DOPEH, Dynamics of online political elite hostility: A study of the multimodal anatomy of negative campaigning in political ads on meta.

Negativity and incivility in political campaigning have been in the focus of research for their potentially pernicious effects on systemic democratic attitudes and political behaviour at large (e.g. Skytte, 2021). The move of political campaigns from legacy media into social media advertising has not only increased the number of campaigns and campaigners (Fowler et al., 2021) but also further shifted the focus from textual content to other modes of communication (Behr, 2022). Despite the importance of visual and acoustic modes in the packaging of political campaigns online, both observational and experimental studies have mainly focused on the textual content of campaigns, e.g., studying (the impacts of) the focus, tone, and incivility of attack ads. Bringing literature on the use of visual and acoustic contents in advertising (Bruner, 1990; Huang & Labroo, 2020) and of the multi-modality of messages (Kjeldsen & Hess, 2021; Schubert, 2021) into the study of negative campaigning, we make a dive into the multi-modality political advertising, to study and explore how the anatomy of various types of campaign messages (negative, comparative, positive; civil, uncivil; character, policy-attacks) differ across text, acoustic and visual features. We do so based on all political ads on Facebook and Instagram aired between 5 months before and one month after the most recent general elections in Australia, New Zealand and the United States accessed through the Meta Ad Library. To study variation in the packaging of different types of ads, we first manually code the tonality, incivility, content focus (character vs. policy) for a sample of ads based on all spoken and written contents. Based on these annotations we train a classifier for the text-based message components of the ads to consistently differentiate types of political ads for the entire corpus. In a second step we explore how the various types of ads systematically differ across acoustic (e.g., voice pitch and variation, chord progression) and visual modes (colour palettes and their changes, objects and expressed emotions) of communication for all the previously extracted acoustic and visual features. Based on the literature integration and empirical analyses this study marks a first step in the exploration of how types of political campaigns differ in their packaging. By also taking stock of the dynamics of elite hostility online, we provide a contextualisation for experimental stimuli that can be used to anchor these in the factual distribution of negativity and incivility of every-day campaigns. Contrasting online campaign dynamics across various contexts (NZ, AU and USA) will also allow us to make statements about the generalizability of negative campaigning research in the US context. Finally, a better understanding of the multi-modality of negative advertisements also constitutes a starting point for the construction of a reliable multi-modal measurement tool for NC.