Political Advertisement and Coordinated Behavior on Social Media in the Lead-Up to the 2021 German Federal Elections

In this study, we analyze organic and paid social media communication from political candidates, parties, and other social media users, in the lead-up to the 2021 German federal election. We document the activity of coordinated networks of Facebook pages and groups dealing with the election, the investment in Facebook advertising of the main parties and their targeting strategies, as well as the engagement they reached organically. We collected the Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter social media accounts of the seven main parties (AfD, CDU, CSU, DIE LINKE, FDP, DIE GRÜNEN, and SPD) and their candidates, relying on the official websites of the parties and the lists of “Direktkandidaten” and “Listenkandidaten” published in the lead up to the elections. We also compiled a list of 450 political-related keywords, updating the lists used by GESIS to monitor previous elections in Germany (e.g., Stier et al., 2018), to collect posts published on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. We collected all social media posts that matched the keywords or were posted by the monitored accounts in the six weeks leading up to the elections by using CrowdTangle API and Twitter API v2. We used the same list of accounts and keywords to collect all advertisements through the Facebook Ad API. The final dataset included 4,561 social media accounts of parties and candidates and 281,830 social media accounts sharing political content, for a total of 668,032 Facebook posts, 129,317 Instagram posts, 20,703 Facebook advertisements, and 1,820,156 Twitter posts. As in the 2019 European election in Germany (Hegelich & Serrano, 2019), the populist right-wing party AfD reached an exceptionally high organic engagement on Facebook, and the green party Die Grünen and conservative CDU led the standings of the Facebook advertisement investment. Nonetheless, they were both overtaken in the overall number of ad impressions by the economic liberal FDP, who strategically spent less on a higher number of advertisements. Considering the area of microtargeting, our findings show that the content of some advertisements was exclusively targeted to women and young generations. They, however, represented just a modest part of the total number of advertisements run by parties and candidates. Using the R package CooRnet (Giglietto, Righetti, & Rossi, 2020), we also found large coordinated networks on Facebook spreading far-right and anti-establishment narratives, as well as anti-lockdown and anti-COVID19 policies messages. In these networks, harsh comments against opponents and a wide range of sources that shared disinformation during the elections (NewsGuard, 2021) were common. References Hegelich, S., Serrano, J. C. M. (2019). Microtargeting in Deutschland bei der Europawahl 2019, Landesanstalt für Medien NRW 2019. Giglietto, F., Righetti, N., & Rossi, L. (2020). CooRnet. Detect coordinated link sharing behavior on social media. http://coornet.org NewsGuard (2021). We’re tracking the top myths about the German federal elections and the websites spreading them. Stier, S., Bleier, A., Bonart, M., Mörsheim, F., Bohlouli, M., Nizhegorodov, M., ... & Staab, S. (2018). Systematically monitoring social media: The case of the German federal election 2017