If you want to work with us on a political ads or elections project, please contact us.
How are online political ads being used in 2024?
- Working with Liberties.EU and many in-country partners to track the use of political advertising in the EU
- Collaborating with the University of Manchester to study the US and UK elections.
- Monitoring the use of ads in other elections around the world.
- Continuing to build what we learn into our tools.
The Who Targets Me browser extension
- Learn more about who’s targeting you with political Facebook ads.
- Available for Chrome, Firefox and Edge.
Trends
- Our tool that tracks political digital ad spending across over 75,000 advertisers in more than 50 countries.
- Data on how political advertisers target voters (beta, in collaboration with Fabio Votta)
- Summarising the issues parties are talking about in their ads
Political ad data standards
- A proposal to standardise political ad transparency data to make analysis and accountability easier.
Decoder
- Shows how Trump and Biden targeted and optimised over 500,000 Facebook ads in the 2020 election campaign (now archived).
Github
- Where all of the code for our projects lives.
Other ideas we’re working on
- Mapping where ads appear to see which places political parties prioritise.
- Improving the information needed to “read” political advertising by adding more context at the point people see their ads.
- AI-powered tagging of advertisers and adverts by goal
- AI-powered content summaries and analysis of advertising
- Advertiser blocking – to allow users to block single, or groups of, political advertisers
- Expanding beyond Facebook – to provide a wider suite of tools to protect users from low-quality information online
- For any other ideas you think would improve transparency of political advertising (data, visualisations, crowdsourcing tools and more), email us!