Who saw the parties' Facebook ads? Mostly men, data shows
During the first seven months of the 2023 election year, the National Party ran more than 500 ads on Facebook and Instagram. An RNZ analysis of Meta's advertising data found that 92 of those ads were shown only to men. Just one was shown only to women.
The male-only ads cost National up to $21,000 and were seen up to 3.9 million times. The single ad shown only to women ran on 12 June, cost less than $100, and was seen by between 100 and 999 women aged 65 and older. National denied placing it.
Meta is the company that owns Facebook and Instagram. It runs a public database called the Ad Library, which shows who saw each ad. RNZ used that data for the first seven months of the election year. Ads paid for by Parliamentary Service — which funds MPs' office communications, not election campaigns — were left out. Across all parties, more than $200,000 went to Facebook during this period.
The Ad Library shows who saw an ad but not what settings a party chose. Think of it like seeing who opened a letter but not seeing the address label the sender wrote. So if an ad was seen only by men, that was very likely a deliberate choice by the party, not something the platform did on its own.
A National spokesperson said the party's ads targeted a range of groups, with 80 percent seen by both men and women. The spokesperson also denied Meta's record of the ad aimed at women. Meta's Ad Library page for National shows some content was removed because its disclaimer did not follow Meta's rules for ads about elections or politics.
ACT placed 63 ads during the period. Fourteen were shown only to men and none only to women. Those male-only ads were seen up to 518,000 times and cost up to $4,000. An ACT spokesperson said the party does not share details of its online strategy with the media and said its values and policies are for all New Zealanders.
The Green Party directed 13 of its 103 ads at women and none solely at men. Those ads cost up to $5,000 and were seen up to 768,000 times. A Green Party spokesperson said limited funding and resources meant the party had to be strategic about where it spent its money.
Labour did not run any ads funded by itself during this time. NZ First did not run any paid ads on Facebook or Instagram at all.
Questions about online ad transparency have been around since at least the 2020 election, when Stuff reported that some parties' ads were slightly skewed towards one gender. The Spinoff also reported on online ad spending during the 2023 election. A 2022 academic paper looked at whether the Ad Library actually helps regulators and the public keep an eye on political advertising (Internet Policy Review).
The broader context here is that New Zealand law does not require parties to say who they are targeting online. The Electoral Act sets spending limits and requires ads to carry an authorisation statement, but it does not make parties reveal the audience settings they choose for digital ads. Meta's Ad Library gives journalists and researchers a way to see some of that information anyway.
Sending different messages to different groups of people online is not new for political campaigns. It happens in other countries too. What stands out in this data is the pattern: National and ACT focused their single-gender ads on men, the Greens focused on women, and Labour and NZ First did not run targeted ads at all during this period.
National's denial of the single ad aimed at women raises a question about how reliable the Ad Library is as a tool for holding parties to account. Meta records who saw an ad, but not who placed it or how the targeting was set up. Parties can challenge the record, and Meta's own removal of ads that broke its rules shows the data is not always tidy. That is a real limitation for anyone trying to use the Ad Library to check what parties are doing.
