Keyword – stealth media

Bene, Márton – Petrekanics, Márton – Bene, Mátyás:

Who spends how much?

This study looks into Facebook’s political advertising sphere in the contexts of the 2019 European Parliamentary and the municipal election campaigns in Hungary. It focuses on the distribution of advertising expenditure between pro-government and oppositional actors, and in light of the ‘stealth media’ thesis (Kim et al., 2018) it also investigates the question of what type of Facebook pages are active in this advertising platform. Its findings show that there was an opposition dominance in terms of advertising expenditure in both campaigns. Also, the advertising sphere was largely dominated by official political actors, but a few highly partisan media outlets also played an important role. Pages with unidentifiable background, however, were marginal in this sphere, refuting the ‘stealth media’ hypothesis.

Keywords: political advertising, political communication, social media, stealth media