Credit to Michaela Manfull

Political advertisements, especially on social media, have given teenagers more access to information about candidates. Social media is the new outlet for political ads to reach younger people and get them interested in voting.

At the political strategy firm where a senior at FHN Elise Hyman works. She works for a democratic political firm where they work on making sure that the candidate’s message gets out to the public and reaches the right people mostly on different social media platforms.

“We mostly use social media because people usually don’t look at newspapers anymore,” Hyman said.

This increased advertising on social media is leading to more awareness in the community about politics, especially young adults, which is better for the candidate and voters.

Candidates make different types of ads based on what is happening in the community or who they are and what they stand for, so Hyman and her firm could get the message across all social media networks.

“If it’s a video ad then the candidate will create a video or if it’s like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, it would be a digital post,” Hyman said.

To make sure that Hyman and her team reach a certain demographic of people, they use public voter information and data.

“[The advertisement] are really rolled out based on areas or demographics,” Hyman said.

“For targeting ads, based on location or age range [that can be found through] census data, you can only be targeted if you are above the age of 18 and that’s because voter information is public, so we can access that information,” Hyman said. “It gives us things like age, race, and stuff like that. We figure out what the trends are and what people care about through data, to help us bring up topics that people in the community care about.”

This exposure to political advertisement on social media has given teenagers a new understanding about political issues and different points of views. Helping teenagers be more active in the political scene, connecting and speaking out to help others to understand what is going on. This increased advertisement on social media makes teenagers feel like they are included in the topics or social issues that are going on.

Although the rise of political social media advertising has been positive on informating teenagers so far, there are some risks. There are some instances where misinformation and false news has been put out on social media platforms to influence certain groups of people. Advertisement aren’t always true, so it influence impressionable teenager to take in and believe in false information

“Advertisement could be dangerous because you always don’t know if the information is true or not,” Hyman said.