Increasing transparency in online political advertising
The Conservatives “Support the Deal” Brexit ads On 29th November, the Conservatives launched 152 ads about Brexit. They are promoting seven different videos, each with a slightly different angle on the proposed deal. All have the same call to action – for people to visit https://www.backthebrexitdeal.com and email their MP, asking them to support the Prime Minister’s […]
Some things that have been bubbling along for a while moved forward last week. First, Facebook and Twitter launched new ad transparency initiatives. You can now view the ads that accounts are running. ‘Dark ads’ are dead. Neither implementation is perfect. Discovery is still hard (you don’t know what you’re looking for, particularly for campaigns […]
Technology and data are changing the way elections work, but there’s not enough debate on the part of campaigns and their consultants about whether the new techniques they’re adopting are a good thing for democracy. I was at a conference for political consultants last week. Those present worked on polling and political messaging all over […]
One of the questions we often get asked is how much is spent on ads in political campaigns. In the UK, political parties must report a breakdown of their expenditure. It’s therefore possible to work out how much they spent on Facebook ads in total during a campaign. However, they don’t share their ad analytics […]
Since starting the project last year, we’ve worked in and around several countries’ elections, collected millions of ads and been part of a story that has caused Facebook (along with Twitter) to make some promises about how they plan to deal with targeted political (and other) ads. We’ve talked to some regulators about how they […]
We’re thrilled to announce a partnership between the Project on Computational Propaganda at the Oxford Internet Institute and Who Targets Me. Together, we’ll study the methods behind and impact of social media advertising on political debate in the campaigns for the US midterms. Over the coming months, we’ll be working together with a cohort of […]
Although it’s certainly true that all of the parties in Germany are using targeting ahead of election day tomorrow, an analysis of messaging from Germany’s nationalist right wing party, Alternative für Deutschland reveals one of the clearest examples we’ve collected of audience segmentation. Who Targets Me has worked closely with journalists from Buzzfeed DE and T-Online […]
The press release can be found at the link below: Press Release 22/09/17
The team is pleased to announce our commitment to monitoring digital advertising in Austria, ahead of the legislative election on October 15th. From today, users in Austria, and indeed any other part of the world can download the Chrome extension and contribute to our ever growing database of online advertising. Austria marks the third election […]
For the past month we’ve been working hard on the German iteration of Who Targets Me. To fill in those of you that are just joining us, we’re a grassroots movement to investigate and produce the first datasets of targeted dark advertising, primarily found on Facebook. This is important because campaigns use this technology (to […]