Between August 31 and September 29, candidates in the September 28 parliamentary elections spent a total of approximately €237,167 on 2,903 advertisements on the META platform. On Google platforms, the identified electoral competitors sponsored 2,046 advertisements, but there is a complete lack of data on budgets, duration of broadcast, and audiences, making it difficult to estimate the real impact.
The leaders in advertising spending on META platforms during the monitored period were:
- Partidul Acțiune și Solidaritate (Action and Solidarity Party, PAS) – €93,386 for 826 ads
- Blocul Alternativa (Alternative Bloc) – €33,346 for 639 ads
- Andrei Năstase – €28,394 for 230 ads
- Gabriel Călin – €20,693 for 40 ads
- Partidul Nostru (Our Party) – €15,265 for 118 ads
- Partidul Național Moldovenesc (Moldovan National Party) – €10,726 for 288 ads
If we take the average per sponsorship, Călin spent approximately €517 per advertisement, while the average for PAS is €113 per advertisement, for the Alternative Bloc €52.18 per advertisement, and for Our Party €129.28 per advertisement. PAS’s expenses represent about 40% of the total amounts declared.
On Google platforms, the leaders in terms of the number of ads set between August 31 and September 29 were:
- Partidul Acțiune și Solidaritate (Action and Solidarity Party, PAS) – 651 ads
- Partidul Nostru (Our Party) – 500 ads
- Olesea Stamate – 300 ads
- Blocul Electoral Patriotic (Patriotic Electoral Bloc) – 200 ads
- Blocul Alternativa (Alternative Bloc) – 200 ads
Other formations, such as Democrația Acasă (Democracy at Home), AUR (Alliance for the Union of Romanians), Moldova Mare (Greater Moldova), the Partidul Liberal (Liberal Party), or Tatiana Crețu, do not appear in the Meta Ad Library or Google Ads Transparency reports, having no sponsored advertisements.
The study analyzed only pages affiliated with political competitors, excluding anonymous pages used for disinformation, as no candidate publicly claimed them. If we had determined that some anonymous accounts/pages promoted a political candidate, they would have been included in the study.