the same ability to post tweets. For this reason, mapping the dynamics of interaction among users is essential to evaluate the processes of influence in an electoral campaign. However, characterising these aspects requires methodologies that consider the interconnections generated by users globally. The discipline of social network analysis provides the concepts of centrality and modularity, both very suitable for the context of network communication. This article analyses the political conversation on Twitter during the 2015 and 2016 General Elections in Spain, in which four candidates with significant popularity in the electorate participated. Two corpora of 8.9 million and 9.7 million tweets were collected from each campaign, respectively, to analyse the networks of mentions and retweets. The network of mentions appears more blurred than that of retweets, allowing us to better estimate users’ partisan preference. The graphs of the network of retweets show a strong internal activity within clusters, and the proximity between them reflects the ideological axis of each party. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sponsored content on Facebook has become an indispensable tool for implementing political campaign strategies. However, in political communication research, this channel is still unexplored due to its advertising model in which only target audiences are exposed to sponsored content. The launching of the Facebook Ad Library in May 2018 can be considered a turning point in this regard, inasmuch as it now offers users direct access to ads paid for by political parties, among other advertisers. This paper analyzes some aspects of the strategies implemented by six national parties during the campaigns running up to the two general elections held in Spain in 2019, by performing an analysis on a corpus of 14,684 ads downloaded directly from the Facebook Ad Library. It also provides evidence of the different emphasis placed by the parties on sponsored content. For its part, an analysis of ad scheduling shows how the publishing of ads was stepped up as polling day approached, while also revealing the practice of posting political content way in advance of election campaigns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]