Social media platforms are currently the main channel for political messaging, allowing politicians to target specific demographics and adapt based on their reactions. However, making this communication transparent is challenging, as the messaging is tightly coupled with its intended audience and often echoed by multiple stakeholders interested in advancing specific policies. Our goal in this paper is to take a first step towards understanding these highly decentralized settings. We propose a weakly supervised approach to identify the stance and issue of political ads on Facebook and analyze how political campaigns use some kind of demographic targeting by location, gender, or age. Furthermore, we analyze the temporal dynamics of the political ads on election polls.

翻译：社交媒体平台目前是政治信息传递的主要渠道，使政治家能够针对特定人群进行定位，并根据其反应进行调整。然而，确保这种沟通的透明度颇具挑战性，因为信息传递与其目标受众紧密耦合，且常常被多个致力于推进特定政策的利益相关方重复传播。本文旨在迈出理解这些高度分散化设置的第一步。我们提出一种弱监督方法，用于识别Facebook上政治广告的立场和议题，并分析政治竞选如何按地理位置、性别或年龄等维度实施人口统计定位。此外，我们还分析了政治广告在选举民调中的时间动态特征。