Politics in the Facebook Era. Evidence from the 2016 US Presidential Elections.

Internet platforms are able to exploit extensive quantities of user-generated data and, thanks to sophisticated technologies, allow policy makers to reach voters with personalized messages (political micro-targeting). Social Media has for this reason become a major tool for political campaigning. A recent PEW Poll reveleaved that 60% of US adults used social media to learn about the latest Presidential elections. Many practitioners, scholars and journalists, think that social media may have significantly contributed to Donald Trump's victory in 2016. We propose a new metric for the intensity of political campaigning, based on online advertising prices. We scrape daily prices for State-Ideology specific audiences, during the three months preceeding the 2016 US Presidential Elections. We then compute the extent of the political campaign conducted via Facebook to micro-target voters, and estimate the effect this campaign had on the behavior of those voters who relied mainly on social media to gather political information.

The Taxman Calls. How Does Facebook Answer? Global Effects of Taxation on Online Advertising

We study the effects of the taxation of digital platforms on the online advertising market. We exploit novel data on daily unit prices of Facebook ads targeted to country-specific audiences, collected around a major change in the firm’s accounting practices following the introduction of the UK Diverted Profit Tax. We show that a substantial increase in ads prices followed such change, although with heterogeneous intensity across countries. These results are in line with a model of a platform operating in the global advertising market. We show that taxation of profits generated in one country makes the price charged to advertisers from that country (resp. other countries) increase (decrease). Accordingly, we demonstrate that aggregate advertising prices in OECD countries increased more, after the policy change, the larger is the market share of UK-based advertisers.