We make 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.

For individuals
For researchers and journalists
For policy makers

What we do

Browser Extension

Installed by over 100,000 people to help them learn more about the political ads they see and aid scientific research. >>

Research ad trends

Monitoring online ad spending, targeting and content from 75,000+ advertisers from 650+ parties in 50+ countries. >>

Newsletter

Full Disclosure is our regular newsletter on what parties and candidates are doing with their digital political ads. >>

Understand social media

Building ecologically valid studies to learn how users respond to changes in platform design, content and algorithms. >>

Policy and analysis

Developing and promoting ideas that improve trust and transparency in election campaigns in the digital age. >>

Consulting

Helping people develop their own research projects to better understand the ways technology and democracy interact. >>

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

  • 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 […] >>

  • Disinformation ads, Systemic Risks and the Digital Services Act

    In the middle of 2023, in our research of political ads in Germany, we started to come across pages and ads in Meta’s Ad Library with names like “Clever Music Bistro”, “Bold Health Garden” and “Adventurous Dogs Blog”. Each would have run a single ad, usually including a newspaper-style cartoon featuring a European leader, or […] >>

  • UK campaign analysis: 19th-25th June

    In the final push, Parties are spending more than ever on Meta. Spend on the platform is at its highest yet since the campaign began. In the 19 – 25 June period, weekly spend was £1,313,442: outperforming even the first two-weeks of the campaign, when more than £1M was spent each week. As we enter […] >>

  • Analysis: Liberal Democrats‘ Target Seats

    In 2015, the Liberal Democrats were blindsided by their then-coalition partners the Conservatives running a ton of Facebook ads targeting seats they held in the west of England. At the time, there was no ad transparency at all, so it was impossible to know with any reliability what was being said, to whom and how […] >>

  • Making UK elections fit for the digital age: Ten ideas

    Digital campaigning isn’t new at this point, but it’s still newer than most of the electoral law that governs it. We think it’s time that changed. The next government should take a step back and do the work needed to improve the rules for British election campaigns in the digital age. Here’s 10 things they […] >>

  • How did UK parties target their ads in the first week of the campaign?

    With thanks to Fabio Votta, who helps us aggregate party spending on different targeting methods. Here’s the first week of the campaign on Meta, broken down by the amount of money spent on the various targeting methods available to political advertisers. To produce the above chart, we aggregate the amount spent on each targeting method […] >>

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