Defining what is and isn’t a political ad isn’t straightforward. It can be from a recognisable political figure or party. A campaign or pressure group might have bought it. Or it could be by a soft drink company, if your interest is in the public health effects of sugar.
To make Who Targets Me’s browser extension easy to use and the data it presents understandable, we’ve chosen to take a narrow definition of a “political ad”, so we can give people using the software an at-a-glance overview of who is trying to reach ad persuade them.
How we define a political ad for the extension
To do this we (or a local partner we’re working with):
- Create a list of the main political parties/groups/coalitions in a country
- Assign them names/labels/colours/a logo in a way that most people would understand/recognise them.
- Work through lists of advertisers from a range of sources (the ads people see with the browser extension, data from platform ad libraries) and assign them to those groupings.
- To date, we’ve assigned over 20,000 political advertisers around the world to groups, with more added every week.
- We then use these groups and lists to produce the displays in the browser extension (and in other tools we build).
If you want to help us add or update your country or have questions about our methodology, please get in touch.