The US presidential election - more than any other before it - has established a battleground online.

The role of social media companies in monitoring content has drawn controversy from both Republicans and Democrats, especially given the alleged foreign interference in the 2016 election.

But data from global tech companies, such as Google or Facebook, has also provided a unique perspective on what subjects are most interesting to US citizens, and how candidates have invested in their online campaigns.

What have voters been searching for on Google?

In the United States, there was a 362% increase in users searching for the term "postal voting" compared to other election years, according to Google Trends.

Meanwhile, there was a 366% increase in searches for "electoral fraud" and the phrase "fact check" had peaked in search interest long before November.

The US President Donald Trump has repeatedly questioned mail-in ballots, tweeting in May they would lead to a "fraudulent" election.

In a first, Twitter labelled the tweet and directed social media users to fact checks and news stories about Trump's unsubstantiated claims.

The tech giant said the tweets "contain potentially misleading information about voting processes and have been labelled to provide additional context around mail-in ballots".

Google Trends also showed that users have searched for "how to vote" and "early voting" more now than any other time on record.

Meanwhile, other political search terms with especially high interest in the US in 2020 included "unemployment", "vaccine" and "racism".

The US economy and growth experienced a historic drop in the second quarter of the year during the COVID-19 pandemic, while demonstrations against social injustice have raged across the country following the death of George Floyd on May 25.

Who spent the most on online ads?

Discussion about the availability of political ads presented a different headache for tech companies in the lead up to the election.

Unlike rivals Twitter, Facebook decided to allow political ads on its platform and Instagram in the lead up to election day.

However, CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed the social network would ban new political adverts in the week before November 3.

Rob Leathern, director of product management at Facebook, added the company would also ban adverts that tried to delegitimise the outcome of the election, such as calling a method of voting fraudulent or corrupt.

But aside from these exceptions, both Trump and Joe Biden have heavily invested in Facebook advertising, more than doubling ad spending on the social network compared with the presidential candidates in the 2016 race.

Since January 1, Biden has narrowly outspent his Republican rival, investing $101 million (€86 million) on Facebook advertising on his dedicated campaign pages, compared to Trump's $93.5 million (€80 million).

In the last week of October, the difference was even more dramatic, with the Democrat candidate more than doubling the investment of Trump.

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