The effects of political advertising on Facebook and Instagram before the 2020 US election

We study the effects of social media political advertising by randomizing subsets of 36,906 Facebook users and 25,925 Instagram users to have political ads removed from their news feeds for 6 weeks before the 2020 US presidential election. We show that most presidential ads were targeted towards parties’ own supporters and that fundraising ads were the most common. On both Facebook and Instagram, we found no detectable effects of removing political ads on political knowledge, polarization, perceived legitimacy of the election, political participation (including campaign contributions), candidate favourability and turnout. This was true overall and for both Democrats and Republicans separately.