One of the reasons for Labour’s surprising performance in this year’s general election has been said to be voter turnout – which, at 68.7%, reached its highest level since 1997. An analysis by LSE researchers Damian Tambini, Nick Anstead and João Carlos Magalhães suggests that a shift in the party’s Facebook advertising strategy in the last 48 hours of the campaign might be one of the factors involved in this phenomenon. In this period, Labour’s campaign on the platform not only mushroomed, but also zoomed in one main goal: prompting users to get out and vote.This post is the fourth in a series that is examining data collected as part of a joint project recently launched by the LSE Media Policy Project and the “Who Targets Me” initiative. Previous analyses have considered how Liberal Democrats, Labour and Conservatives were using Facebook to court voters.
