Expert Forum (EFOR) analyzed the expenses made by political parties and politicians on social media, through Facebook and Google, in the first three months of 2024 electoral year.
A press release from EFOR sent to SpotMedia.ro presents the main conclusions of the analysis regarding party expenses for social media.
- Over 3 million lei were spent on promoting official pages of members/candidates/elected officials at local or central level.
- Almost another 600,000 lei were spent for promotion through online publications, non-governmental organizations, or other entities, through ads marked as political/electoral/social.
- Over 75% (2.4 million lei) was spent by USR, PNL (each 700,000), PSD (650,000), and AUR (325,000).
- The total expenses of these four parties did not increase compared to the same period last year. Specifically, PNL's expenses increased, while those associated with USR pages decreased.
- Expenses for AUR-associated pages increased nearly 20 times.
- For USR, PSD, and AUR, the leaders' pages were among those with the highest expenses.
- For PNL, the party president's page ranks lower in terms of expenses.
- In addition to politicians' pages, we identified pages that appear to be publications but are associated with parties. The most numerous and visible are related to AUR, having a large number of ads, even though they do not invest much.
- There are 42 pages that promoted 127 ads worth 20,000 lei in Neamț County. Although the amount is not large, it is interesting how information is conveyed in very similar formats in multiple cities in Neamț County, promoting PNL candidates and denigrating local PSD elected officials. This type of coordinated campaign actually shows that the PSD-PNL alliances are not as strong locally as party leaders present them to be at the central level.
- It is not known whether the ads are paid for with the subsidy received by parties from the state budget.
- Online promotion represents a very small percentage of the total investments made by parties from subsidies.
- Political parties spent approximately 600,000 lei on Google.
- Half of the money was spent by PSD, and nearly 40% by USR.
- The majority of expenses were related to advertisers promoting the party itself; cases where an individual is the advertiser are fewer.
- Expenses decreased compared to a similar period in 2023, when payments of nearly 700,000 lei were recorded.
- Advertisers associated with PNL and USR spent significantly less, while those linked to PSD spent six times more.
More details about the methodology can be found in the previous EFOR report and on https://www.banipartide.ro.
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