Last week, the EU Parliament backed an amendment to the Digital Services Act that banned the use of “special category” data “for the purpose of displaying advertising”. If the ban is enacted (the other arms of the EU must agree first), no digital platform or service will be allowed to sell ads targeted at people […]
To start this post with something fancy, let’s go back to Thucydides (an ancient Greek historian). He wrote: “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.” For what it’s worth, this is pretty much the root of realist political thought. Everything’s a power game, where […]
By Fabio Votta. There are less than 10 days left until the German parliamentary elections and the campaigns are picking up steam by heavily increasing their spending. Between August 30th and September 13th, 2021 Who Targets Me users saw over 12,000 political ads in their timelines. We can use the data they provide us with […]
MIT Technology Review yesterday reported a story about how ‘troll farms’ (probably better described as ‘profiteering content spammers’) copy and repost content to gain (a lot of) traction on Facebook. The spammers’ strategy gamed the way the company chooses to display content to users, ensuring their posts got lots of engagement, before racking up even […]
Last week, Ray-Ban, in collaboration with Facebook, launched glasses that take photos and videos, and have little speakers in the arms for playing podcasts and the like (via Bluetooth – the glasses don’t have standalone network connectivity just yet). The speakers are “discreetly” built into the arms, so you can walk around, listening away, without […]
Ever since Facebook first started publishing political ad data in 2018, many organisations, including ourselves, have called for them to include information about ad targeting. So far, there’s been no movement on this, with Facebook arguing there’s a privacy risk if this data is combined with data from other parts of Facebook. Here’s what (we […]
The UK Government’s proposed Online Safety Bill doesn’t currently include any measures that cover political advertising. However, we think that, being platform-focused, it’s actually a really good place to address some of the platform-level risks that online political ads create. (Other future legislation can think about those risks from the perspective of campaigners). So we […]
Today we’re launching the first phase of some new features to allow the Who Targets Me browser extension to become part of the workflow of any reputable fact checking organisation in the world. Initially, we will be working with Correctiv for the German election, and Full Fact in the UK. We hope to add more […]
We’re suspending our Notify service for the foreseeable future. The goal of the service is to provide interested folks with a near-realtime notification of new political Facebook ads going live. When a new ad from a page or party launched, you get an email telling you about it and directing you to the relevant place […]
The Who Targets Me browser extension generates personalised results to help you understand the ways political ads are being used to reach you. To see them, after installing the extension, click the Who Targets Me icon in your browser toolbar to open the results page. (Note that personalised results will take a while to appear, […]