Collaborative Research: EAGER: This project “provides the infrastructure necessary to answer critical questions about the role of digital advertising in American democracy, including the extent to which ‘dark money’ dominates campaigns, and the spread and reach of misinformation in campaigns.

The project team is building expandable infrastructure to acquire, process, integrate, label, and distribute digital election advertising data from two large online platforms. The result is a centralized repository that provides robust documentation of all procedures and code such that they can be modified to apply to other platforms and contexts for expansion. Cross-platform integration and standardization of digital election advertising data through human and state-of-the-art computational methods reduces costs to individual researchers, provides parallel procedures already in place for analyzing TV advertising (and thus maximizing comparability to existing data), provides linkage information to other data sources, and produces accessible data to benefit the community.

Accomplishing this aim is a high-risk/high-reward endeavor. For instance, new approaches or methods are needed to capture and label relevant advertising by focus, especially when the true sponsor is unclear or disguised.”