Study: of 228 groups found running divisive Facebook ads during 2016 election, 122 were “suspicious” and ran 4x more ads than others, ~20 had known links to IRA
WHEN YOUNG MIE Kim began studying political ads on Facebook in August of 2016—while Hillary Clinton was still leading the polls … Tweets: @wired , @davidfrum , @issielapowsky , @issielapowsky , @campaignlegal , @issielapowsky , @edbott , and @issielapowsky Tweets: @wired : Political ads from suspicious groups—including Russian trolls—leading up to the 2016 election were far more prevalent than initially suspected, new research shows http://www.wired.com/... David Frum / @davidfrum : The better the data, the larger and more effective the Russian pro-Trump Facebook operation looks http://twitter.com/... Issie Lapowsky / @issielapowsky : These “suspicious” advertisers predominantly targeted voters in swing states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. She also found that white voters received 87 percent of all immigration ads. https://www.wired.com/... Issie Lapowsky / @issielapowsky : She found that the advertisers that were not required to file any disclaimers or disclosures with the FEC ran 4 times as many of these divisive ads as advertisers that did have to file with the FEC: https://www.wired.com/... CampaignLegalCenter / @campaignlegal : “When [CLC Scholar in Residence] Young Mie Kim began studying political ads on Facebook in Aug. of 2016... few people had ever heard of the Russian propaganda group, Internet Research Agency.” Now data shows how critical it is to close disclosure loopholes. https://www.wired.com/... Issie Lapowsky / @issielapowsky : This research makes a strong case for regulation of digital political ads. Yes, the Russian trolls were running divisive, misleading ads without being detected, but...so lots of other groups we know nothing about https://www.wired.com/... Ed Bott / @edbott : How dark money used Facebook to steal the 2016 election. Amazing report from @issielapowsky of a J-school prof who captured the data in real time. https://www.wired.com/... pic.twitter.com/36rB6Bnpvo Issie Lapowsky / @issielapowsky : A researcher with lots of foresight scraped 5 million political ads on Facebook during 6 weeks before the 2016 election. She found that half of the advertisers had absolutely no federal records or online footprint. Of that half, 1 in 6 were Russian trolls. https://www.wired.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Young Mie Kim's dataset closes a gap the Mueller indictment left open: the [[a:926832|Mueller indictment showed Facebook's Groups tools were easy for Russian operators to exploit]], but this study quantifies how much of the divisive-ad volume came from actors outside any known indictment — 122 of 228 groups flagged as suspicious, running four times the ad volume of ordinary advertisers, with only about 20 traceable to the Internet Research Agency.
The finding lands in an arc where disclosure is the recurring failure point: the Trump campaign had already shown how provocative content and Custom Audiences amplified ad purchasing power, and Kim's data adds that advertisers skipping FEC disclaimers ran four times as many divisive ads — a pattern later echoed when researchers found 86K+ pages running political ads without proper disclosure.
First-order effects
- Facebook faces renewed pressure over its ad archive and targeting tools, since the study shows suspicious groups concentrated spending on swing-state voters in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania while evading federal disclaimer requirements.
- The FEC and Campaign Legal Center gain concrete evidence that the disclaimer loophole — not just foreign interference — drove disproportionate volumes of divisive advertising.
Second-order effects
- Researchers' dependence on platform-provided access becomes a battleground: as later reporting showed, Facebook weakened or disabled the tools researchers use to track political ads just as 2020 spending ramped up, making independent replication of Kim-style audits harder.
- Campaign operatives on both sides take note that unattributed, high-volume microtargeting works; the Trump campaign's subsequent $20M spend on 218K+ conservative-targeted ads built to harvest user data shows the tactic migrating from trolls to mainstream campaigns.
Third-order effects
- If undisclosed advertisers consistently out-spend disclosed ones, political-ad regulation drifts toward platform-enforced transparency — ad libraries, researcher access, authenticity verification — because FEC rules alone cannot reach actors with no federal footprint.
- The structural endpoint is an arms race between inauthentic advertiser networks and audit infrastructure, where each election's post-mortem study becomes the evidence base for the next round of platform policy and potential legislation.
The trend: Political advertising on Facebook is converging toward a transparency regime shaped less by election law than by whatever audit access platforms choose to grant researchers after each scandal.