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.
But times change.
In particular, we’re seeing an increase in political advertising via sponsored videos on YouTube. We’ve also seen the reintroduction of political advertising on Twitter (currently known as X). These platforms have weak transparency tools for both users and researchers, but are commonly used at scale by people seeking election.
It’s therefore important we now a) understand how these platforms are being used and b) apply the same pressure for greater transparency to them as we have previously to Meta.
So we are now asking Who Targets Me extension users if they wish to share the YouTube, Instagram and Twitter ads they’re targeted with so we can start revealing how these platforms are being used by political advertisers to try and win votes. This will also help us understand better how voters are targeted across different platforms.
In return, we will be expanding the way the extension works to give you new, cross-platform insights into when and how you – and thousands of other people – are targeted with digital political ads. This information will be available via results.whotargets.me.
If you’re an existing Who Targets Me user, you will see a notification asking you to reconfirm you’re happy to donate data on both Facebook as well as these additional platforms. You can update these choices at any time to opt in or out of sharing the ads you see on any or all of these platforms. If you don’t want to participate any further, you can simply delete the extension.
New users will be able to choose what data they are capturing, sharing, and getting further information about during the extension set up process.
To summarise:
- We will be rolling out an extension update that will request your permission for you to donate ads from X/Twitter, YouTube and Instagram.com (on the web).
- You can choose if you want to allow the extension to do this (whether in full, partially, or not at all).
- Donations of data are anonymous.
- You can remove the extension and/or delete the data you’ve shared directly from the extension.
If you want to see how the extension works, the source code is available here:
https://github.com/WhoTargetsMe/Who-Targets-Me
A note about mobile:
We continue to focus on desktop extensions as the techniques for investigating data via mobile apps is monitoring is too intrusive and/or requires too much user interaction. We believe that monitoring desktop usage of social media websites is still a good proxy to understand how we are being targeted, even if the dataset is smaller.
If you want to help our project provide this transparency. If you want to better understand how you are being targeted, please: