Tools, projects and ideas
- Access crowdsourced political ad data (requires login) and Facebook spending data for any date range.
- Get daily email notifications when the campaigns you’re interested in launch new Facebook ads, compare frequency and spending data without leaving your inbox.
- 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.
- Explore visualisations advertising trends for political parties and candidates.
- Shows how Trump and Biden targeted and optimised over 500,000 Facebook ads in the 2020 election campaign.
- Where all of the code for our projects lives.
Inactive or retired projects
- Two visualisations of political ad data from the 2019 UK election.
Ideas to explore
- In-feed fact checking and flagging – making bad ads clearer to Facebook users
- 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
- Creating an archive of email and SMS campaigns – these are targeted information too.
- For any other ideas you think would improve transparency of political advertising (data, visualisations, crowdsourcing tools and more), email us!
