Parties and candidates spent around €870,000 on ads on social media platforms during the general election campaign, according to data made available by social media platforms under EU laws.
Fine Gael and its candidates were the biggest spenders on ads of all the parties, spending more than €280,000 in total – just over €100,000 of which was spent in the last two days of the campaign.
Data collated by transparency group, Who Targets Me, shows on November 28 and polling day on 29 November, Fine Gael spent more than €48,000 and €46,000 respectively.
Fianna Fáil and its candidates were the next highest spenders, with a total of €170,000 over the campaign. The party and its candidates also considerably upped their daily spending during the last couple of days ahead of voting, spending around €20,000 on the day before people cast their ballots.
During previous campaigns, including the local and European elections in June, Sinn Féin has been - or has tracked close to – the highest spending Irish party on digital advertising. However, in General Election 2024 it was heavily outspent not just by Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, but also Labour.
Sinn Féin, including its candidates personally, spent €80,000 on Facebook and Instagram advertising in total. Labour campaigns in comparison spent just over €100,000.
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Sinn Féin had been spending around €1,200 a day on Meta ads before the election was even officially announced. Meta is the parent company which operates Facebook and Instagram, which soaked up the vast majority of political advertising spending during the campaign.
The party's spending grew gradually into the second week of the campaign, and ramped up into the final week but not to the scale seen during previous elections.
In the run up to the local and European elections, Sinn Féin outspent all other parties for weeks only being surpassed by a surge of spending by Fine Gael in the final days of that campaign.
During this election, Sinn Féin did scale up spending towards the end of the campaign, reaching between €10,000 and €15,000 per day in the last three days.
Despite that, overall, it was still outspent by the three other parties. The fifth biggest spender on Meta ads was the Social Democrats with €71,000.
Other money was spent by parties and candidates on Google sites, like YouTube.
On them, Sinn Féin has also trailed Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil, The Irish Freedom Party, the Social Democrats and People Before Profit on Google ads, spending just €845. Party sources said during the campaign they were more focused on 'organic' social media campaigns - in other words, videos which are shared and engaged with by users but not promoted with funding as adverts.
The party's spending this time marked a stark difference with its approach to the local and European elections. Three weeks out from polling day during that campaing Sinn Féin spent €42,900 on 11 ads across Google search and YouTube alone.
No spending push on Google occurred this time round from Sinn Féin.
In comparison to the party's €845, Fine Gael spent €27,000, Fianna Fáil spent around €8,000, the Irish Freedom Party spent €3,500, Social Democrats spent €2,000, and People Before Profit spent €1,000.
Over recent elections, parties and candidates have been focusing increasingly on reaching voters on social media platforms, and have made their ads on certain platforms a prominent feature of their campaigns.
Large platforms are required to publish political ad spending data under the European Digital Services Act. Meta and Google both maintain transparency data libraries from which detailed information is readily available.
X – formerly Twitter - is also subject to the Digital Services Act, however researchers point to difficulties accessing data on ads published by the company.
Other platforms, like TikTok, say they do not allow political ads. On TikTok, the content published by the parties is supposed to be wholly 'organic,' in other words not boosted in prominence by advertising cash.
