How to use our “Manage” tool

Our “Manage” tool organises and localises the three things Who Targets Me’s tools need in order to work anywhere in the world:

1. A listing of significant entities running in elections in a country
2. The ability to tag political advertisers by arbitrary characteristics (such as the party or group they are a member of).
3. Translations into other languages

Note that to access Manage, you’ll need a login. Please contact us to get one.

How to use the tool

1. Check that all the significant electoral entities are set up correctly

• Select your country from the list on the left
• Click “Entities” in the left hand menu
• Are the major parties (or coalitions) all listed? If not, add them.
• Are there other groups you want to add (e.g. non-party campaigners)?
• Our tools work best if there are no more than 10 parties listed (charts get very complex when there are more than that), so try and consolidate parties into groups if they regularly work together.
• If that doesn’t work, use (or create) a ‘catch all’ category such as “other parties”
• Make sure entry for the party uses their full name, a recognisable short name or abbreviation, colour and logo (these can often be sourced from Wikipedia pages and a Google has an online colour picker that produces ‘HEX’ web colours).

Some guidance to help with this:

• In most countries, the parties are the most active entities and many affiliated actors are very clear – they’re candidates or party pages.
• However, there are always decisions to be made. Are labour unions and left-wing campaigners affiliated with socialist parties or independent from them? What should I do with government-supporting media? Do these need separate categories?
• Our guidance is that these types of entities are generally best kept separate. For example, in Hungary, we used “Pro-Government” and “Pro-Opposition” as a way of keeping obviously affiliated and coordinated campaigns separate to those who were actually running for parliament. In the US, we use “Democratic PACs” and “Republican PACs”, as well as “Conservative orgs and media” and “Progressive orgs and media” as a way of keeping some separation between groups campaigning for the same goals.

2. Set up your account to make it easier to research advertisers

1. Go to your Profile (top right).
2. Select “Facebook Ad Library” from the drop down list.
3. Add these search term templates:
   • Name: “G” | Template: https://google.com/search?q={page_name}
   • Name: “FB” | Template: https://facebook.com/{page_id}
   • Name: “FBAdL” | Template: https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/?active_status=all&ad_type=political_and_issue_ads&country={country}&view_all_page_id={page_id}&search_type=page&media_type=all
4. These will create buttons that make it easier to research unknown advertisers via our interface.

3. Tagging advertisers by affiliation

1. Click “Advertiser sorting”
2. The list will be populated with advertisers that we have not yet affiliated with any party.
   • (You can see the ones that are already affiliated by clicking the filter icon next to the “Entity” column and unchecking “Unassigned”).
3. Find one you recognise (try using the filter to search for a party name).
4. Check the box next to it.
5. Click the party name associated with it. This will affiliate the advertiser with the party. The row will disappear from the list. Done (see point 2 if you want to see it again).
6. If an advertiser is obviously not political, check the box next to it and click the “Remove” button.
7. Advertisers can have more than one affiliation (e.g. a national party and a state or local party, or a challenger versus an incumbent etc).

When you first start, there will be quite a lot of advertisers (at least a few hundred), so here’s some guidance on efficient ways to do this:

This tool is all about finding an effective workflow, and using the available filtering, ordering and bulk tagging functions. Here are some tips:

• Start by typing party names into the filter search box. This will find any page that uses the party name in the page name or ‘disclaimer’ field. Click the checkbox at the top of the row on the left to bulk select them all, then go down the rows double-checking that there aren’t any entries which are not associated with an entity (e.g. parodies or companies). When you’re happy, click the entity name button at the bottom of the screen. They’ll all be assigned and will disappear. Repeat for the next party.
• Once all the obviously affiliated pages are done, move on to pages “without a disclaimer”. These are usually false positives – things that Meta has included in their ad library that are not electorally or politically significant. Type “disclaimer” into the filter field and select all entries. Now run down the list unchecking anything that looks like it could be political. You’ll need to use your judgement, but generally, we uncheck any entries that look like a person’s name (they could be a candidate), as well as any organisations that seem like a possibility. Once you’re happy, click the “Remove” button to get rid of all the false positives.
• Now use some of the sorting functions – alphabetical order (useful for finding groups of similar things to categorise or ‘remove’) and date (useful for prioritising the newest advertisers).
• You’ll now be left with a list of advertisers where you probably don’t recognise very many of them. They might be a just a list of people’s names. The ‘search’ buttons on the right hand side of the screen will help you to research who they are.
  • FB = opens their Facebook page
  • G = Googles their name
  • AdL = opens their Facebook Ad Library page
• Things we look out for to help us categorise are:
  • On Facebook:
    • The URL of their Facebook page, which sometimes includes their party name or acronym.
    • Their Facebook page category (if it’s politician that’s great, but it could be ‘musician’ or ‘writer’ or anything else, in which case click ‘remove’ as they’re not electorally significant)
    • A mention of the party name in their Facebook page bio
    • A use of the party name, logo or colours in their Facebook posts
    • Pictures of them with a party leader, in front of a poster or banner etc.
  • On Google:
    • Their party affiliation in one of the information side panels
    • Or the same in any search result snippets
    • If they are already elected, the website of the elected body they are part of will likely include their party affiliation.
    • Lastly take a look at their website and try and work it out from there.
  • On the FB Ad Library:
    • The content of ads may give away their affiliation (e.g. support for a policy or other politician).

To reiterate the steps:

• Classify the easy advertisers first.
• Then remove all of the obvious false positives.
• Lastly research the less obvious ones.
• Don’t worry too much if you end with a shorter list of advertisers that you don’t know what to do with.
• Ask us for help at any time!

Once you are happy you’ve tagged everything you can, you can also download a copy of the data (click “data access” to see a link).

Translations

We try and make our browser extension available in as many languages as possible. To do this, we use a service called Weblate, which combines automated translation, with human-made improvements. There are around 100 terms and sentences that need to be translated to make the software work accurately.

Click the “Weblate” link on the left hand menu to see the translations we currently offer. Let us know if you want to add a new language, as this requires some set up at our end.