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

  • Why (and how) the UK Online Safety Bill should regulate political ads

    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 […] >>

  • Why political ads shouldn’t have social features

    Last week, Rob Leathern, formerly a product director in Facebook’s ads team with specific responsibility for political ads, (now working on privacy products at Google) tweeted: I still find it odd that platforms like Twitter and Facebook let people comment on their ads. If someone wants to quote-tweet a Twitter ad then it is a […] >>

  • How to correctly identify political ads (while acknowledging you can’t)

    A question that’s asked a lot, particularly as discussions about how to regulate political ads rumble on, is “how should we decide what is – and isn’t – a political ad?” The answer matters because legislators and regulators – rightly – want to impose some costs on political ads in the name of trust and […] >>

  • Thoughts on the UK Elections Bill

    The UK Government has published a new Elections Bill. It has some good and important things in it, particularly with regard to digital ads, and some controversial and bad ones too. First thing to say is it contains a useful transparency measure – digital imprints. It’s good that paid digital election material will finally be […] >>

  • Oversight Boards for everything

    Evelyn Douek, who researches and writes on content moderation, joked recently about “oversight boards for all”. For those of us working in and around this space, it actually is pretty amusing to think that an idea that has, to date, produced zero rulings on content and is currently waiting with baited breath for whether the […] >>

  • How to stop future Trumps before you need to deplatform them

    After the events of the last week in the US, many people are demanding the “regulation” of social media. But amid that clamour… what is actually to be done? One opportunity (that happens to be the area we work on) is the reform of political ads, specifically finding ways to create a meaningful system of […] >>

View more >>

Sign up to Full Disclosure

Our newsletter on how political campaigns use ads, and what it all means.

Sign up