By Trey Plante ‘24, Dale Ross ‘22
Our goal was to develop a dataset of Snapchat ads to enable the Wesleyan Media Project to research an area of ads that impacts a younger demographic, and hasn’t been explored as thoroughly as other platforms like Facebook. The Snapchat political ads library offers an interesting look into how political ads operate on primarily video based platform that has unique user base. By investigating the Snapchat political ad library, we hope to recognize differences between ads on different platforms, and discover underlying trends in political entities behavior across platforms. We extracted text from the speech in ad videos and text in ad images and generated facial recognition results from the Snapchat 2020 political ad dataset. Additionally, we developed a classifier that predicts the party lean of a Snapchat ad using the content data we gathered. As a result of our research, we have made it possible for the Wesleyan Media Project to analyze Snapchat ads, and have taken steps to predict the party of future Snapchat ads.