Why Harris campaign has spent $16 million on a Facebook page with 1000 followers
9NewsAs Donald Trump and Kamala Harris feverishly chase undecided voters in the final stretch of the US presidential campaign, millions of people in battleground states are being served ads on Facebook and Instagram from an obscure page calling itself "The Daily Scroll."
The social media ads, which are adorned with a nondescript logo resembling a pair of checkmarks, have promoted news articles from mainstream outlets including CNN, ABC and NBC, showing easing US inflation, cheaper insulin prices, and the consequences of state abortion bans.
But the ads on Meta-owned platforms aren't being paid for by any news outlet — they're a product of Harris' presidential campaign, which has spent heavily on social media platforms and embraced influencers to power her online efforts against Trump.
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Since Harris launched her bid for president this summer, her campaign has spent more than $US11 million ($16 million) on Facebook and Instagram ads to promote The Daily Scroll into users' feeds, a CNN analysis found. That made it the second biggest page by spending on political or social issues ads in the last 90 days, after only Harris' main campaign page.
The Harris campaign spent another $1.3 million on ads from a similar news aggregator page dubbed "Headlines 2024."
The ads promoting The Daily Scroll have appeared on screens at least 700 million times, according to data from Meta's Ad Library, with about 97 per cent of views coming from seven battleground states: Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina.
All the ads include a disclaimer that they are "paid for by Harris for President," and they do not appear to violate Meta's rules for political advertisers.
The Daily Scroll and Headlines 2024 pages are just a small part of a much wider effort to reach undecided voters across all forms of media, Kevin Munoz, a Harris campaign spokesperson, told CNN.
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Promoting news stories is just one of many digital strategies the campaign is using, in addition to traditional online display ads and short video clips to target voters on YouTube and other platforms, he said.
Overall, the Harris campaign has far outspent the Trump campaign on Meta's platforms, spending nearly $119 million on ads since this summer, compared with about $14 million from Trump's campaign and associated fundraising committees.
Unlike the Harris campaign's main Facebook and Instagram accounts, the ads run by The Daily Scroll and Headlines 2024 aren't soliciting donations, and most of them aren't directing users to the campaign's website. Instead, the Harris team is using the ads to promote select news stories from major media outlets that reflect well on the Democratic presidential nominee and poorly on Trump.
In recent months, the campaign has spent more than $3 million on The Daily Scroll to promote an ABC News story about slowing inflation — a major voter concern ahead of the election — which was viewed about 120 million times by Facebook and Instagram users in battleground states, according to the Meta database.
"Good news for consumers – price increases have cooled significantly as inflation reaches the lowest point in over three years," the ads declared.
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Other news reports promoted by the page include an NBC News article on Trump boasting that his crowd sizes rivaled that of Martin Luther King Jr., a CNN video of Harris speaking the day after Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race, and a story from The Guardian reporting that the Project 2025 conservative policy blueprint will "gut labor rights." The campaign spent more than $440,000 on ads promoting each of those reports.
While the thousands of ads in the social media campaign have appeared in users' feeds hundreds of millions of times, The Daily Scroll account itself appears dormant, with only a handful of public posts and roughly 1000 followers. Headlines 2024 is even more sparse, with only about 100 followers and no posts at all. This is because Meta allows advertisers to run ads that don't appear on the main feeds of the pages they are associated with.
"The ads are clearly labelled as being paid for by the Harris campaign; there is nothing obviously deceptive about them," said Peter Loge, director of the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University, who previously worked in the Obama administration. "There is no generic-sounding PAC associated with them."
