Ultimately, the IDJC identified 158 networks of these accounts collectively representing $8.5 million in ad spending and 504 million impressions from September 2023 through April 2024.

An impression is a count of every time a post appears on a user's screen while scrolling on a social network—whether or not they liked, shared, commented, or interacted with it at all. It provides the broadest possible picture of the impact a single post may have had on users.

For comparison, the analytics service Databox estimates that the entire apparel and footwear industry achieved 460,000 impressions via Facebook ads in one month in 2023. If extrapolated over the period of the IDCJ study, that could amount to roughly 3.68 million impressions—a fraction of the more than 500 million impressions made by inauthentic influencers.

Researchers categorized pages according to independent reviews by team members, Google searches to determine political party affiliation, and the Ad Fontes media bias scale. The team found that conservative-leaning pages spent $2.1 million more on ads over the period studied and recorded 315.4 million more impressions than progressive-leaning pages. And accounts falling into these ideological categories targeted different groups of Meta users across Facebook and Instagram.

Those partisan pages were equally likely to target older users over younger ones with their posts, but there were differences in the gender of users targeted. Researchers drew a parallel between how progressive pages aligned with national political trends in targeting more women with their ads than men and how conservative-leaning pages targeted men more heavily.

The ads tended to push misleading information about different topics based on their ideological leanings, too. Among conservative influencer networks identified, immigration, the economy, safety, and foreign policy were the top issues. For progressive pages, the economy was an important issue, too, along with health and social issues, including abortion access, according to researchers.

Aside from Donald Trump-related swag and financial scams from conservative-leaning pages, researchers found that progressive-leaning pages also commonly pushed health benefits-related scams to users they targeted with ads.

Facebook has since shut down the Patriot Sanctuary page and others identified in research from the IDJC, which makes its database of political ads on Meta available publicly. Researchers warn, however, that when one page is closed, another tends to pop up in its place.

Data from Meta also paints an incomplete picture of the networks of dishonest actors that could be working to fleece concerned citizens and manipulate voters. The company is the only major ad platform or social network that allows approved organizations access to its advertising data for study. Social networks, including X, formerly known as Twitter, and TikTok, do not offer the same access.

"It underscores that tech platforms need to do more to allow academics and journalists access to platform data so that political actors can be held to account with the American public," lead researcher Jennifer Stromer-Galley said in a statement.

Story editing by Carren Jao. Additional editing by Kelly Glass. Copy editing by Kristen Wegrzyn.