Tools, projects and ideas

The Who Targets Me browser extension

  • See who’s targeting you with political Facebook ads. Available for Chrome, Firefox and Edge

Data projects (requires login, contact us)

  • Crowdsourced political ad data and Facebook spending data for any date range.
  • List of political Facebook pages categorised by party/coalition affiliation.

Political ad data standards

  • Political ad data supplied by platforms lacks sufficient detail and does not follow a consistent format. This project proposes a standard format for this data. Adoption of such a standard would allow political ad data to be combined, compared and new tools built with it.

Decoder

  • Shows how Trump and Biden targeted and optimised over 500,000 Facebook ads in the 2020 election campaign. The project is now archived.

Github

  • Where all of the code for our projects lives.

Ideas to explore

  • In-feed fact checking and flagging – making bad ads clearer to Facebook users (currently in Alpha)
  • Advertiser blocking – to allow users to block single, or groups of, political advertisers
  • Expanding beyond Facebook – to provide a wider suite of tools to protect users from low-quality information online (in Alpha)
  • Creating an archive of email and SMS campaigns – these are targeted information too. 
  • For any other ideas you think would improve transparency of political advertising (data, visualisations, crowdsourcing tools and more), email us!