ArticlePNAS nexus2025
The role of social media ads for election outcomes: Evidence from the 2021 German election.
Article in PNAS nexus, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
2 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- Comparable 2022 General Election Advertising Datasets from Meta and Google.Scientific data · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Social media ads have become a key communication channel in politics. However, the relationship between political ads from social media and election outcomes is not fully understood. Here, we aim to estimate the association between online political advertising and election outcomes during the 2021 German federal election. For this, we analyze a large-scale dataset of 21,641 political ads from Facebook and Instagram that received ≈126 million impressions. Using regression analysis, we show that political advertising on social media has a positive relationship with a candidate's election outcome and may even sway elections. All else equal, ≈200,000 additional impressions are predicted to increase a candidate's votes by 2.1%. We further use a causal sensitivity analysis to evaluate how unobserved confounding may affect our estimates. We find that the estimated impact of ads cannot be reasonably explained away, highlighting the significance of social media for election outcomes.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.