Understanding persuasive strategies used in online political advertising and how the public views them

Concerns about online political advertising often focus on the techniques used to engage and persuade the intended audience. In this paper, we examine the persuasion strategies being used in online political advertising and ask how acceptable these strategies are to the public by analyzing a sample of 2,272 political ads placed on Facebook during the 2019 UK general election. Identifying six persuasion strategies, we examine the prominence, tone, and source of each strategy to provide new insight into the tactics used in online political advertising. We find that different persuasion strategies are not used to the same extent, and that while positive tones are predominantly used by all actors, certain strategies are used more negatively, especially when mobilized by satellite campaign groups. Integrating these findings with data from a second survey study of public responses to these ads, we find evidence that positive ads are deemed more acceptable, but that when positive strategies are combined with negative strategies in a single ad, perceptions of acceptability decline. Collectively, this study offers new empirical evidence of the persuasion strategies deployed in ads and suggests that an emphasis on concerning content and negative perceptions misses much about online political ads.