Online ads are now one of the main ways political campaigns talk to you. But because these ads are often highly targeted, you usually only see one small part of a campaign’s message or strategy.
Who Targets Me’s Trends platform helps pull back the curtain, letting you see the “big picture” of how campaigns are trying to influence you and your community.
1. Why this matters
Campaigns use your personal characteristics, location and digital footprint to decide which messages to show you. This means a neighbour might be seeing a completely different version of an election campaign to you. Trends helps make the bigger picture of this data visible, so you can see who is spending money to get your attention and what they are saying to everyone else.
2. What you can discover
- Who is paying for your attention? Check the real identity behind the ads in your feed and see which parties or groups they are actually linked to.
- Why are you seeing a specific ad? See the age, gender, and location patterns campaigns use to find their audience.
- What are they saying to others? Use our tools to look at the ads you’re seeing alongside the ones being sent to other groups. It helps you find out if a campaign is emphasising different issues depending on who they are talking to.
- Monitor the local spend: Filter by your region to see which political actors are putting the most money into targeting your specific community.
3. How to use Trends as a voter
- See all the advertisers, big or small: Whether they’re advertising nationally or locally, Trends tracks their ads.
- Learn what they’re saying: Keep an eye on our ad summaries and topic analyses to see how a campaign talks about the issues you care about (as well as what they say about their opponents).
- See the impact: When you spot a suspicious post, use Trends to see if it’s a one-off or a massive paid campaign targeting thousands of people.
4. How you can help
Who Targets Me relies on the support of many people. You can help make elections more transparent by:
- Installing our Browser Extension: Join thousands of others who help us “crowdsource” the ads they see so we can hold campaigns accountable.
- Sharing the data: If you find a surprising spending spike or a weird messaging shift, use our charts to share it with your friends and family.
- Getting in touch if you see something unusual: We’ve been monitoring ads since 2017 (and were involved with digital campaigns for a decade before that). If you’ve got a question, ask us!
- Follow us: We post regular updates on our BlueSky account and (roughly monthly) via our newsletter.
5. Things to keep in mind
- The 4-day lag: Facebook and Google release their data with a delay of a few days. The dashboards and charts you see today usually reflect what happened a few days ago.
- Platform limits: We can only show what the platforms disclose. They often hide the exact reason you were targeted, showing us only broad categories like “People interested in politics.”
Summary
Trends helps you see the “hidden” side of the election. By using these tools, you can move past your own social media bubble and see the actual scale of the digital campaigns trying to win your vote.