Politics is a rather uncertain career, fraught with ups and downs. For Facebook though, politics is appearing to be a goldmine, as would-be leaders spend millions of dollars on political campaigns, so as to gain an edge over their competitors.
According to the recently released Facebook ad archive report, U.S. Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke, who is challenging Republican Ted Cruz in Texas, is the top spender. O’Rourke’s “Beto for Texas” campaign saw spendings to the tune of $5.37 million on Facebook sites between May to Oct. 20. President Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again Committee” wasn’t very far behind and spent around $3.14 million during this same period.
Of course, the biggest spender has been Facebook itself. The company spent a massive $12.5 million on information campaigns. Some of these campaigns were aimed towards “blowing Facebook’s own harp” so to speak, where the company promoted its investments in security, some of the ads had to do with acknowledging mistakes that the social networking platform had made, while still others were to encourage users to register and vote.
The $10 million+ that Facebook has spent in convincing people has a direct co-relation to the various scandals that the company has found itself embroiled in over the past few years. Fakes news, hate speech, have been very real issues on the platform and it is rather ironic that the company is using the very same platform to convince people otherwise. And it also turns public opinion into another problem that you can solve by throwing money at it.
Meanwhile, the sheer amounts of money that politicians are throwing at Facebook is a testament to the platform’s effectiveness in convincing the masses. If Facebook’s dominance in this area continues, don’t be surprised if the company decides to start shielding numbers associated with political spending in the near future.
