Who Targets Me makes online political ads more transparent

…with tools for individuals, data and support for academics, researchers and journalists, and advocating for better policy from platforms, regulators and governments.

How?

Browser Extension

Research ad trends

Newsletter

Understand social media

Policy and analysis

Training and Consulting

Featured tools and projects

Our Browser Extension


Trends

  • Tracks the spending, messaging and targeting of 75,000+ political advertisers
  • Shows trends and leaderboards to monitor change over time
  • Dig down into presidential races, referendums and local campaigns
  • Try it out

Understanding social media

  • Allows researchers to run ecologically valid experimental studies with real content on real social media interfaces
  • Learn how users react to re-ranking, labelling, literacy interventions and exposure to different types of content
  • For quantitative and qualitative study
  • Learn more

Policy and analysis


  • Why do we keep running our browser extension?

    Who Targets Me’s first product was our browser extension. Before Meta offered an ad library, it allowed us to crowdsource the political ads people were being targeted with and better explain which ads were showing up to different people in different places, and how those ads were targeted. It still does, but the extension now […] >>


  • Should tech companies be forced to carry political ads?

    On 27th November, Google announced it would stop carrying political ads in the EU before new political advertising regulations kick in next year. Google currently has a “weak” definition of political ads (essentially they’re ads run by national parties and candidates during election periods), versus Meta’s rather stronger one (the wider “political and issue ads” […] >>


  • Google quits political ads in the EU – a quick reaction

    In March, the EU adopted the text of a new regulation on political ads, designed to promote transparency and close off the period since 2016 where there’s been significant public and media concern about their misuse. The “final” regulation wasn’t very final, serving more as a framework than a specific set of requirements, with much […] >>


  • Why didn’t AI ‘happen’ in 2024’s elections?

    Dire predictions about deepfakes damaging elections in 2024 turned out to be a long way off the mark. The predictions mostly came from two camps. The first was politics people who don’t really understand technology. The second was technology people, particularly AI people, who don’t understand political campaigns. The reality was, for problematic generative AI […] >>


  • Extending what the Who Targets Me browser extension does

    Since 2017, Who Targets Me has focused on improving transparency in political advertising on Facebook, the dominant platform for paid online political messaging. With the help of the thousands of volunteers, who have donated their data, we’ve had a significant impact in how that platform implements transparency, and how policymakers have crafted new digital regulations. […] >>


  • How Labour should improve digital campaign rules

    During the election campaign, British political parties and candidates handed £1 million a week to Meta and Google – two of the richest technology companies in the world – to target social media ads at millions of voters. By the time the polls closed, UK voters had seen over two billion digital political ads during […] >>

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