Donald Trump is the biggest political spender on Facebook
Guess who's sending fat checks to Mark Zuckerberg and company?
Yep, Donald J. Trump. The president's political action committee (PAC) has spent $274,000 on Facebook ads since May, reports the New York Times.
That makes him the biggest political spender on Facebook. Planned Parenthood, which came in second, spent $188,000.
The numbers were crunched by New York University researchers who scraped data from Facebook, which created a publicly searchable archive of political Facebook ads in May.
So, what does $274,000 get you? Ads seen by 37 million people, according to the researchers. As an example, the Times highlighted an ad promoting Brett Kavanaugh, Trump's nominee for the Supreme Court.
It wasn't only conservatives spending on Facebook, though. Of the 449 top spenders, 210 were on the left, while 124 were on the right.
After Facebook was blasted over allowing "fake news" to spread during the 2016 election, and the whole Cambridge Analytica debacle, the company has tried to make its ad network more transparent. It now requires anyone who wants to run political campaign or "issue" ads to get authorization from Facebook first. The company also started labeling political ads.
Topics Facebook Donald Trump
Keith Wagstaff is an assistant editor at Mashable and a terrible Settlers of Catan player. He has written for TIME, The Wall Street Journal Magazine, NBC News, The Village Voice, VICE, GQ and New York Magazine, among many other reputable and not-so-reputable publications. After nearly a decade in New York City, he now lives in his native Los Angeles.
