turn out to vote. Arguably, 100 percent of campaign ads on television have
persuasion as their chief goal. A working paper found a similar distribution of
goals in online display ads in the 2016 presidential campaign (Ridout et al.
2017), with 52 percent of ads designed to gather information about the viewer,
37 percent designed to persuade, 15 percent asking for a donation, and
14 percent encouraging campaign involvement (percentages are higher than
100 percent because ads could have more than one goal). Consistent with the
varied focus of online advertising, many contain little policy information; just
under a quarter of online ads in the Ridout et al. (2017) study contained
discussion of policy compared to more than 70 percent of television ads from
the same campaigns. Another paper (Franz et al. 2020) conﬁrmed this ﬁnding of
more issue discussion on television than online but found considerable
consistency in the issue agendas across the two media; moreover,
the
Social_Media_and_Democracy