  Online political advertisements have become an important element in electoral
campaigning throughout the world. At the same time, concepts such as
disinformation and manipulation have emerged as a global concern. Although
these concepts are distinct from online political ads and data-driven electoral
campaigning, they tend to share a similar trait related to valence, the
intrinsic attractiveness or averseness of a message. Given this background, the
paper examines online political ads by using a dataset collected from Google's
transparency reports. The examination is framed to the mid-2019 situation in
Europe, including the European Parliament elections in particular. According to
the results based on sentiment analysis of the textual ads displayed via
Google's advertisement machinery, (i) most of the political ads have expressed
positive sentiments, although these vary greatly between (ii) European
countries as well as across (iii) European political parties. In addition to
these results, the paper contributes to the timely discussion about data-driven
electoral campaigning and its relation to politics and democracy.

Computers and Society