Who Targets Me makes online political ads more transparent

…with tools for individuals, data and support for academics, researchers and journalists, and advocating for better policy from platforms, regulators and governments.

For individuals
For researchers and journalists
For policy makers

How?

Browser Extension

Installed by over 100,000 people to help them learn more about the political ads they see and aid scientific research. >>

Research ad trends

Live tracking of online ad spending, targeting and content from 100k+ pages from 1000+ parties in 50+ countries. >>

Newsletter

Full Disclosure is our regular newsletter on what parties and candidates are doing with their digital political ads. >>

Understand social media

Building ecologically valid studies to learn how users respond to changes in platform design, content and algorithms. >>

Policy and analysis

Developing and promoting ideas that improve trust and transparency in election campaigns in the digital age. >>

Training and Consulting

Helping people develop their own research projects to better understand the ways technology and democracy interact. >>

Featured tools and projects

Our Browser Extension

Political Ad Trends

  • Live tracking the spending, messaging and targeting of 100k+ advertisers in 50+ countries
  • Monitor change over time. Who’s up? Who’s down?
  • Dig into presidential races, referendums and local campaigns
  • Explore the data

Understanding social media

  • Allows researchers to run ecologically valid experimental studies with real content on real social media interfaces
  • Learn how users react to re-ranking, labelling, literacy interventions and exposure to different types of content
  • For quantitative and qualitative study
  • Learn more

Policy and analysis

  • Making UK elections fit for the digital age: Ten ideas

    Digital campaigning isn’t new at this point, but it’s still newer than most of the electoral law that governs it. We think it’s time that changed. The next government should take a step back and do the work needed to improve the rules for British election campaigns in the digital age. Here’s 10 things they […] >>

  • How did UK parties target their ads in the first week of the campaign?

    With thanks to Fabio Votta, who helps us aggregate party spending on different targeting methods. Here’s the first week of the campaign on Meta, broken down by the amount of money spent on the various targeting methods available to political advertisers. To produce the above chart, we aggregate the amount spent on each targeting method […] >>

  • The Brexit effect on UK political campaign rules

    The UK is starting to diverge from the GDPR. What will looser rules mean for political campaigns? >>

  • Ad transparency – what’s missing for 2024?

    What should platforms do to increase the integrity of their political advertising systems to protect the many elections taking this year? >>

  • Has the DSA done anything for political ad transparency?

    The EU’s Digital Services Act is a big step forward in holding platforms accountable. On ad transparency, it could have gone further. >>

  • Transparency needs transcripts

    For researchers, processing video and images is hard. The files are large, processing them without powerful hardware is slow and, quite simply, you can’t watch them all. To make research possible, platform ad libraries should include video and audio transcripts as standard. >>

View more >>

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