Immigration has been a contentious topic in the world, and especially in Italy. In this visualizations, we show information about the advertising campaigns in Italy around immigration, focusing on the biggest political parties. We encourage the viewers to interact with the visualization, select different parties and time periods, and explore the geographic and demographic viewership of their ads. We hope such visualizations will increase transparency and encourage discussion around the political advertising around contentious issues.

This visualization is based on data obtained via the Facebook Ads Library. The advertisements were collected using keywords related to immigration. The library gives us information about the ads, who posted them, approximate number of people that saw them (impressions) and money spent (expenditures). For those who saw the ads, the breakdown by gender, age, and geographic region is also provided. To determine whether an ad is pro- or anti-immigrant, we built a supervised machine learning model trained on manually annotated dataset.

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For details on how the data was collected and processed, please read our papers:

Clandestino or Rifugiato? Anti-immigration Facebook Ad Targeting in Italy
Arthur Capozzi, Gianmarco De Francisci Morales, Yelena Mejova, Corrado Monti, Andre Panisson and Daniela Paolotti
ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), 2021

Facebook Ads: Politics of Migration in Italy
Arthur Capozzi, Gianmarco De Francisci Morales, Yelena Mejova, Corrado Monti, Andre Panisson and Daniela Paolotti
International Conference on Social Informatics (SocInfo), 2020

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We would like to thank the CRT Lagrange Fellowship program for supporting this project.
If you have questions about this project or visualization, please contact migration-ads@isi.it