ABSTRACT
This chapter used real-world advertising data to examine how emotion can act as a frame in advertising messages influencing the reach of political propaganda. This process used a sentiment analysis and word associations of fear to understand potential outcomes of exposure to an advertisement with online engagement trace data. Data were examined from two sources during unique time periods, using a 2016 Russian Internet Research Agency sourced advertising sample (n = 2,274) and a 2019 U.S.-sourced advertising sample (n = 162,324). The measures were operationalized using sentiment and emotion analysis in R to convert the advertising text to data before running a mediation analysis on impressions. The results provide some evidence that word associations of fear can mediate exposure to political advertising on social media. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed in light of the popularity of social media and the precision targeting of advertising in a social network.
