Our current tools, projects and ideas
- See who’s targeting you with political Facebook ads. Available for Chrome, Firefox and Edge.
- Spending trends and leaderboards for many countries (beta)
- Better understanding targeting patterns for many countries (beta, in collaboration with Fabio Votta)
Data projects (requires login, contact us)
- Crowdsourced political ad data and Facebook spending data for any date range.
- List of political Facebook pages categorised by party/coalition affiliation. We are looking for volunteers to help us improve this data.
- Political ad data supplied by platforms lacks sufficient detail and does not follow a consistent format. This project proposes a standard format for this data. Adoption of such a standard would allow political ad data to be combined, compared and new tools built with it.
- Shows how Trump and Biden targeted and optimised over 500,000 Facebook ads in the 2020 election campaign. The project is now archived.
- Where all of the code for our projects lives.
Other ideas we’re exploring
- 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!
