Wesleyan Media Project - public_data

Welcome! This repo is part of the Cross-platform Election Advertising Transparency initiatIVE (CREATIVE) project. CREATIVE is a joint infrastructure project of WMP and privacy-tech-lab at Wesleyan University. CREATIVE provides cross-platform integration and standardization of political ads collected from Google and Facebook.

In this repo you will find data output and accessibility.

[A picture of the repo pipeline with this repo highlighted] https://mediaproject.wesleyan.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/wmp_pipeline_051123_v2_circle.png

Table of Contents

• Introduction

• Objective

• Data

• Setup

Introduction

This repo contains links to data made publically available by the Wesleyan Media Project.

Currently, this consists of a file which contains aggregate weekly spending compiled from the Facebook Aggregate Report from the period 1/26/2020 to 11/7/2020 for all page name and disclaimer combinations that were identified by the Wesleyan Media Project as being associated with a page ID that was caught through keyword searches of the API for all federal candidate names during the general election period 9/1/2020 through Election Day.

However, in terms of files, this repo contains just this README, and it should therefore not be downloaded into a folder as many of the other repos are.

To access the data that is linked to in this repo, click on the link in the setup section.

For data from prior to 2020, as well as data that can't be made publicly available (such as data provided to us by Kantar Media/CMAG), see: https://mediaproject.wesleyan.edu/dataaccess/

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Number 2235006.

Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Objective

Each of our repos belongs to one or more of the the following categories:

• Data Collection
• Data Storage & Processing
• Preliminary Data Classification
• Final Data Classification
• Data Output and Accessibility

This repo is part of the Data Output and Accessibility section. The data within this repo can be used in any analysis where aggregate weekly spending compiled from the Facebook Aggregate Report from the period 1/26/2020 to 11/7/2020 is wanted.

Data

The data linked in this repo is in a .csv format. A description of the variables, along with details on data collection methods and known issues can be found at the page that contains the link to the data itself

Setup

1. Accessing the Aggregate Weekly Spending Data

To access the spending data discussed above, head to Releases. There is also data relevant to the release and information on how it should be cited included there. When you are on this page, scroll down to 'Assets' and click on the filename to download (make sure to click on the file itself, the source code files only contain compressed versions of the GitHub repo readme, not the data). Once downloaded, you should be able to open the data, access it, and use it.