During the presidential election, both candidates aggressively pursued the Latinx vote, particularly in battleground states of Florida and Arizona. As the Wall Street Journal reported in an article published on November 20, though Biden won a bigger share of this increasingly significant voting block, both nationally and in the states, Trump’s TV ad spending did improve his performance, particularly in Florida, which he won by more than 3 percentage points.

One of the sources used to gather and assess these trends in the article was the Ad Observatory, a web-based tool that allows reporters, researchers, and the general public to identify trends in how ads are targeted to specific audiences. A project of the Online Political Transparency Project  at NYU Tandon, data from the Observatory was cited in a number of articles in the run-up to the election and in the days that followed.

One such article, published in Vox on November 19, points to misinformation about the Democratic candidate in online ads as a factor in Trump’s unexpected success. It points to data compiled by Tandon Ph.D. candidate Laura Edelson that shows the Trump campaign spent more $26,000, for one Facebook ad that generated between 1.6 million and 1.9 million impressions on the platform from July 1 until November 3. It made these impressions by painting Joe Biden as a radical socialist, in the mold of the late Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro or late Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. 

Edelson was also quoted in a Yahoo.com article on the practice of paying influencers and publishers to create and post political content that skates under the restrictions in place on these platforms, and in a Politico article that spotlighted “the social network’s continued role as a conduit for hard-to-trace online spending.” She also offered a comment in an International Business Times articles about a loophole in Facebook’s policies that does not prevent removed ads from being reposted by other groups. In the latter, Edelson suggests Facebook is not aggressive enough in enforcing its policy, noting that “It’s not technically hard to prevent that same content from being uploaded.”